Wow

It's not as if I think I rival Oprah with my "recommend it and they will read it" powers. This post serves the purpose of releasing personal feelings (the kind that make you want to tap your finger or shake your leg). Otherwise known as a RANT.
I haven't read something this good in a long time. I was floored.

They are watching the TV. They are always watching the TV. It is an inviolable right that neither mom nor dad question.
Question? I would usually sit there and wallow with them, but not today. I have a fire burning in my soul that will not let me sit.
“Kids, turn that off.”
I don’t mean it but I feel obliged to toss something over my shoulder on my way to the kitchen. The evolved way of saying, I’m home. Welcome to the new millenium. There is no answer from the kids, but I wasn’t expecting one. Gone are the days of sitting around the dinner table exchanging pleasantries and, how was your day. I do miss those days but life must go on, and who does that nowadays anyway? The dinner table went out of date with the log cabin.
Nothing in the refrigerator looks appealing. Cold wing, cold pizza, cold everything. That will be the second night in a row that I don’t eat. I am sure not eating is good for you anyway, and the fire inside won’t let me eat. I feel like dropping and doing twenty pushups, or running up and down the stairs a hundred times. Carol would think I am crazy.
Maybe that is what the fire inside is. A touch of mental imbalance creeping up your shoulders like frost on a cold day.
No. What really gives me the shivers is the global tendency that I am picking up on, to consider any fire at all insanity. This burgeoning paranoia for the abnormal that drains the life out of life. The comparison-that is what is really insanity. I am comparing fire to frost, look at me. At best a bad metaphor and at worst a paranoiac complex. There’s the big insanity again.

That, my friends, is a portion of The Taming, by Joe Johnston. It is the story of a man who is so unlike the average man in wealth and intelligence, but cannot escape the thoughts of the average human--cannot escape the fear of mediocrity...the fear of time...the fear of death. It inspires the thoughts that men were made to think.
I secured a printed copy and smuggled it in to nap with me. I read it straight through.
(In other news: It staggers a bit through the beginning portion but finds its legs. The second half is some of the best stuff I've ever seen written.)

The imagery:

I see the sun. It is smiling cheerily at me, its arms stretched towards the earth to gather up the floodwater. The ground dries and is quickly parched. My walls are searing black from the heat as the sun grabs my brain in a pudgy fist and scalds it in its stifling grasp and its surface begins to blister. The sun smiles and says, “It is your fault.”

I love the violin. I love the way it expresses itself, it climbs its way out of your speakers and burrows and claws its way into your heart. You could say it speaks to me. I feel it connects me to its source, the frantic, fervid vehemence of the authour. I can feel his hands around his enemy’s neck as I am strangling my steering wheel. A thousand insects gnaw into my ears as the fiend pleads for his life futilely. I can hear in my brain the pitiful snap of the spinal cord, and it echoes salaciously, yet emptily, in my head as he moves on to his next victim.

The brevity:

You think of the silliest things in a crisis situation. And then you think of thinking of them, and it complicates things.

The truth:

My life used to be boring. It’s funny how we as humans only find amusement and challenges when reality perverts itself, when we have to try to find it within ourselves to ‘rise above’ our circumstances. It’s not within there, I know it. The ability to transcend my circumstances is not within myself. I don’t know what I am going to do. Right now I am only existing. Everything else has been taken and I am existing on instincts. Facing immediate challenges, and closing my eyes to the future.

Just little pieces.
The ending was amazing.
I haven't read anything this spectacular in years. I took a break with the CGO handbook--but still, years. It's the kind of Wow that makes you want to take off and run and run.

Just for the record, I am not doing publicity for the author, and I don't know him personally. I would do the same for Lord of the Rings or Memoirs of Geisha, only, this impressed me more.