better with age?

For those of you keeping score at home who are wondering where Sarah is, I'd like to remind you that she has a boyfriend and a real(er) job, whereas I spend 1/4 of my day on the subway. So. This week, I read Another Country! James Baldwin is a famous African-American writer who I had never heard of until he was mentioned in Stew's musical, "Passing Strange," because sometimes the public school system fails. And then my literary beloved, Jonathan Lethem, listed Another Country as influential in his writing of The Fortress of Solitude, so I figured it was worth a read. I was right. It's a massive meditation on all the...unwanteds, so to speak, of New York. Not exactly the homeless people sleeping on the subway, but the people who didn't quite fit into society in the 1960s....and let's be honest, today too, to a certain degree. I'll be honest though, the whole time I was reading it, I couldn't wait to read it in another ten years. It's like when I played Anne Frank when I was 17. Being 14 made sense three years later, but I would have sucked if I had been cast when I was 14. The people in this book are in their mid to late 20s and I think I'm too closely aligned to them to fully appreciate how brilliant Baldwin's writing is. I'm too busy feeling kinship and empathy. So I happily placed it on my bookshelf and look forward to picking it up in a few years, after it has had a chance to breath.


Also, totally unrelated to books unless you count Us Weekly and Star, but here are my two favorite things this week:
The Original and the Equally-Funny-But-For-Different-Reasons Parody. I have watched both too many times for them to be as hilarious as they still are.