New Look for (the year of the) Pig Pig

Welcome to the stove's new look. It's a little early for the third annual anniversary redesign, but what the hell. I like these colors.

The new quote is from, to paraphrase a link in the sidebar of a blog Josh introducted me to, OMGTHEWAVESOMG! What a book! I've read it before (and left marginalia suggesting that 19-year-old Sarah was also a fan), but didn't really remember the feel of the experience. It creates a fully realized world of incredible complexity, idiosyncrasy, and wisdom--one of those books, like Ulysses but in a very different way, that's so 3-dimensional you can disembark into it and wander around and find everything you need to survive.

And yet, and this is a strange conundrum with important implications, this whole world is trapped in a little paperback book that sat on my shelf for ten years without me even remembering it was there. Even now, flush with my love for it, primed to cry at the smallest tenderness between, say, Bernard and Neville, or the most forseeable of Louis's disappointments, some part of me would rather post on the internet about how I love this book than read this book.

The book handily contains a compassionate and open-eyed and wise discussion of this very problem, but it is sitting closed at my right elbow as I type.