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Summer by the pages
The crippling summer blaze has kept me in-doors more than ever — 120-percent of the time as opposed to the usual, paltry 100-percent — and I’ve seized the indooriness to accomplish an almost unseemly amount of reading. Words are tasty, and I will devour them raw, unseasoned and in fattening, nourishing quantities.
A few menu items …
“A World Lit Only By Fire” by William Manchester: After the fall of Rome, darkness dropped in thick, dank sheets of backwardness, violence, pestilence, church tyranny and other retarding forces. Manchester chronicles this in how’d-he-know-that? detail, segueing to the revolutionary glories in thought, faith, science and art of the Renaissance, its players and monuments. Throughout it all, the Church remains a big ninny.
“The Comfort of Strangers” by Ian McEwan: This small and curious thriller by one of my writing idols, though limpidly written, didn’t do it all for me. That shocker ending is abrupt and not altogether earned. I shrugged, wrinkled my nose and asked it “So what?”
“The Prince of Tides” by Pat Conroy: A roaring storm of southern soap, with twisting squalls of family dysfunction and thunderclaps of hooey (a killer tiger?). Conroy’s magisterial control of tone and language knocked me down repeatedly, hard. Extravagantly controlled chaos.
“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” by Michael Chabon: Written with literary gifts no 24-year-old should have (that’s how old he was when he cracked open his big brain and poured out this wondrous novel), TMOP is about sex and summer and coming of age confusions. It’s about identity, a heady love triangle and finding oneself. It’s about all that impossible stuff, and making it as possible as one can.
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By Tom R.
September 12, 2009 1:46 PM | Link to this
You may feel like a denizen of Julian Barnes’ choir loft after reading his deathly treatise “Nothing to be afraid of”. His treatment of the ultimate finality is quite comfortable. I hope you like it, too.
By Joe
August 10, 2009 2:45 PM | Link to this
I read Michael Chabon’s “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” soon after it was published and, as a result, have read most of his later novels, too. He has yet to disappoint me. He remains an unusually gifted writer.