vriad_lee

i always have a set of bathroom books i read in the bathroom. i'm not extravagant, this is simply a well-established russian tradition. my main bathroom book currently is 'bech: a book' by john updike. i open it at random and read from different chapters every time, and today's piece was hilarious
( a few scanned excerpts )

there are books and there are books. there are people who read a good fat book in 3 hours, and claim to remember all the facts/details. and that sounds awful, and you don't envy them. no, you don't. it happens that you need to invest something to get a return. sometimes making an effort is such fun that you're tricked into believing there was no investment at all. but that doesn't change much.
one of my favorite books is the picture of dorian gray. i started to read it when i didn't know english - no more than some very basic grammar. it was spring time, i went to dacha and spent days watching radish sprouts and reading dorian gray. and first it took me a whole day to make a page or two. then i went to moscow, to my sister, and asked her all kinds of questions about the few pages that i'd read, some of them (questions) very silly.
reading at such a deep level, trying to grasp every word, doubting every expression, i эgrew' into the book at some point. it was as if i had been allowed into some secret/hidden dimension of it. i might have been reading a lot into this book, and i probably have, but it doesn't make it any worse. it makes it much better.