Fresh on the heels of the *excellent* Among the Missing (blogged here), I've been reading Dan Chaon's new novel, You Remind Me of Me.

I found that the novel begins surprisingly slowly at first, but suddenly near the end of Part One there's this wonderful eureka moment when you suddenly realize how all the different strands you're reading connect together, a few pages before the characters start to. It's really something. I'm digging this novel, and I'm digging Chaon's work.

Here's one quick little passage that moved me:

The baby's large eyes settled on him, and though this had been one of his happiest nights in his whole life, it made him melancholy. He had read somewhere that babies are instinctively drawn to faces, that they will fixate even on drawings or abstract, facelike shapes, and round objects with markings that might resemble eye-mouth-nose. It was information that struck him as terribly sad, terribly lonely -- to imagine the infants of the world scoping the blurry atmosphere above them for faces the way primitive people scrutinzed the stars for patterns, the way castaways stare at the moon, the blinking of a satellite. It made him sad to think of the baby gathering information -- a mind, a soul, slowly solidifying around these impressions, coming to understand cause and effect, coming out of a blank or fog into reality. Into a reality. The true terror, Jonah thought, the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die, but that we were all born, that we were all once little babies like this, unknowing and slowly reeling in the world, gathering it loop by loop like a ball of string. The true terror was that we once didn't exist and then, through no fault of our own, we had to.

Which describes how you're feeling all the time.