Few scenes in any book have stayed with me in the way the "knife in the ground" scene in The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk

IYKYK

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"If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."

Pynchon is a writer for the moment

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When I travel, I like to take a book short enough that I can start and finish it on the trip. That way, when I think of that book later I also think of the trip...and vice versa.

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The General in his Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez is one of his best lesser known works. I think it reads very well now in the era of anti-hero prestige TV. A masterclass as always in building an intricate world with no wasted time

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I think Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is his most readable book. Maybe his best. It's also his longest. The crying of lot 49 is his least readable, maybe his worst, and it's his shortest. It's an odd inversion that highlights how conflating length with difficulty is bad.

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Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel is the literary equivalent of a cool cover of a classic song. Take an overtold story and sing it in a new style and it becomes something familiar but with new life.

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I think Willa Cather should be more widely read and celebrated as an American Great. Her stuff is so so so good. She is to the midwest what Faulkner is to Mississippi IMO

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Don't get me wrong Cormac McCarthy was a master of his craft. But the one time he attempts to write a woman, he makes her an irresistibly sexy schizophrenic math genius in love with her brother?! Stella Maris should not have seen the light of day IMO. The Passenger was OK.

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Often fractured narratives either get the short term or the long term payoff right but not both. I like The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño because its scenes are compelling, the language straightforward, the characters interesting AND it all sits together well.

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