Book Review

 I recently finished reading "Love Begins in Winter," a collection of five short stories by Simon Van Booy. I really enjoyed the author’s writing style, with short choppy sentences broken by one twisting, long one with semicolons. Lots of similes and metaphors and strange contrasts. It read very poetically with a strong sense of rhythm. I liked his portrayal of characters, how each of them had some kind of darkness beneath their surface. Each story weaved together threads of parents, children, guilt, and hope to form a mosaic that, when viewed from afar once finished with the book, really showed the intensity and power of love to change a person.

Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5 

Excerpts:

(12): “They will only be my parents once. They are the only parents I will ever have in the history of the universe. I wonder if they feel me thinking about them here in Quebec City in the rain – I wonder if they feel me like a small animal gnawing at them affectionately.”

(48): “From my pocket I took a large stone and set it squarely in his open hand. If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony: in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedroom fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don’t know then. But later you realize – that was the moment."

Literary Lists

I've been keeping tabs on Penguin Books USA through Twitter lately -- and not just because I really, really, really want to work or intern there. There are some pretty interesting posts about up and coming authors, interviews, and (obviously) books. And I just read that Penguin has released a list of the top 10, reader-chosen must-read classic books.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm skeptical as to why the classics are classics. The writing is typically dense and inaccessible and the stories tend to revolve around mundane daily matters. I've read books like Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and Romeo and Juliet (all of which are on the reader-chosen list), and I just don't get what's so overwhelmingly great about them. I'd take a modern, experimental read like Shane Jones' simultaneously whimsical and somber novel, Light Boxes, over the classics any day. 

Then again, I did enjoy Little Women (on the list, thankfully) a lot when I was younger, so maybe I'm just erecting a double standard here. I checked last year's list, not chosen by readers, which included Thoreau's Walden and Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, two books I did enjoy. I'm sad to see that no one thought to include A Separate Peace by John Knowles, which everyone knows is one of my favorite and most-referenced books of all time.

What do you think about the reader-created list? I'm tempted to make my own list of top ten not-just-classics that every person should read, so maybe I'll ruminate on that and get back to you with it.

Visual Arts Aren't Just Digital

Considering I was just posting about reading and writing and about Jonathan Safran Foer, check out this video about his newest book, "Tree of Codes," which is actually a story literally formed by cutting out sections from Bruno Shulz' "Street of Crocodiles."

Active Reading

I interviewed Tim O'Brien for an article I wrote sometime earlier this year. Most famously, he wrote "The Things they Carried," the story of a group of army grunts in Vietnam. I've read every single book he's ever written, and he's always been my favorite writer. So of course, when I interviewed him, I had to ask him about writing, and he told me to always "read like a writer," asking myself why I liked something, and how it moved me.

I just finished reading "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer. What started as an affinity for the movie "Everything is Illuminated" (mostly because Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hutz had a leading role), has developed into a deep respect and admiration for Safran Foer, both as a writer and as a reader. 

As a writer, I've been paying attention to the way he manipulates style to get across the voice and tone of his character. I want to try and develop my own style and voice in my own works. It makes me want to write more. As a reader, I appreciate the always-moving, ever-developing story and the way it drew me in and didn't let me go until I had finished the entire novel, almost without realizing it.

Tim O'Brien will always be my favorite author, but Jonathan Safran Foer definitely comes close, and I highly recommend reading his books. Find your own way to read it, whether it's as a reader, as a writer, or as something else, something that only you can define. 

"What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls?" 

- Jonathan Safran Foer, "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close", page 1.