I'm surviving, but barely. My internet connection at home has been down for two days. I never realized how much I use the world wide web before. Checking ESPN for baseball scores, checking e-mail, writing posts, browsing my daily blog...anything and everything I seem to do, is on-line. And I'm not. But that should change today. I called Comcast last night and a tech is coming out today to check our modem. My sister's going to be there so I don't have to take a day off of work, which wouldn't have actually been a bad thing.

In my new found time of not blogging or losing myself in space, I finished Tussing's The Best People in the World and have moved on to Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. It's my first Eco and I've been surprised so far. I never really took him for a modern writer, but his style is a cohesive version of post-World War II literature. Which, I guess it is because that's what he is. He plays with sentence structure and memory and I'm digging it so far.

The story's about a man who has had some sort of problem and ended up in the hospital with now memory of his personal life. We haven't been told how/why he ended up in the hospital, but that's part of Eco's game I take it. The narrator, is an antiquarian book dealer in Italy that can remember everything he's read and learned, but not his children, his wife or favorite food. He's fully functional and Eco allows the narrator, nicknamed Yambo, but who's actually named after the great Type and Font creator Bondoni, to experience firsts again. He eats his favorite food for the first time again; he falls in love with his grandchildren for the first time again; he makes love for the first time again; and most importantly, he goes home for the first time again. And that's where I am right now. Yambo has arrived at his family's country home and now the secrets will be revealed...at least I think and hope they will.

Eco's a master craftsman and now my only regret is that I put off reading The Name of the Rose for so long simply because I saw the movie so many times.

Onward and upward.