Heroic Day-to-day Life

"Sometimes living day-to-day can be heroic, as it is in this subtle, gentle book... a quietly wonderful delight." -O Magazine

The main character/narrator of The Pleasure of My Company, who has yet to be named, is the most interesting character I've ever read about or heard of. He seems to have a lot of not-too-serious mental conditions, like social anxiety and awkwardness. He describes his obsession with numbers in a way that shows but doesn't tell that he is obsessive compulsive. He overthinks anything involving numbers so much, he loses a romantic opportunity with the young, beautiful, recently heart-broken actress who lives upstairs, Philipa. After she complains about the lighting being too bright and "not dim enough, not sexy enough" the main character goes and gets a lower watt bulb, and of course he has to change all of the other light bulbs in his small apartment to match the ones in the bedroom. After a while, the intoxicated and exhausted Philipa falls asleep. Being an honorable man, the main character helps her back into her own apartment. I love the description of his thought process during the whole scene, especially his miles and miles of thought in just a few moments.

Pleasure of My Company

As great as Clapton was, when I read the first page of The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin, I couldn't put it down. Not because of suspense, but because of the awe I felt when I saw how beautiful his style is. Martin is clearly a true writer. I've also read his autobiography, Born Standing Up, and his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile for an acting class. Both pieces are great; for Born Standing Up there are almost no words. His style and his story are among the greatest I've seen or heard, and the two combined into a couple hundred pages just made an amazing and emotional read.
Now with Pleasure I'm getting to see another side of him; a side that was hiding behind something translucent in Born Standing Up. In his autobiography, I could almost see a loner side to him, and the main character in Pleasure seems to be semi-agorophobic, and seems to have crushes on almost every female in his life, including Elizabeth, the realtor trying to sell the apartment across the street, whom he has never met but is convinced he is in love with.
This main character, who has yet to be named, comes with all sorts of quirks, such as never admitting his real age. He changes it depending on his mood, the day, who he's with, etc. He is also one of those people who overthinks everything; such as what to wear, when to go outside, whether or not to wear sunglasses. Though it's clear through all of these quirks that he is a good, caring, relatively sane person. I am so interested to see what comes in the next hundred pages of this novel.

Clapton

This quarter I'll be finishing Clapton, the autobiography by Eric Clapton.

I started looking for this book a while ago after reading Pattie Boyd's autobiography Wonderful Tonight [which was amazing] and I really wanted to hear a different point of view of their complicated love story.