Some progress on my 2010 reading list: I finished The Living.
I wrote a review over on Goodreads:
This book is beautifully written. The prose is as fine and as lovely as anything I’ve ever read. The book is majestic and magisterial, as formidable as the densely forested lands that the characters strive to master and tame.
And yet, well, put it this way: one character is said to have written a three-hundred page epic poem in which men battle polar bears and pack ice; although the poet is a rank amateur, I wish I could have read his no-doubt-inept poem rather than this finely wrought novel.
I was profoundly unmoved. I barely cared whether the characters lived or died. I had a glimmer of interest in a sort of antisocial, woodsy Nietzschean named Beal Obenchain, but for him as well as for the rest, I felt very little emotion.
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That B&N gift card I got for my birthday is almost spent. I got a little impulsive last night and bought five–count ‘em, five!–books, four of which were in hardcover. I love books in hardcover, and it’s a rare treat to be able to buy a pile of them all at once without a shred of guilt.
Two of the newest five are debut novels by authors I’ve never heard of. Their book jackets did a bang-up job at being book jackets; that is to say, at attracting my attention and getting the book into my hand. I thought I might take a look at the various covers, then, in this special Birthday Edition of Under the Covers.
I’ll start with a cover that I’ve already written about: the cover of Colm Tóibín’s latest novel, Brooklyn.
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For some years now, I’ve thought that I should just skip the whole birthday thing. It stops being fun when you’re about 10, except that on your 21st birthday you get to drink too much–legally!–and make an ass of yourself.* After that, it’s just a cruel reminder that you’re getting older and not necessarily wiser, that you’ll likely never have abs like this guy, and that there’s more hair on your earlobes than on the top of your head.**
Whenever I mention my birthday-skipping scheme, however, Todd reminds me that it would preclude the possibility of gifts, and I invariably withdraw the suggestion. And with good reason, ’cause I usually get some kick-ass stuff.
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