Books Waiting to be Read

Earlier in the show, we were talking about books that we just couldn’t wait to tell people about.

So Grant, I’m wondering what’s next on your reading list. What book are you just champing at the bit to read?

There’s a series of books by Neil Stevenson. The first one is called Quicksilver, and these are monster fat tomes. I guess you’d call them historical fiction. He does have a bunch of real characters in there, old alchemists and early philosophers, set in the 1600s and the New World and in the Old World.

And I tried to read it once before, but I could only get about 100 pages in, and I was like, oh, this is a waste of my time. But people keep telling me, I need to read this book, and so I’m going to give it a shot.

But what about you? What’s on your nightstand?

Well, on my nightstand right now is Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer. And the reason that I got this book is because I read a short story by Borges. This is a collection of them, and I read one called The Gospel According to Mark.

Have you read this story?

I haven’t, no.

Oh, man. It’s such a great story. I was just reading a lot. It takes place in the countryside of Argentina, and I’m interested in that. And I was just reading along, reading along, no idea where the author is going until the very last word. And then it left me gasping.

And I had to go back over the whole short story. It was truly amazing. Because it recasts the entire book for you.

Yeah, yeah, the entire story. I was just kind of going along, and then all of a sudden, boom. And so I’m very eager to see what else he can do like that.

So it’s Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges. And again, the book that I mentioned was Neil Stevenson’s Quicksilver.

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