I finally finished Bolano's 2666 tonight. This book has carried me through early-morning bus rides, tedious afternoons and breaks at work, and who knows what else. I loved most of it but found the fourth chapter ("The Part About the Crimes," also the most critically-hyped section) slow going.

Soon (i.e. once I've got my hands on a copy) I'll be tackling Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. I can't think of a more exciting book right now - I've only read two of Ligotti's books but his style of morbid fiction and his worldview I'm totally on board with. His ideas, expressed as much in interviews as in his work, have to do with the general bleakness of existence - as Cioran put it, "the trouble with being born."

This is a philosophical vein that's occupied me a lot in the last year or so - not exactly nihilism, not exactly anti-natalism, but I can see my way to sympathizing with both positions. A lot of this comes from a few books I've read in the past few years, each of which complicates any possibility of empathy with this philosophical vein - Kierkegaard points obliquely toward it but offers the possibility of redemption via a radical inward form of Christianity; Dominic Fox's Cold World which I read last October argues that anhedonia is a totally appropriate response to contemporary life. I'm not sure I agree with this - most of the writers I value most who come from a depressive point of departure seem to react to the contemporary world with various degrees of unhealthy neurosis - Kierkegaard's fanaticism, Duras's alcoholism, Bernhard and Cioran's misanthropy - but not exactly the sort of anhedonia that cripples you from any possibility of creation and invention. If writing weren't a way out, the ultimate depressives Bernhard and Cioran - or Kafka and Beckett, who took their mistrust even further - wouldn't have done so much of it.