book chat
February 1, 2010 JD Salinger
Every year, when I taught THE CATCHER IN THE RYE to my ninth graders, my kids finished it overnight and always said, "I didn't know you could write like this." Salinger was so open, so close to the bone. So conversational. Holden wrote "to" someone he'd never met as if he were talking to someone he'd always known. Holden could tell a secret publicly and it would still be a private secret. He revealed the most profound emotions in the simplest language; in fact, it was more effective to do it like that because then the writer got out of the reader's way. The smallest gestures could reveal all you really needed to know about a character. Humor and pain could exist on the page beside each other, if not inside each other.
January 28, 2010 Top 10 rock'n'roll novels....
In todays Guardian, Tiffany Murray chooses her spot-on top 10 rock'n'roll novels....
Tiffany Murray's first novel Happy Accidents was shortlisted for the Bollinger/Wodehouse prize for comic writing. Diamond Star Halo, her second, was published earlier this month.
Check out her full list, below....
January 26, 2010 Plucking the Poetry
One of my favorite people sadly lives many thousands of miles away in California. Luckily for me, Randy periodically sends me her blog posts from the Laguna Dispatch. This post resonates with all the simple, clear, and authentic wisdom we cherished in Baker's novel:
"Ah the joys of a great book. I’ve read, and reread portions of The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, an ostensibly simple but fantastically complex and profound study of a modern-day poet-procrastinator-socially inept-loner struggling to write an introduction to an anthology of poetry and doing everything else but. It’s of course a love letter to poetry and to the life of the great poets, but also the study of the human psyche, which in the end is all about poetry...
January 15, 2010 Thank You Mr Tanenhaus!
What an evening! Sam Tanenhaus was as engaging and brilliant as we hoped. Thanks to Sam and to all of our LM guests for another great event!
Can't wait for Chris Cleave on Feb 27. See you there!
