what i'm attempting to read...

so, i have this problem with books. i can't seem to ever just read one and move onto the next. i buy books all the time, never read them, then decide all of a sudden that i need to read all of them at once. i honeslty haven't been reading books cover to cover for very long. i know there are people who claim Oscar Wilde and James Joyce as their bathroom reads from when they were sitting on the plastic throne of their potty-training days, but i somehow managed to fly through english classes with the perfectly crafted tool of "skimming" hooked onto my belt. i have definitely encountered some wonderfully engrossing reads, the kind that kept me up at nights and had my head in cloud 9 for days, the ones that are so ingenius they make you feel as creative and witty as a pidgeon turd... nope this problem is more of a testament to the severity of my short attention span, my penchant for losing things for periods of time, and the constant fluxes in my multiple personality disorder.
i'm reading 4 books at the same time right now, (a couple of which i started around mid-2006, but lost them to the dark crevices and underbelly of my bed until they were valiently rescued one night upon accidental discovery) and they are all amazing and you should read them. maybe not all at the same time. maybe two would be ok.

1. Valis, Philip K. Dick - too. much. acid. this book is insane. gnosticism, suicide, alter ego, a dead cat, god, jesus, rays of pink light that beam info about humanity and salvation into your brain. i attempted to read it a few years back and decided i didn't have enough of the cragees in me to even begin to decipher this book, but now... oh, but now...

2. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez - i know. i'm late on this one. i'm sure you've all read it and felt your hearts swell and your nads shrivel. beautiful. makes you want a canopy bed, a victorian tea set and a tragic young latin love.

3. Blood Curdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, H.P. Lovecraft - a collection of short stories. i mean really. how can you go wrong with titles like The Rats in the Wall and The Whisperer of Darkness? Lovecraft's ouevre is complicated to explain without references of d&d-esque culture, but aside from all the pimply-faced demons of underworld lords he might have spawned around the world it's his strange personal life and his morbid outlook on humanity that make his stories that much more delectable.

4. The Conspiracy of Art, Jean Baudrillard - i can see the eyes rolling, but this is one i had actually wanted to finish in school but never got around to it. a bit more enthused than his perfunctory counterparts, his cultural critiques and theoretical writings on semiotics and "hyperreality" (like totally awesome and like relevent to like postmodern times) were standard reads for the budding art student, but with the "conspiracy of art" he had perceptively fucked himself of his revered status as the reluctant art critic when he announced that the art world had been reduced to a load of crap that fueled consumerism, that art had "lost the desire for illusion, and instead raises everything to aesthetic banalty" and post warhol contemporary art was "striving for nullity when already null and void"... but at some point his declarations of conspiracy became a vehicle for counterreaction and therefore it was ok to call art art again, but in reality this self-defacation was another spoke in the art-as-revolutionary bandwagon which beaudrillard was criticizing in the first place, no? huh?? yeah, i dunno. i'm only on page 25 and trying to see how many times i can necessarily say "art" in one paragraph. so far it's pretty fascinating. like watching a dog incessantly chase its tail.