January 6, Tuesday evening -- Reading Robert Pirsig

At Grant and Stockton Streets, taking advantage of the post-holiday slowdown
Finally getting around to reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig.

If he were to write his own book, it'd be a self reflection, maybe about (or written during) a bicycle trip he hopes to take around the country this spring/summer. (The book I was telling you about, where the guys who cycled across Siberia to Moscow is called Off the Map, by Mark Jenkins.)

Favorites -- The Razor's Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham and Steinbeck's works, especially The Grapes of Wrath, which takes him a long time to read. He gets caught up in the sad parts and rereads them over and over, like the scene where the kid is looking at the candy and the shopkeeper finally says that the candy's on sale.

His house mate is Bob Calhoun, San Francisco writer, wrestler, and author of Blood, Beer and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling. The cornmeal, he said, alludes to the tradition of throwing tortillas at wrestlers....so his friends threw tortillas at him during his book readings, too.