I stumbled onto this book because I was chatting up an acquaintance and I mentioned I was into hard-boiled mysteries. He said, “Oh, you might like The New York Trilogy“. In retrospect, that’s like saying, “Oh, you like the show Friends? You might also like the movie Requiem for a Dream. It also has stuff about friends and family dynamics!” This is…different than what I had in mind. The only other way to talk about this book is to talk about talking about this book. […]
There is no escape from this. Either you do or you don’t. And if you do, you can’t be sure of doing it the next time. And if you don’t, you never will again.
I don’t know if you’ve read much Paul Auster. I have read a few of his….namely the one I most remember is Brooklyn Follies, which is a perfectly good book about a bookshop owner in a Brooklyn neighborhood dealing with the changing face of the city etc etc. It was nice, if sentimental. So, this one is definitely NOT sentimental. This is a set of diary entries written by a woman named Anna Blume living in an unnamed city in a unnamed future where an […]
You’ll want to take notes
This was one of the longest books I have read in a while, and it can be a bit of a slog. The writing twist does help to keep things fresh but overall the book is a beating because it just never ends. 800+ pages on this bad boy and you feel every one of them. Paul Auster uses these way too many pages to tell the story of young Archie Ferguson growing up in the 1960s, and he tells it four different times in […]
Earth below us, drifting, falling
I had yet to read any Paul Auster when I saw 4 3 2 1 on the 2017 Man Booker shortlist, and I didn’t jump on it right away, mostly because of its sheer size, this brick of a book at 1,070 pages. I don’t read a lot of long books because I’m not a fast reader and can be easily distracted, so I figured this was a pass, but then I read a synopsis and found myself intrigued by the structural conceit of telling […]