I was around the corner from my usual library branch when I finished The Stranger's Child and felt that I should get another book in my hands promptly. Since reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men last year, I'd never officially added this to my reading list, but it was on the right shelf at the right time.
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I haven't read any of Hollinghurst previous novels, but I've been told they involve contemporary gay men having lots of sex, and therefore you may not feel comfortable reading them on the subway. At his Bookcourt reading for "The Stranger's Child," he used the phrase "uncharacteristically restrained" in response to a question about the lack of detailed action on the pages of this book. But there is plenty going on between the chapters and sections and after a while that becomes the point.
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The news about the USPS a few weeks ago was dire, so I bought some new stamps (I recommend a couple panes of the Pioneers of American Industrial Design — they're good forever!) and picked up this book for a little inspiration. —Read more…
After reading Infinite Jest two years ago, I didn’t become a DFW fanatic, settling instead for a measured respect for a writer who manages to be incredibly brilliant and hilarious at the same time.
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By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible, had made it impossible for me to find the thing I was looking for. I needed to separate myself from myself…
Paul Auster is one of those writers where most likely you’ve read The New York Trilogy, if you’ve read anything, and nothing quite compares to that.
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A bit too elegiac of a novel for the early summer, Austerlitz is still worth any potential struggles in making it through the endless paragraphs — often as much as twenty-five pages long. The character, and really the voice of the book, Jacques Austerlitz meets the nameless narrator as they are both appreciating the architecture of the Antwerp train station, starting a decades-long friendship that seems to consistent of them usually running into each other unexpectedly and then Austerlitz talking this guy's ear off about his life for hours on end.
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I was drawn to this book based on its setting in 1970s New York City, specifically set around the day Philippe Petit made his World Trade Center tightrope walk; curiously the tightrope interludes in the book felt mostly unnecessary and distracting. The shorter sections that only have the tightrope connection to tie them with the rest of the book hence feel entirely disconnected.
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I picked up All the King's Horses as a break from this and found that a longer narrative really hit the spot. Afterward I decided to finish up the stories in the section I was reading here and come back to the rest of the collection later, only to discover somewhat disappointingly that there were just a handful until that next break. But I'm sticking to the plan.
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