The Last Book I Loved: Turtle Diary
The tempting line of thinking for lonely people is that if only there were somebody who’d understand, we could somehow be less alone.
Last Book I Loved
287 posts
Charlotte Freeman: The Last Book I Loved, The Death of the Heart
Was it the last book I loved, or just one of the ones I come back to again and again, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart? This winter, once…
The Last Book I Loved: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Aimee Bender is nothing if not a master of alluring premises. She’s made a name for herself as a virtuoso of “magical realism,” but this distinction doesn’t quite capture her…
Art Edwards: The Last Book I Loved, Infinite Jest
I bought Infinite Jest in April of 2010 because we needed a book to press flowers. My wife and I were in Austin, Texas, and we were off to the park…
The Last Book I Loved: Smonk
The last book I loved has a character with the same name as me. In Tom Franklin’s Smonk, a section titled “The Tale of Snowden Wright” describes its titular character, a…
The Last Book I Loved: The Children’s Hospital
While reading The Children’s Hospital I could not sleep. When I did, the sleep was strange, extra-charged, heavy. After I finished, I started telling everyone to read it. I did…
Mary Pacifico Curtis: The Last Book I Loved, Tender at the Bone
The title of this book, Tender at the Bone, is quite brilliant. As the chef’s description of a roast that is perfectly cooked, it gets to the junction of a memoir…
The Last Book I Loved: Arctic Dreams
A few years back, when I was deciding between graduate school in history or anthropology, a tenured professor at one of the top-ranked anthropology programs explained to me over coffee…
Wendy Breuer: The Last Book I Loved, Everything Flows
Russian journalist and novelist, Vasily Grossman, is the most humanist of writers. I found my way to him through his brilliant epic of WWII, Life and Fate. I didn’t want…
John Knight: The Last Book I Loved, The Best of Roald Dahl
There are too many good writers for me to keep track of so, mostly for the sake of convenience, I categorize them: Koontz writes thrillers, Franzen does literature, King fills…
Gabriela Iztner: The Last Book I Loved, The History of Love
The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss, is a book within a book within a book. Like a matryoshka doll set, when you think you discover what the book is…
Mary Pacifico Curtis: The Last Book I Loved, Grief
Andrew Holleran’s Grief is a beautifully written book that fulfills what one liner note promises, perhaps delivering the fictional version of what Joan Didion before him did in her non-fiction Year of…