Books
Looks like Star News writer and community guy Ryan Tuck is in the middle of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and a series of posts about recent reads. (May also be reading only books that leap into your consciousness because they’re assigned or because they’re being made into movies or have authors who for one reason or another are making the morning show circuit.)
Now that’s a book! (Re: Road). As I told R., that book makes other books seem like they’re flinching. It is unflinching. Also makes me think of Rilke’s quote (by way of Stephen Mitchell), “For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of a terror we are still just able to endure.” Grippingly abject and true-seeming.
Wow, The Road and Into the Wild back to back. That’s heavy duty, but good on ya mate! Both great reads — one fiction, one fact. I was haunted by the story of Chris McCandless (Into the Wild) since a New Yorker article appeared shortly after his death. I was positively giddy when Krakauer filled in the blanks. I never really considered the young man an idiot or a masochist but rather a guy taking a decidedly different path in life (by the time I read the book I was living overseas and pursuing my own curious path). In many respects, we Americans are closer to lemmings than to the freedom-loving individuals we purport to be, or aspire to but rarely attain. One look at the upcoming presidential primaries speaks volumes. Which candidate will get the highest volume of feel good media coverage to sway voters? Huckabee was a nobody until every newspaper and magazine started chanting his name, cynically calling him a fresh voice, only to have his poll numbers spike.
The Road is just a beast of a book, hard to put down and hard to shake off the brain.
I’m currently reading Brock Clarke’s An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, a comic mystery published by North Carolina’s own Algonquin Books. I was hooked by the opening sentence: “I, Sam Pulsifer, am the man who accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts.” And I recently read that that wacky Algonquin sent out a fake letter to book publishers around the country asking people to burn down Edith Wharton’s home. The publicity worked enough that the cops got involved and Algonquin issued an apology, insisting that the letter was clearly fictitious.