I started reading David Foster Wallace’s epic Infinite Jest at the cottage. I set myself an (overly) ambitious target of 100 pages a day. Ambitious because it took me an hour to read 15 pages. And I could only reasonably avoid my family and read on the dock for seven hours of the day. Because reading Infinite Jest is an exercise in focus, absorption and dedication. Like the ‘entertainment’ that so bewitches characters that they cannot look away (choosing death by starvation or dehydration rather than stopping the consumption of the entertainment) the novel asks for (demands?) complete attention if the reader is to make sense of the overlapping plot lines, constantly shifting points of view, temporal and geographic locations, narrative styles and relationships among characters. Continue reading
Category Archives: Prize Winner
Infinite Jest: Why Reading this Book Makes You a Hero
Filed under American literature, Fiction, New York Times Notable, Prize Winner, Reader Request
The Good Earth: How I Accidentally Stole from the Public Library
Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth is so bad I have almost nothing to say about it (and so will tell you about my accidental thieving – but first…). Continue reading
Filed under American literature, Bestseller, Book Club, Prize Winner, Worst Books
Do Not Say We Have Nothing: You Probably Know More About Everything Than Me.
I can’t remember how I first came across Madeline Thien. It was almost certainly in the context of a literature class, and probably the responsibility of L. or D. teaching me Canadian literature. The origins don’t matter so much as knowing that I associate Thien with beautiful writing and themes of family, place and home. So when mutliple folks recommended her new book Do Not Say We Have Nothing I was primed to appreciate it. I say ‘appreciate,’ but I could have also said ‘enjoy,’ or ‘marvel,’ or ‘revel.’ It’s a book that takes for granted that its reader will want and appreciate depth in theme and exquisite beauty in writing. It is not for the lazy reader, and doesn’t assume that such readers exist. Continue reading
Catcher in the Rye: The book my bookclub actually talked about
I re-read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye for bookclub. It was a good choice for bookclub because a) it was easy to get copies of the book (in fact I read a .pdf version the day-of) and b) it invited sustained discussion (I’ll be the first to admit our bookclub has the tendancy to wander off into talk of breastfeeding and the lastest Justin T. photo-op). S. gave the book high reviews, as did most others (though L. didn’t like it one bit), but in the discussion we circled around how much of liking the book was because we thought we *should* like the book given it’s canonical status (and adolescent attachment for those who had read it in their teen years). Continue reading
Filed under American literature, Bestseller, Book Club, Fiction, Prize Winner
Literary Vice 