Today I read The World Doesn't End (Simic), standing up for twenty minutes in the bookstore. This kind of book, amusing as it is, just doesn't offer enough resistance to easy consumption. It seems all of a piece: the same tone, the same register, in each short prose poem. The same degree of unpredictability, or rather, predictability, since the jokes are all the same.

I didn't read any complete books yesterday. My idea is to avoid repeating any poets until I've read at least 200 books. At least I won't be reading anything else by Simic in the immediate future.