Last Book I Loved
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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.
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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 again, it was necessary somehow to go back to this…
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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 real talent. Her ideas, the divergences from our own reality…
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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 to find flowers for an art project she was doing.…
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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 preacher whose mental deterioration eventually leads him to rape his…
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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 this zealously. I wrapped my copy in blue paper and…
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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 told by an author who is renowned for her expertise…
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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 the difference between the two disciplines: “When historians reach the…
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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 my conversation with him to end, so I continued on…
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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 the world with horror, Snickett delights children. The problem is…
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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 really about, you find this other smaller book inside the…
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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 Magical Thinking. I not only harkened back to Didion, but given…