David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto has generated mucho buzz, including enough A-list blurbs to sink an aircraft carrier. I’m going to dig in soon, but I can’t say I’m optimistic. For one thing, there’s this interview in the just-published February issue of Bookslut, in which Shields offers up several possible nuggets for Andrew Sullivan’s Poseur Alert. Including this one:

I swear to God, I can’t read a book unless it has miniature numbered sections. I exaggerate, but only slightly. I think of so many books that I love and so many of them are numbered: Pascal’s Pensées, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Wittgenstein, The Pharmacist’s Mate, 8, Wenderoth, Lindqvist, Pessoa, Daudet, Cheever’s Journals, Rochefoucauld, James Richardson, Donald Patterson, Cyril Connolly. I’m not 100% sure that all of these books are numbered, but they have at minimum some kind of numerological structure, and the key thing for me is that the numbers pretend to be a rational order, and the work blows that apart. The tension between the order of the numbers and the chaos of life I find, I’ll say it, erotic.