I might see a view like this while driving down to OHM tomorrow. Hopefully one of us will be watching the road though.

I will be in OHM -- also known as One Hundred Mile House -- from Friday night to Monday sometime. Mon petite amie Roxanne McLeod is coming, ainsi il sera absolument le fun! Tentative plans include: drinking coffee, talking hyperactively, building a weather machine to make the weather nice, hiring Sean Connery to play a supervillain who wants to steal the weather machine, and maybe going to a lake, if the weather machine doesn't get stolen. I'll be at my childhood home throughout, perhaps for the last time before it is sold, so stop by. I'd like to see you, as long as you are you, and you are, trust me. I promise I will say something nonsensical or confusing and then apologize for it.

I don't recommend books to people. Just because I like a book doesn't mean Bob will like it. Rob might like it, because Rob likes everything, but Lob definitely won't, because Lob is a fool. Also, recommending a book implies that the target of the recommendation doesn't have books he wants to read himself. He is just sitting there waiting for someone to recommend a book to him. "This had better be good, I wouldn't bump Heart to Heart, by Britney and Lynne Spears, from my list for just any book!"

Having said that, I will also say that the book I just finished -- The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald -- is first-rate. Normally when someone says 'classic' I think: "This had better involve Cambell's Chunky soup in some way". But The Great Gatsby is better than soup. It is set, and was published, in the 1920s, which to my mind is one of the most fascinating North American decades. A lot of the love-and-hateable things with which we grapple to this day began to sprout at that time. Namely, rapidly increasing technology, mass commercialism, prosperity and prosperity's bedfellows optimism and greed. It also has an interesting narrative structure, with the narrator being a semi-important character, but not necessarily central. The thing which moved me the most, though, was the interaction between the two main characters, who were rivals. Fitzgerald had amazing insight into how they embodied, in polar and similar ways, different perspectives on, and methods to acheive, the American dream. I'd like to talk about it more, but certain IP readers have not yet read the book for our Eng 385 class, so I don't want to spoil anything. Generally, for better or for worse, as a Canadian, I understand America better than Britain. That carries over to Lit, and this could only be an American novel.