Inside the Book Prison (Back on Un:Bound)

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So now you know why I was looking for images!

When a friend needs a boost, you heed the clarion call.  Simple as that.  So despite a break of over 10 months from writing on Un:Bound, when Adele sent out the call to ask for some posts to get the site moving again (long story short, after years of fun and sun and lots of readers/contributers, a long-standing member of the community passed away, leaving everyone stunned), I finally gathered the intestinal fortitide to write up ansd post my re-introduction back to the site.

You can read the post over at Un:Bound, but - as always - an excerpt is printed below:

So if it was so great, why did I leave? 

For the same reason we do anything - life.  2010 in particular was a supremely shitty year, culminating in April with the death of my father, a loss that a year later I still haven't completely comes to terms with.  I wrote about his effect on my life with regards to reading here on the site, and even carried on with reviews and articles for a few more months until finally, things just dried up.  Not just writing: even reading became too painful a reminder of things, so I just kind of drifted away from the blogosphere until, well...now, actually. 

With that out of the way, let's talk books. 

As I write these words (well, not literally as I write these words...as I these words I'm sitting at my desk at work, looking at the monitor to ensure I don't misspell any of the words I'm currently writing) I'm 250 pages into The Pale King, the "unfinished novel" by the late, great David Foster Wallace.  What little plot there is centers around a group of IRS employees stationed in Illinois in the mid 1980s, including a young man named David Foster Wallace.  The book is filled with the rich observations and attention to language Wallace was famous for, including massive amounts of entertaining footnotes, and it's a incredible look at what could have been his crowning achievement as a writer instead of a sad, wistful look at what could have been.

Nice to be writing again, nice to be reading again...On a side note, I finally ditched my old phone which had a black spot on the camera lens and upgraded to a shiny new fancy iPhone, meaning that there will (finally) be new pics on the site.  If you've never been to Un:Bound and you like science fiction and fantasy, check it out: there's a wealth of book reviews, interviews, and assorted goodness to be had.