You what?

At the opening of Call of the Small, I was told I needed to read the book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, which I went home and bought from Book Depository that very night.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and what do you know? The room essay for the exhibition quotes from the very same book. Which suddenly leapfrogged to the top of my To be read right now, if not sooner pile.

There's only one problem: lots of big words I don't know the meanings of. I've started copying them into a notebook to look up when I'm in front of my dictionary, And feeling very Nick Cave-like in the process.

Actually, there's another problem: entire paragraphs in French with no translation. Which means I resemble that Larson cartoon:

"the little paper vignette is something when the something (is that lentil?!) of door pen souvenir (that can't be right, surely?), when the something of the bottle of Evian is a something something"

Crap: maybe I need to start a new page of my notebook for French words I don't know for when I can access Google languages...