Announcing in this quasi public space my reading goals and delays seems to have aided me in picking back up with my reading. I finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.
Foer’s book is a work of art. I enjoyed seeing the world through the narrator’s perceptive and innocent eyes, and loved the idea that even a city as huge as NYC can be a community, to be “the village” it takes to help the narrator and his family deal with grief. I wrote before that his book offers so many examples of what Donald Maas recommends to create an emotional impact on the reader. A moment that especially affected me was when the boy asked a stranger to tell him everything he could remember about his father, even though the two men hardly knew each other. He longs to reconnect with his father even in this small way, the glimpses of what another person noticed.
I’ll share some notes soon on the other book I finished, The Fifth Risk. Now I need to decide which of the endless list of books I should read I will decide to read next. It’s a good problem to have.
reader. writer. 