List list list. In the name of science, if you will.

1. "The Tremor of Forgery" (P.Highsmith) � I bought this months ago and thought that it was in my briefcase when it was stolen, but I found it as I was packing and thought it made the grade as one of the five I figured would last me through the vacation. Finished it on the plane to Frankfurt and began to doubt my calculations.
2. "The Moviegoer" (Walker Percy) � I am officially angry at everyone who over the years failed to press Percy upon me. Bastards! You are very cruel. But I won�t hold a grudge. Also, I now officially am less impressed with Padgett Powell, because in so many things I have seen that he did not get there first. If there were ever a movie made of "Edisto, " who should direct it? Jarmusch? Not that I want that, you understand. Steve read the Percy after I did and, apropos of nothing, observed that the Somerset is Kate. (Does everyone know what my next question was? The answer was no.) Next Percy: "The Last Gentleman." And what�s up with this?
3. "Tests Of Time" (William Gass) � Hey, did I leave this on the ferry or something? Now I can�t find it. Oh well, I�m not crying. Many years ago I was a big Gass fan, and packed up somewhere in the storage unit is a copy of "The World Within the Word" that was inscribed to me, stylishly, by a Norwegian endocrinologist I many years ago knew. Sigh. Anyway. But here is my question: when you get older, do you necessarily have to get crustier and more Grandpa Simpson-like? The gist of the argument, the perspective, underlying all of the essays in "Tests of Time" is Damn kids! It�s so intellectually protectionist, it�s like that Stranger pieces on Friendster I got all exercised about a few months back. Like, how bold is it to crab about television? In one of the Gass essays, he�s railing about the perfidy of lists, the culture of list-making and how it has blah blah blah effect on our brains and our collective cognitive experience and our ability to respect each other as adults, and I swear, my opinion of him would have done a total 180, he would have become a Norwegian endocrinologist, if among the list-centric works he cited Gass had referred to "88 Lines about 44 Women." Or "People Who Have Died" (hi Tom) or something like that. But no. Query: What, short of assassinating Lapham, would be required to make Harper�s consistently relevant and interesting to those of us left cold by the ossified Gass and his cranky ilk? Wake me up if you come up with anything.
4. "The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World" (Emmanuel Wallerstein) � Poorly written, lousy with false modesty, and not especially thought-provoking. Most of the people who stay at the hotel we did in Matala are German, and in gratitude for such a lovely stay I left it at the book exchange there so that one day some German might have his or her poor opinion of Americans confirmed; he or she will enjoy that. Just call me an international goodwill ambassador.
5. "Travels With Myself and Another" (Martha Gellhorn) � OK, late-breaking news, Gellhorn did in fact know of Emily Hahn. Now I feel dumb, especially because the reference is in the first essay in the book and I read them out of order: "I remember [from Hongkong] only Emily Hahn with cigar and highly savvy on the Orient and I was never foolish enough to be disdainful of her�" There�s good stuff in here. Gellhorn�s racism is a complex construction that is worthy of your complex analysis. I will confess that I can�t be bothered to distinguish between Bill Buford, who wrote the introduction, and Bill Bryson.
6. "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (Highsmith again) � in the Hauptbahnhof in Frankfurt, that�s the train station to you, there�s a bookstore where the weary traveler can purchase books in English. The selection is not so great, lots of thrillers and historical romances, but you can pick up a few interesting somethings. I took a pass on the movie one yet I cannot see how anyone other than Philip Seymour Hoffman was hopelessly miscast.
7. "The Book of Illusions" (Paul Auster) � I loved that this was published with the dramatic overarty cover art you�d expect to see on one of those thrillers, and partly to support the promulgation of Auster among the thriller-reader set I bought it, though I guess the Europeans don�t really need the encouragement. Do you think that several decades hence there will be Auster parody contests the same way there are for Hemingway? Why does it feel like he keeps writing the same book over and over again? Though, don�t get me wrong, no matter what the covers look like I keep buying or reading them. Narratively, how does he get away with such egregious violation � like it�s a philosophical stance � of Show Don�t Tell? I mean, doesn�t he? The chapter on the onscreen ethos of Hector Mann, especially coming as it did so early in the book, felt like cruel and unusual punishment or some kind of weed-out course, and I don�t mind telling you I skimmed it and then came back a hundred pages later or so when I had a bigger investment in the book and knew I�d be less likely to harden my heart towards it or give up altogether. Are liberal-artsy types like me allowed to apply the word "wank" to the ongoing and philosophical Auster project without getting struck by lightning? Though, don�t get me wrong, no matter the wank quotient I keep on buying and reading them; as we have established, I�m a wanker myself, ahoy! In About the Author, Auster�s books are identified in terms of how well they sold.
8. "What I Loved" (Siri Hustvedt) � No one ever told me anything about any of her books, recommended them or warned me against them, and I don�t recall ever having read a review either, but it seemed like a why-not idea to read her together with the Mr., Mr. Auster I mean, and now I have decided that I would even less rather have dinner with Paul and Siri than I would with Alice and Glen, and if I had to give you one reason and one reason only then here it is: "As the evening went on, her peculiar remarks gained a kind of philosophical rhythm, the clipped tones of which reminded me a little of reading Wittgenstein�s Tractatus." I don�t know what�s funnier, the idea of people who upon reading this are nodding sagely in recognition because good gracious they know *precisely* the type of Tractatus-reminiscent tones Hustvedt is describing or her use of "a little." You know? The narrator was a little bit reminded of Wittgenstein but on the other hand mostly reminded of, what, Magilla Gorilla cartoons? So not only is Hustvedt writing for the rarefied audience of those who have read the work in question, who have internalized it to such an extent that they vibrate in response to an evocation of it � who feel sufficient mastery of it that they feel entitled to make that call � but for those who routinely parse their intellectual responses with a degree of care so that the qualifier "a little" is not superfluous. And, let�s not miss this, who want you to know that they do. O Rory, that audience does not include me. To me there was a sense in which "What I Loved" seemed an exercise, on Hustvedt�s part, on constantly drawing away from the reader by means of reference to such a large body of knowledge that almost anyone but Hustvedt must shrink from it and regard it as that which he or she is smaller than. At what point does an author�s polymathy become a barrier to the reader�s engagement with the work? Does the author have a humanistic obligation to come down a few levels and become less inaccessible? This is an interesting question for me, because on the one hand I once took my name off a radio program I produced when the person who would be hosting it changed some words she thought listeners wouldn�t know and totally dumbed me down, but on the other hand I consider myself a dilettante of at least the third water, I know a fair bit about art history and have read some big books, and I have never before had the experience of being as coldly clobbered as I was by the Hustvedt novel, and I couldn�t concentrate fully on the narrative or the writing because I was so conscious of the learnedness of the extra-textual entity who had brought them into being. Does that make any sense? Hustvedt makes herself bigger than the book. If you don�t believe me, then this �

