"You're reading a fish book."

The name of this post, Norm, is based on one of the early lines in the Christopher Walken movie Suicide Kings. Denis Leary, as his driver, is showing off his boots to Charlie Barret/Carlo Bartolucci (Walken), and tells him they're made of sting ray. Walken says, "You're wearing fish boots."

That doesn't count as a segue, but whenever I pick up the book I'm reading that line passes through my brain. My dad suggested a book by a guy Richard Flanagan, who's Tasmanian. Now, my dad has a pretty good track record with his suggestions to me, like Haruki Murakami and Dennis Mitchell, who wrote the excellent Cloud Atlas. Flanagan was described as a read that would stretch your imagination, and I found a copy on Amazon.com for a penny plus shipping, so I picked it up. It arrived before I finished The Garlic Ballads, so I started it before The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

It's called Gould's Book of Fish:

I'll have a longer explanation in a bit, but it's almost like Flanagan has a streak of Pynchon in him, at least in some of the early nineteenth century sentence construction. It's good.

Christopher Walken's voice, though, going on in my head, "Your're reading a fish book."