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March 19, 2003
Springtime and books
All y'all who left Austin last week at the end of SXSW missed the real start of Texas Springtime. All the trees are blooming, it's 70 degrees and gorgeous today. Almost makes an unemployed boy feel optimistic.
Speaking of unemployment, I've been happy to have had time over the last year (sob) to spend more time reading fiction. Here are three books that I reccommend. I'm totally late to the party with all three of these, but they are all great.
Everyone in Berlin was reading this, and I picked it up when we flew home: The Corrections. It's terrific, bleak, and an amazing feat of writing. I'm a sucker for writers who are able to effortlessly turn a virtuoso phrase, and Franzen seems incapable of not doing it. I was saying wow on almost all of the 600 pages, and was stealing five-minute periods whenever I could to read just a couple more pages.
My friend David just loaned meThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay another popular one that I hadn't heard of. It's quite a "boy" book with its themes of comics, magic, and escape artists. A fictional account of two guys who help establish comic books as a legitimate creative thing in 1940's New York. Surely no one will ever write as gripping a novel of creativity, heroism, and love about the early days of the web. ("He realized that an invisible one-pixel .gif could be stretched in table cells, allowing him new possibilities in HTML layout. Soon he was able to mimic print layouts more accurately. He turned back to his monitor for another four hours of deeply nested table tags." No thanks.)
Middlesex is a historical novel of a different stripe, one that explores the life of a young hermaphrodite growing up in Detroit. I enjoyed this one a lot, but not as much as the other two in this post.
Posted by Andrew at March 19, 2003 11:33 AM
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I miss talking about books with you and Heather. Still, we seem to be a bit on the same wavelength -- I have read or mean to read almost all of the books you list here (but that's probably left from the last conversations).
Posted by: Libby at October 19, 2003 03:22 PM