   Greene Street, "a gallery on Prince Street in SoHo," New York, Butler Library at Columbia, "my old apartment on Riverside Drive," German Jews, Berlin, Juilliard, Upper West Side, "a Hampstead flat in London," West Eighty-second Street, Sacher torte, "a loft on Greene Street between Canal and Grand," Eight-fourth between Broadway and Riverside, Rutgers, Columbia, Harvard, 89 Bowery, "between Hester and Canal," Jan Steen, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, "Zurbar�n�s Saint Francis," "Gr�newald�s dead Christ and the rosy skin of Boucher�s nudes," Pontormo�s Mannerism, R. Crumb, George Grosz, Tales from the Land of Genitalia [Crumb], Gogol, C�zanne, De Kooning, Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother [De Kooning], Hopper, Duchamp, New Jersey suburbs, Cub Scouts, Fieldston School, Met, MoMA, Frick, Yale, Yale Law School, Vietnam, Europe, Rome, Paris, "the catacombs in Rome," New Haven, NYU, flageolets aux l�gumes, "Tristam Shandy, chapter 4, on Horace�s ab ovo" [and then there is a lengthy recitation; one of the characters knows it by heart], Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Louis-Ferdinand C�line, Wittgenstein�s Tractatus, National Socialism, Paris, "Mohrenkopf � a ball of pastry filled with custard and covered with chocolate," Nuremberg Laws, Reich, Flanders, Adorno, Giorgione, Rubgens, Vermeer, Manet, Jacques Lacan, Fanelli�s, Russia, Lower East Side, Canada, Rivington Street, Yiddish, Machiavelli, Aufbau, Martin Buber, M. M. Bakhtin, South Orange, Sheetrock, Little League, Lamaze, St. Vincent�s Hospital, Lou Reed, Cologne, Tokyo, "seventeenth-century Dutch paintings," Hello, Dolly!, Plexiglas, Piero, Warhol, Hester Street, Georges-Didi Huberman, Salp�triere Hospital [Paris], "the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot," "the French town of Josselin," Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger

   � is a record of her references through page 52, which is where I ran out of space on the quarter-page I allotted myself for that project. This is the book�s conversancy, I know that�s not a word but work with me, people; this circumscribes the book�s world. But who lives in this world except for Husvedt � and, presumably, Auster; and note please that the dedication reads "For Paul Auster," I guess this is so Paul Newman and Paul Kariya don�t go getting any ideas. The book, in short, was too much, and this made me sad because I could see that if I�d thought it was just enough I also might have thought it was just aces.
9. "Johnson v. Johnson" (Barbara Goldsmith) � This was from the hotel�s book exchange, and I read it because I was starting to worry that I would read everything I�d brought with me, and Matala is not exactly the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof when it comes to English-language books and magazines. It was beach trash, and I was happy to use it for its intended purpose. Cover blurb from Peter Maas: "A pornographic true-life soap opera of stupefying proportions!" Excerpt: "The appeal of the lottery winner is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. In fact, the myth of striking it rich is a basic one in our culture, but then so is the opposing Puritan ethic of deploring the vice of extravagance. We are a society in transition, still engaged in the battle between the stern values of our forefathers and our present worship of affluence and celebrity." So you see. I was interested to learn of the nefarious pre-Guide career of Nina Zagat, I hadn�t known that she�d made such a bad name for herself as a lawyer.

Hello and now it is the next day: Still can't get in touch with Vanessa. Still haven't found what I'm looking for. Still no modem so my wireless card and I are freeloading at Capitol Hill dot net. But holy crap, check this out � the timing, how uncanny, how cool. Link via this diary's endocrinology department.