The Sickness Unto Death

Many things I'm trying to work on posting, but Kid Biscuit and I are now both sick (not, at this time, with the "sickness unto death," just some viral thing) so my brain is not working properly. I have a torture post to write, and a 'new year' post to write, and a tsunami post to write. None of which I'm getting very far with. So, instead, here is a list of books next to Biscuit mommy's side of the bed:

• Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death by Kierkegaard
• Going To Pieces Without Falling Apart by Mark Epstein
• The Pessimist's Handbook -- Schopenhauer
• They Thought They Were Free
• Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decisionmakers
• Essays in Zen Buddhism -- D.T. Suzuki
• Anno's Journey
• Curious George
• Mac OS X - The Missing Manual
• The Impossible Will Take a Little While
• Active Treatment of Depression
• Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness
• The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Abortion Service
• Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf
• Kafka's Complete Stories
• The Feeling of What Happens
• Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco
• The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent -- essays by Lionel Trilling

Of course, anyone with a serious book habit recognizes that being in a stack next to the bed is, for a book, just a first step in actually being read. The next-to-bed stack is more an indication of the wished-for landscape of the mind than the landscape itself. Not the map, not the territory, not even a blueprint. More like a cloud of unknowing, to crib a second Christian mystic's term in the same blog post. I'm sure my personal cloud looks awfully pretentious. But I'd rather aspire to knowledge and seem pretentious than disdain it for fear of being tarred with the label.

I was going to link to each of the books above, as is customary, but you can run a search on Amazon just as well as I can, even better, since you probably don't have a sick, dozing, yet squirmy child in your arms right now, as I do.