i'm a very very complex person

Hardly wrote a lick last night (too hard to concentrate, too many songs that needed to be listened to). Instead, I stayed up and finished Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai. Before finishing the book, I thought I wanted to write some big essay about it, but now that I have finished it, I'm no longer quite sure what to make of it. I was going to write about how it's book that is quite good--engrossing, fun to read, written in a highly inventive style--but also significantly flawed, and I still think that, although I can't quite decide if the flaws are the same ones I thought they were earlier. Perhaps I need to think about it more, although I find that the more I think about it the less I seem to like the book, so I'm not really inclined to think about it more. It just feels like the book has something unpleasant at its core somehow. I'm being horribly vague, but I really don't think I can explain it any better than that. I don't know why I'm finding it so hard to put an intelligent thought together about this particular book...

Anyhow, I'm now reading Lizard Music by D. Manus Pinkwater. I loved this book when I was a kid, but forgot the title and was never able to figure out what it was. A month or so ago, I happened to be in a used bookstore and there it was! Same cover and everything, and selling for only 75 cents. So of course I picked it up... The main character is a kid named Victor who gets involved in all sorts of mysterious goings-on, and I was absolutely madly in love with him when I was about 11. I had forgotten that until I started reading the book again. I used to imagine the conversations I would have with him and everything. Obviously my parents should have made me get out more as a kid. Still, it's pretty funny to read it now.