People always talk about summer reading lists, and to be sure, summer is a great time for reading: beaches, hammocks, soft grass under shady trees. But let’s get real--when it comes to seasonal reading, winter is where it’s at. It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s slushy, and there’s no place I’d rather be than curled up under a blanket, in front of a roaring fire, with a big, fat book. Unfortunately my fireplace isn’t working, but that hasn’t stopped me from reading my brains out the past couple of months. And, not to be a downer, but there are still a couple months of gray skies left, which is why I’m going to tell you what’s gotten me through the season so far.
The Ticking Is The Bomb, by Nick Flynn
This is the second memoir from the poet (the first was Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which merits reading even beyond the fabulous-ness of its title). Much like Suck City, Ticking is structured in fragments, a collection of memories, events, and musings about torture, parenthood, loss, and love. Unlike Suck City, it is loosely focused, the threads connecting the vignettes thin. Still, the prose was engaging, and the pace breakneck. It was all I could do not to read it in one sitting.
In his latest, Auster is in classic form, perhaps too perfectly satisfying the contention of his wearied protagonist: there is far more poetry in the world than justice. Adam Walker, a poetry student at Columbia in the spring of 1967, is Auster’s latest everyman, revealed in four parts through the diary entries of a onetime admirer, the confessions of his once-close friend, the denials of his sister and Walker’s own self-made frame. With crisp, taut prose, Auster pushes the tension and his characters’ peculiar self-awareness to their limits, giving Walker a fractured, knowing quality that doesn’t always hold. The best moments from Walker’s disparate, disturbing coming-of-age come in lush passages detailing Walker’s conflicted, incestuous love life (paramount to his education as a human being, but a violation of his self-made promise to live as an ethical human being). As the plot moves toward a Heart of Darkness–style journey into madness, the limits of Auster’s formalism become more apparent, but this study of a young poet doomed to life as a manifestation of poetry carries startling weight.
I also took a stab at Auster’s “memoir” The Invention of Solitude. The first half was pretty great, but the second half was way too abstract.
And finally, The Bill From My Father, by Bernard Cooper. This memoir was a powerhouse. A compassionate rendering of a complicated father son relationship, Cooper paints a gripping portrait of two men shadowed by loss, struggling to understand how to love one another.
So...what are you reading???
