More on: books

Katie Ford’s collection If You Have to Go was in steady rotation for me. I would finish another book, then go back and reread Ford.

I did read a few books published in the last thirty years. Most of them bored me to tears. A few, however, were so odd or stupid or, here and there, brilliant that I had to take notice. I was not able to dismiss them, as I would probably have preferred to do.

The novel’s decline in importance relative to the memoir and the personal essay may be one of the major literary trends of the past thirty years, but it remains the most important form for me.

I want a little mystery. I don’t want to hear the obvious stated, even if I agree. I want to be awed.

YOU MIGHT BE AT A DISTANCE from your life. As always: an ordinary state, banal. Your body headed straight for the abyss, with the forward momentum of age. And beneath the freshness of blood there is weakness, ashes. Nostalgia: the soul. Sick, yes. Without a doubt: sick. And the real name of that sickness would be…

WRITING FROM HIS SMALL CELL in a German prison, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer advised his family and friends to read the lengthy novel Witiko by Adalbert Stifter—the book that gave him great comfort from the time of his arrest in 1943 until his execution in 1945 for his involvement in the plot to kill Hitler.…

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?         by Dave Eggers (Knopf, 2014) High as the Horses’ Bridles by Scott Cheshire (Henry Holt and Co, 2014)   THE WORLD HAS TURNED SMALL in our hands.…

IT WAS AN ORDINARY autumn night in suburban Chicago when I received the most disturbing book I have ever read. I was seventeen, slouching in my bedroom making a half-hearted attempt at homework, my sweaty cross-country clothes festering on the floor. My father appeared at the doorway and handed me a yellowed paperback that looked…