Garth Risk Hallberg, contributing editor for The Millions and author of A Field Guide to the North American Family. Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves. Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams. John Darnielle, vocalist for the band the Mountain Goats and author of Wolf in White Van. Isaac Fitzgerald, editor of BuzzFeed Books and co-founder of Pen & Ink.Įmily Gould, co-owner of Emily Books, author of Friendship. Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Stephen Dodson, co-author of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit, proprietor of Languagehat.Īnthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See.
#INFERNO DAN BROWN MANILA SERIES#
You can bookmark this post and follow the series from here, or load up the main page for more new Year in Reading posts appearing at the top every day, or you can subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Facebook or Twitter and read the series that way. We hope you find in them seeds that will help make your year in reading in 2015 a fruitful one.Īs in prior years, the names of our 2014 “Year in Reading” contributors will be unveiled one at a time throughout the month as we publish their contributions. Grouped together, these ruminations, cheers, squibs, and essays will be a chronicle of reading and good books from every era. It always feels like we’ve hit the jackpot when we can offer up dozens of these great memories and experiences, one after another, to close out the year.Īnd so now, as we kick off another Year in Reading, please enjoy these riches from some of our favorite writers and thinkers.įor our esteemed guests, the charge was to name, from all the books they read this year, the one(s) that meant the most to them, regardless of publication date. For the reader, being caught in the sweep of a book may be one of a year’s best memories. Instead, I asked some friends to write about the best books they read that year and was struck when each one seemed to offer up not just an accounting of books read, but glimpses into transporting and revelatory experiences. It also occurred to me that a “best of” list would not have been true to the reading I did that year. Realizing I had spent much of that year with my nose in books that were two, 20 or 200 years old, I was wary of attempting to compile a list of the year’s best books that could have any hope of feeling legitimate. This series was first conceived in 2004 as a way to get a fledgling website about books through a busy holiday season. Recently I passed the book to another friend, who will add her marginal notes, and then I will pass it to someone else, and then someone else, and on and on until eventually we have written more words in Dan Brown’s book than Dan Brown himself. This seems like the only way to tame the monster at the heart of the Inferno. We spent most of our time in the margins making fun of Dan Brown.Īnd probably the worst “academic” lecture in the history of fiction.Īlong the way, we managed to isolate the keywords of the Dan Brown lexicon. Sometimes I would miss one and David would catch it for me. They make their first appearance on the dedication page.Īfter a while I started trying to circle all of them, which became a meditative exercise. Basically, ellipses are the hero of the book.
Very early in Inferno, I realized that Dan Brown’s career-long fetish for ellipses had reached a whole new level.
WARNING: There are probably Dan Brown spoilers here, but come on, seriously. Usually we agreed, but occasionally we disagreed. David wrote in red pencil, in block letters. It was fun to see someone else’s words next to mine. When I finished, my friend David Rees, the artisanal pencil sharpener, asked if he could borrow it. I purchased and read Inferno, which was inscrutable and interminable, and as I read I scribbled in its margins. Why does he write the way he does? Is he a sneaky genius? How is it possible that he was once in a writing seminar with David Foster Wallace? (One of my dreams is to write a hit Broadway musical about that seminar, in which Dan Brown strides around the stage wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches singing bombastic anthems about the great masterpieces of Europe while DFW sings introverted atonal fugues with mumbling sotto voce footnotes.) Like most writerers, I am crazy about Dan Brown. Recently I had a new kind of marginal experience that I would like to share: the pleasure of joint, or (as they say in grad seminars) “dialogic” marginalia. I am on record, both in this magazine and in my local newspaper, as an enthusiastic defacer of books.
0 kommentar(er)
