Harvey Danger – "Wine, Women, and Song" (2005)

Didn’t you used to be someone

Who meant something to me?

Ron Charles of the Washington Post couldn’t get enough of Deepti Kapoor’s recently-published novel, Age of Vice: 

Swinging from the hovels to the palaces of contemporary India, this hypnotic story poses a horrible dilemma: For days, I was torn between gorging on “Age of Vice” or rationing out the chapters to make them last. Finally free from the book’s grip, now all I want to do is get others hooked.

Charles promised his readers that Kapoor’s “lush thriller” featured a “ferocious plot, arresting characters and electric dialogue.”  So I immediately ran to the nearest public library and grabbed a copy.

I started reading Age of Vice in early March.  I think Charles’s description off the book is accurate, but it’s now early June and I still have 75 pages to go.  

What’s up with that?

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Since graduating from law school in 1977, I’ve been writing down the name of every book I’ve read.

In a typical year, I read almost 50 books – in other words, about one book per week.

But in the first ten weeks of 2023, I read only four novels – all of which were relatively short and easy reads.  That’s about half as many as you would have expected me to have finished given my past history.

I’m flunking this challenge badly!

And in the following ten weeks, I couldn’t even manage to complete one book.  

I could polish off the rest of Age of Vice in an hour or so if I made my mind up to do so.  I do think I will get to the end by June 6.  But that’s a full three months – or 13 weeks – after I finished my previous book.

*     *     *     *     *

The fault, dear reader, is not in Age of Vice, but in 2 or 3 lines (to paraphrase Cassius’s often-quoted line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar).  

I could blame the falloff in the number of books I’m reading on the demands of producing my wildly successful little blog.  But as my loyal readers have no doubt noticed, I’m producing fewer 2 or 3 lines posts than I once did – and spending less time on each post that I do manage to publish.

I could point to the fact that I now have nine grandchildren, and I try to spend time with each one every week.

And playing trivia three times a week consumes some time that I would otherwise spend reading.

But those are just excuses.  The truth is that I fritter away a lot of time. 

*     *     *     *     *

Those of you who are personally acquainted with me probably assume that most of that time-frittering relates to wine, women, and song.  

After all, I have an average 4.7 rating on Yelp Dating, with comments like “sparkling personality,” “knows his way around the fairer sex,” and “handsome and fit (adjusted for age).”

Unfortunately, that is not the case.  

Where my time is going remains something of a mystery to me.  But the fact remains that my book-reading pace has slowed to a crawl.  

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“Wine, Women, and Song” is the first track on Harvey Danger’s third and final studio album, Little by Little, which was released in 2005.

It’s a clever piece of songwriting, but it’s no “Flagpole Sitta.”

Click here to listen to “Wine, Women, and Song.”

Click here to order the song from Amazon.