Despite being an English literature major, I have always had a hard time reading novels. Unless I can devote a solid amount of time to becoming invested in a story, I find myself starting over at the beginning every time I sit down to read a book until I give up (and inevitably blame the book for being of a caliber incapable of winning over my attention).

Since I am back to the 9-5 (who are we kidding? 11 - 9) after graduating, I have fallen into a nightime routine that gives me enough time to get invested (turns out it wasn’t the books after all).

I just finished A Very Long Engagement last night. I hate reviews for lots of reasons. I fear I might say something about the book that is imprecise. I often can’t wrap my mind around precisely why I liked or didn’t like a particular work. In some instances I simply don’t want to deny others the exciting process of discovery that I had.

So this is my review:

The book contained two lines that caused me to stop reading dead in my tracks, filled with a jealousy I can’t remember ever having felt before. And this is officially the first and only book to make me consider learning French so that I could capture any hint of additional beauty that may have been lost in translation.

On a recommendation from Sheila, I recently read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It really captured my imagination. Much of the book is told from the perspective of a 9 year-old New Yorker with an over active imagination:

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”

I absolutely love those last two lines.

A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life
By David Foster Wallace
Ploughshares, Spring 1998

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed very hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one.