Gombrowicz

The best party invite I ever received? You don't have to come, but come if you'd like to.

The best advice I ever received from a writer? Write the kind of thing you like to read.

The sort of book I like to read is a book that I have to think about as I'm reading; and so that's what I want/hope to write myself, and with enough elegance to make the reader glad he's reading if he should be reading it.

Who's in power, the writer or the reader? It's an interesting question, one that may be asked of both good and bad books. Often, toward the end of some really good books I've read I feel myself struggling, as if in some personal tussle with the writer. The struggle elongates the story, often to an interminable end (the Russian novelist's are expert at this strategy, as are the Victorians). Now the moment I feel that the writer isn't having any fun anymore, is weary of the whole thing and is only writing dutifully to get to the end of the story, I put the book down, no matter how classic it may be. I don't mean to say that bad books are any easier to put down, but that so many more of them are written with the authorial glee of not caring how good or bad the prose is.

I'm drawn now to quirky books that fill in the blanks of my haphazard education, a book such as A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes by Witold Gombrowicz (Yale University Press, 2004). Seven great philosophers are examined by the Polish writer in six one-hour 'essays,' which he first spoke in conversations with his wife and a close friend, and include a short fifteen-minute piece on Karl Marx.