What I Am Reading: The Discomfort Zone

I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's book The Corrections immensely and upon realizing that I would not be working at Borders much longer I promptly bought the other two books of his that we had in stock.

The Discomfort Zone is meant to be (as the cover says) a personal history; all of 20 pages in it appears to me to be a tamer telling of The Corrections with his real mother and father reflecting milder versions of their counterparts in the Corrections. Makes you wonder if he wrote this only to clear up any misconception that Alfred and Enid were fictional characterizations of his parent. Not all of us can be fooled.

Yet again Jonathan Franzen fails to disappoint in the cover department with this being my favorite book cover of any book I have read so far. My being a lover of maps it isn't hard to believe that a book with a very descriptive map of a man's heart would catch my fancy. Now after doing a little research stemming from reading the back cover, apparently the original map (published in a January 1960 edition of McCall's) came complete with a map of a Woman's heart as well. I have been unable to find a good quality version (here is a poor one) via the internets so I now have plans to look through Northeastern's collection of Magazine's and if I cannot find it there I will hunt it down at the library of congress. To be continued.....