Best Fiction Book: Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton
Best Nonfiction Book: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett
Toughest Read: John Burroughs: Naturalist by Elizabeth Burroughs Kelley
Easiest Read: Early Royko by Mike Royko
Number of Books on Loan: 1 (Fast Times at Ridgemont High by Cameron Crowe). Thanks, Kelly!
Number of Books Given as Gifts: 3 (John Burroughs: Naturalist by Elizabeth Burroughs Kelley, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan). Thanks Bryan and Josh!
Number of Books Signed by the Author: 3 (Libra by Don DeLillo, My Life Outside the Ring by Hulk Hogan, Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee)
Book That Was Sitting on the Shelf the Longest: Libra by Don DeLillo, purchased in, I think, 1997, at the Ithaca College Bookstore. Worth the wait, too. It's probably my favorite of the DeLillo books I've read.
Best Paragraph:
"For there is this about men. You can embitter and torment them from birth. You can make them waiters and sailors (like Bob) when they want to be authors. You can make them (as Bob and most of them were made) servants of their passions--weak--timorous--querulous--vain--egotistic--puny and afraid. Then, having made them so, you can trick them and mock them with all the implements of fate--lead them on, as Bob was led on, only to betray them, obsess them with hopeless dreams, punish them with senseless accidents, and harass them with wretched fears. You can buffet them, bait them, enrage them--load upon them all evils and follies in this vale of obstruction and tears. But, even at that, there is yet one thing that you cannot do. You can never make them, under any provocation, say die. And therein lies their acquittal."
from Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton
More revkus to follow (I hope). And I'll check in again when I hit 20.
No comments:
Post a Comment