Readering

Yesterday, I finally received my Best American Essays anthology which is my favorite reading of the year. I love the essay, in all its permutations, more than any other type of writing. I was too tired last night to read much of it, but I did manage to read David Foster Wallace's preface and some other essay which I was too drowsy to make any sense of. I'm never sure whether I like DFW. Footnotes of any kind annoy me, so his that are meandering and excessively long drive me crazy. And yet. He seems quite aware of his inability to write concisely (he speaks to this in his essay), so I have to forgive him and I find "Consider the Lobster" one of the most ingenious pieces of food writing. And yet. His intro. to the collection was delightfully strange. He argued that his role is not really as an editor but as the Decider. He then riffs on the word (in honor of GWB): Deciderization, Decidering. The latter is my favorite new noun form. One could argue that "decidering" is just a clunky synonym for "deciding," but no. It evokes something else--not just the act of deciding, but the act of being the decider. Not just reading, but acting as a reader--and those are certainly different. Reading involves turning pages and processing words. Readering involves ordering books weeks before they are released, tracking packages, and blogging about reading.

I'm not sure if I will like DWF's choices, but I already know I'll like the collection better than last year's: Lauren Slater's "Best American Essays About Death." The only light-hearted essay in the thing was Adam Gopnik's "Death of a Fish," which is a lovely thing that explores the death of his child's fish with an analysis of Hitchcock's Vertigo. If you haven't read it, you should.

Ok, back to readering. Happy bloggering.