Road-running today, pushing BK in our Super Jogger. Total distance: 3 miles, with massive hills. Huah!

Road-running today: 1.2 miles around my friend's neighborhood, with a .2 mile walk cooldown.

My preferred grocery store can't sell beer and wine, but the new gas station down the street can.

ran 1200

ran 400

walked 800

ran 400

walked 400

Felt surprisingly good, particularly as I was up with the screaming-bloody-murder BK in the middle of the night and up with both kids at 6:40 this morning.

My best friend from grad school and matron of honor Anne Jennings Paris has a book of poetry coming out later this year. Titled Killing George Washington: The American West in Five Voices, it is “a collection of narrative poems [that] imagines the voices of the forgotten historical figures of Lewis Wetzel, a notorious Indian killer; York, the slave who accompanied Lewis and Clark; Charity Lamb, Oregons first convicted murderess; Ing Hay, a Chinese immigrant who made a name for himself as a doctor; and Mary Colter, an architect who helped shaped the western landscape.”

You can pre-order your copy from Powell's Books. You can also pre-order it online from Barnes & Noble, but wouldn't you rather support Powell's? Yeah, I thought so.

In any case, the book will be available for purchase on November 1st, just in time for all of your holiday gift-giving needs. Not to spoil the surprise, but I'll be buying copies for everyone I know.

So I posted one of those “how well do you know Motormouth” quizzes on Facebook, and every single person who has taken the quiz has answered that Motormouth thinks Infinite Jest is the one novel that everyone should read. I'm intrigued by that answer, because it's incorrect: I think everyone should read the Sebastien Japrisot novel A Very Long Engagement.

Why?

Well, don't get me wrong: Infinite Jest is a phenomenal work, a blow-your-balls-off novel, a combination of pathos and humor the likes of which we just don't see anymore. David Foster Wallace was a master of the English language (and, apparently, pharmacology), which adds up to a tremendous novel. It also paints portraits of addiction that are both tragic (Hal) and uplifting (Don). So yeah, I recommend it.

BUT…

Infinite Jest takes a major commitment on the part of the reader. The edition I read is 1,079 pages long. The last 96 pages are endnotes, so you're constantly flipping back and forth (finally, I secured two bookmarks: one to mark my place in the text, and the other to mark my place in the endnotes). Plus, it's really heavy and not very portable. These are important things to think about when you're also toting a couple of kids and a diaper bag and a bottle of water. You don't need to be reading a book that makes you feel even more like a sherpa.

Whereas…

A Very Long Engagement comes in around the 200-page mark, and so much is packed into those pages that every time I read it, I notice something new. It is the only book that ever made me cry before page 100. It is a phenomenal testament to the power of dogged investigation, and it's beautifully written, and we all should strive to be a little like Mathilde. Plus, you won't throw your back out if you carry it around.

Highly, highly recommended. xo, Motormouth