Some exerpts...

I'm reading Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins, and I have a feeling that this is becoming one of my favorite books ever. Tom Robbins has a way or writing that becomes addicting to read. I'll come upon a few lines in the book that are written so comicly or beautifully or profoundly, that I have to stop and read it three or four times again. I can't stand not talking to someone about how great his writing is, so I figured to satisfy my need to express how much I love this book, I would post some of the great literary moments of the book so far :)


"...the fullness of existence embodies an overwhelmingly intricate balance of defined, ill-defined, un-defined, moving, stopping, dancing, falling, singing, coughing, growing, dying, timeless and time-bound molecules - and the spaces in between."

In this exerpt, he is describing the performance of an old American Indian:

"In the circus arena, lit only by a dry twig fire, the old Apache would commence a performance of calculated frenzy, identifying his bodily rhythms with the historical migrations of his people, recalling both their triumphs and their tribulations, insinuating their glories and humiliations, howling myths in the shadows like a coyote, clacking his peyote-stained teeth like a beaver, arching his back like a mesa, planting his toes like the dawn of agriculture, weeping like a long winter, laughing like the mouth of a river, stalking with his arrowed eyes some unlicensed prey in the faces of the audience. And the audience would sit chilled, bound to the stake of congenital guilt, its thoughts paddling along some quiet piney lake or spurring a pony around the bend of a canyon, all trails however clean and simple leading to the scene of slaughter...and when the drums suddenly froze and the hard mahogany Indian stilled his dance at the summit of its demonic power to shriek in perfect magpie Trickster, to scream in flawless American, "Hi'niswa'vita'ki'ni" - "We shall live again!" - the stoutest of mechanics coughed nervously and children and women were known to pee in their pants."

And finally...one of the main characters is inspired by her husband's rhythmic drumming...

"The whole universe is a complex of rhythms. We each of us feel a need to identify our bodily rhythms with those of the cosmos. The sea is the grand agency of rhythm. The grain-tops in the wind, the atoms in orbit are rhythmic. The uterus, which is a strong muscular organ, contracts with the birth of the baby. Actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats. The majority of our actions occur regularly, lack dynamism and are unaccentuated. But occasional actions are accentuated due to their intensified stress. The quality of man's life depends upon the rhythmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy."