But there’s another reason he never finishes, if he’s honest with himself. He’s afraid of being disappointed by the endings, which is the reason he stopped reading fiction. He’d read Great Expectations at Rikers and had loved it — this story of a criminal secretly sponsoring some poor kid’s life — until the jail librarian pointed out that Dickens had written two endings. When he found the original ending Vince felt betrayed by the entire idea of narrative fiction. This story he’d carried around in his head had two endings? A book, like a life, should have only one ending. Either the adult Pip and Estella walk off holding hands, or they don’t. For him, the ending of that book rendered it entirely moot, five hundred pages of moot. Every novel moot.

So he only reads the beginnings now. And it’s not bad. He’s even begun to think of this as a more effective approach, to sample only the beginnings of things. After all, a book can only end of one of two ways: truthfully or artfully. If it ends artfully, then it never feels quite right. It feels forced, manipulated. If it ends truthfully, then the story ends badly, in death. It’s the reason most theories and religions and economic systems break down before you get too far into them — and the reason Buddhism and the Beach Boys make sense to teenagers, because they’re too young to know what life really is: a frantic struggle that always ends the same way. The only thing that varies is the beginning and the middle. Life itself always ends badly. If you’ve seen someone die, you don’t need to read to the end of some book to learn that.

— Jess Walter, Citizen Vince

My profile of Oliver Sacks can be found in this week’s Time Out New York. Dr. Sacks and I talked about quite a lot in the short time we had, and the entire conversation will be unveiled in a forthcoming podcast, which likewise includes Woody Geist’s remarkable version of “Shooby Dooin’.”

Not only does Carolyn have a piece in today’s Los Angeles Times, but Dan Wickett has made Wired! It seems that some of these litbloggers don’t seem to be spending much of their time in Terre Haute these days.

Speaking of Mr. Wickett, I have unimpeachable evidence that he’s in New York right now. Roy Kesey, an author who has published two books with Dzanc, will be appearing tonight as part of the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series. The bar’s at 302 Broome Street. The show begins at 8:00 PM, and also features Benjamin Percy, Min Jin Lee, and music from Max Gabriel. Several bloggers (including me) should be there. So do swing by and say hello!

Science Daily: “With the latest advances in treatment, doctors have discovered that they can successfully neutralise the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The so-called ‘combination therapy’ prevents HIV from mutating and spreading, allowing patients to rebuild their immune system to the same levels as the rest of the population.”