Holed up at friends', with books. Which one first?

Strange and gripping, a short and intense read. Perhaps I wanted just a bit more from the ending, but perhaps it was enough. Time will tell.

This may be a great book, but my respect for its endorsers hiked my expectations. The pov rang false to me, but that could have been my mood. I am going to try it again some other time, when I will try to remember the author is also/mostly a playwright and so maybe playing a different sort of game than I'm seeking in a novel.

Starting this based on the recommendations of Michael Ondaatje and Colm Toibin. My expectations are high.

Halfway through, mesmerized.

To be read, new additions.

If you ever have the opportunity to hear him speak, do it.

Picked this up at AWP and read half of it on the flight home. The Bernhard influence is hard to miss, yet it doesn't seem derivative. Engrossing use of repetition - surprisingly absorbing. Looking forward to the second half, curious if/how the threads and hints will accumulate into something.

Left some money at the Dorothy Project at AWP

Having lunch with a newly arrived refugee family from Iran. The ten-year-old girl speaks fluent English so I am giving her these books that my daughter enjoyed at about that age.

Giving a talk o this book in April--haven't wrapped my head around an approach yet.

"This is true alchemy: to change the gold of one language into the gold of another." --Cees Nooteboom on Edith Grossman's translation

Normally I avoid "issue" fiction (I go to nonfiction for that), but a review prompted me to pick up this novel about the consequences of fracking for one small PA town. It's a composite portrait--lots of point-of-view characters--that becomes more than the sum of its parts while offering small satisfactions in each part. Strengths are character specification and authorial control/vision.

Archipelago Books rainbow

Someone here just posted about Auster being a nice guy and I remembered this picture I took when he was here for a lit series I organize. Not a great photo but what's funny about it is that he is standing in the SC State House, listening to the governor who happened to give an impromptu press conference while we were walking around. A long way from Brooklyn!

"Rural Pennsylvania doesn't fascinate the world, not generally. But cyclically, periodically, its innards are of interest. Bore it, strip it, set it on fire, a burnt offering to the collective need."

Failed to engage with this book that I was looking forward to. I plan to give it another try at a later date/in a different mood, because this received reviews and recommendations from people I respect. I generally love experimentation, but this struck me as more derivative than original in its experimentation. Perhaps unfair, so I will try again later. But it's a "bail" for now.

After a few pages, I was absorbed by this imperfect but often breathtaking novel(la). It begins with a magnified look at one day in the history of a love that seems doomed but is ultimately about much broader issues of class, the aftermath of war, and the relationship of fiction to truth. I kind of wish the narrative had stayed miniature--or else that it had more fully blown up its later material. Still: moving, often beautiful, softly dark.

"This was the great truth of life, that fact and fiction were always merging, interchanging."

Good job, Richland County Public Library!

Wishing you all good luck and abundance--and lots of great books--in 2017!

"Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything, last of all should pay a visit to Stitchings."

I'm writing a novel that includes some nods to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, so I thought I should crack into this retelling. The language is immediately interesting, but I'm not sure I'm going to like the tale.

"The identities of the not-so-innocent are verifiable."

"To live back then, in the past, what more could I want?"

"I ached for a new idea, a new thought in my head."

This book is structurally intriguing, elegantly composed, and insightful about how people think. I'm sorry it received so little review and other attention. It's quiet, I suppose, yet engrossing and (oddly, given some of its subject matter) comforting.

"You read without understanding what you read, so you read more and more, relishing the ability of words to diverge from the ordinary. Words are waves. You learn to swim from the seduction of a wave that wraps you in foam."

"Whereas we are sure of absolutely nothing when it comes to prehistoric times, we know nothing, or almost nothing. We are obliged to invent." (Ozzie, a terrier mix, with some of Archipelago's beautiful little books)

"You'll never know what's going on inside the heads of other people." (Keret read here and was extraordinarily generous to our students.)

I love seeing a friend's book in a great bookstore.

"He had failed, he realized, to take the measure of the great flat foot of the public, and he now had to realize that nothing he did would ever be popular or generally appreciated."

I love everything Colin Dickey writes.

"For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love."