In soloing - as in other activities - it is far easier to start something than it is to finish it. -Amelia Earhart

Dear blog enthusiasts,

I'm sure you're just Dying to know what's become of me, and if I will Ever. Blob. Again.

And the answer is, Yes! I will! I am reading Gravity's Rainbow, and have been for quite some time, but it is a slooooooooooow read (did I mention it's SLOW?) so it will be a little while.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share this tidbit - Gabriel García Márquez passed away a few weeks ago, and I received his obituary from the NY Times from my lovely and thoughtful Aunt Stevie. Here are a few snippets I enjoyed... (click here for the full link if you're interested)

"Mr. García Márquez was a master of the literary genre known as magical realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge. In his novels and stories, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a half-century apart.

Magical realism, he said, sprang from Latin America's history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence. In accepting his Nobel, Mr. García Márquez said: "Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination. For our crucial problem has been a conventional means to render our lives believable."

He read intensely - the Americans Hemingway, Faulkner, Twain and Melville; the Europeans Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka, and Virginia Woolf.

"I cannot imagine how anyone could even think of writing a novel without having at least a vague idea of the 10,000 years of literature that have gone before," Mr. García Márquez said. But, he added, "I've never tried to imitate authors I've admired. On the contrary, I've done all I could not to imitate them."

He will be missed! I can only speak to One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, but they were both excellent, and I recommend them highly!

Onwards to more of Gravity's Rainbow and my last few weeks in DC!