austinkleon:

Jonathan Lethem, “In My Room,” from The Disappointment Artist + The Beach Boys’ “In My Room”

Every room I’ve lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books…

…My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull…room as brain…

…The adult life I’ve made—getting paid, reader, to tell you these things—bears a suspicious resemblance to the rooms themselves. My prose is a magpie’s, even when not larded with cultural name-dropping, as have been my last two novels, as is this piece of no-longer-particularly-veiled memoir. Perhaps anyone’s writing is ultimately bricolage, a welter of borrowings. But of the writers I know, I’ve been the most eager to point out my influences, to spoil the illusion of originality by elucidating my fiction’s resemblance to my book collection.

(Thx, thisismyfavoritesong for the track!)