Seeing as how the focus of the blog this month appears to be literature (not something I planned, but let us say that it is a decision intended to celebrate the first meeting of the Everything You Read book club), I would like to share with you a passage that occurs early on in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections:

"I'm saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed," Chip said. "I'm saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as 'diseased.' A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying. And I'm saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant."

It's a wonderful bit of prose from a novel that, twenty pages in, had failed to capture my attention. Now, I find myself one hundred pages along and absolutely enthralled. Having had a conversation earlier this evening centred around what drives the reader to carry on when a novel doesn't immediately grab them, The Corrections has provided me with a rather simple answer: some books are slow starters, and the very nature of literature contains the promise that things may pick up in spectacular fashion at any moment.

Hopefully, I'll be able to find the time to keep reading it at this rate. There's a wealth of stuff to tackle at the moment, though. Vintage Books were kind enough to send me a copy of John Lennon's In His Own Write for review. I'm expecting Naive. Super by Erlend Loe - the first selection of the aforementioned book club - to arrive any day now. And I started Dante's The Divine Comedy the other day. It somehow seems rather fitting that, as soon as my degree ends, I rediscover my passion for books.