I realized, only today, that fio, fieri, factus, -a, -um is the passive form of facio, facere, feci, factus, -a, -um in form, but is also the passive form of sum, esse, fui, futurus, -a, -um in sense.

I knew that there was no bijective map between active and passive forms of verbs in Latin, but thought that the only violation was with surjectivity, thus somewhat salvaging my poor heart. This shows that the map is not injective either, effectively and completely breaking it.

Jacob Levy praises Sin City at Belle Waring's blog. (N.B. you can meet Belle Waring tonight at the Rendezvous Lounge).

Ordinarily, when Will's gone guest-blogging, I feel a duty to try to post more, and about subjects other than the 50 books club or food. But I have not been writing much recently because I have been spending a great deal of time reading. The free newspapers aren't sufficiently interesting to get me into work in the morning, let alone home again, so I pack a book. The discouraging Sleeping with the Devil that made me wish to join the CIA (a secret that people aren't telling is one I want to know); the somewhat repetitive Guns, Germs, and Steel with the great mental image of Africans mounted on rhinos decimating a horsed calvary; the obligatory Freakonomics that unfortunately had been somewhat ruined for me by all the reviews telling the stories before I read them; Richard Ford's novel Independence Day and collection of short stories A Multitude of Sins that together, though both good stories, well-told, convinced me that the next thing I read would not center around the dating life of middle-aged divorcees; The Berlin Stories that filled that requirement delightfully; the concise and honest Nervous People and Other Satires; the source of my remark, "I was just reading a story about a camel earlier today," The Day Lasts More Than a Thousand Years, and the source of a passage on which I plan to write, Tales of the Mountains and the Steppes, both by Chingiz Aitmatov, Kyrgyzstan's best known novelist; a good issue of Wilson Quarterly with a cringe-inducing description of conscientious objectors who volunteered for starvation experiments during WWII; the amazing Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World that reminds me of an anthropology student's pronouncement that the great thing about his major was that he could always find a counter-example; the incredible essays on the public and the private and other topics in How to Be Alone (if you were going to hit on someone on the Metro, would you chose the person engrossed in a book of that title?); and, I'm sure, others. Kremlin Rising just came from Amazon, I've ILL'd several books on missionaries and papal emmissaries to Mongolia, and I picked up the complete set of A Dance to the Music of Time at Second Story Books today (12 stories in 4 volumes).

I need to stop.

I need to practice scribbling in a steno pad while standing on the Metro so that I can break this habit of reading during the commute, then finishing more of the book in the evenings. It's 1:30am and I have insomnia because I have not written in a while and there is a giant mass of uncoordinated thoughts piling up and distracting me from sleep.

Lest you think that this is all I do, in the past month and a half, I've been to Los Angeles, back to Chicago for the first time since I left Chicago, to Baltimore for the first time since I was 8 and then to see my first MLB game (Orioles 9, Red Sox 1), and to the Shenandoahs for my first backpacking trip. I have great difficulties declining any scheme that involves leaving whatever city I'm in, particularly if it involves travelling to some place I've never been (or other novelty) or only rarely been. I think I did turn down Delaware, but tonight I began plans for New York.

And though my mind is now diverted from these readings, it's now on thoughts of where to go next. At some point, finding a job after this summer's internship and finding an apartment do need to enter into the equation (thus no Delaware, unless that's not where the beach is).

Useless.

I think I was supposed to be reading something by George R.R. Martin (and I will start it, soon!) but I accidentally started Tom Perrotta's Little Children, which I confess I found addictive, as I find all of his books (Joe College, The Wishbones, Election...). The main characters are a bunch of sad-sack parents (and a child molester) who are not exactly happy about their lives. They bumble about rather unsurely and end up more or less the same way. If it is hard to tell from this description why the book is compelling, that is fair enough, but it is.

In response to my last book post, Raffi told me that he loved my description of "promiscuous reading habits", "as if there was something vaguely immoral about riffling through books in seriatum, leaving some, stringing others along, and so on." Alas, I am indeed a promiscuous reader; but now Harry Potter 6 is here, an infatuation that I anticipate seeing through to completion.

[50 Book Challenge.]