Last Book I Loved
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Ari Messer: The Last Book I Loved, Ablutions
Why is the second person such a natural and addictive tense–perhaps the only honest one–when writing about drug abuse and a foggy recovery? For years, you haven’t been able to stop asking this question. Reading Patrick deWitt’s Ablutions: Notes for…
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The Last Book I Loved: Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes
In the brief preface to his novel, Exley calls his book a work of fiction or fantasy, claiming that the events of the novel only bear a passing similarity to his life, an event he refers to as “that long…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Blind Side
I remember being 18 years old, secretly thinking that all the good writers were dead or past their prime. I wanted to be born in the twenties, where wilderness was untamed and fiction was wide open. I knew there must…
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The Last Book I Loved: Mating
Dealing in questions rather than answers, Mating has a way of making things seem possible for both its characters and its readers—intellectual love included.
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David Breithaupt: The Last Book I Loved, West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief
I generally shy away from books with Jesus in the title. Everyone deserves their own trip, as they used to say in the sixties, and Jesus was never really mine. Not that I dislike Jesus, but I really don’t want to…
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Devon Shepherd: The Last Book I Loved, The Sheltering Sky
I loved this book. Haunting prose. Exotic locale. Existentialist themes. I stayed up much too late to read it, enchanted – entranced even – only to wake up with bags under my eyes and vague memories of desert-sun dreams. The…
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The Last Book I Loved: Sailing Alone Around the World
“Remember, Lord, my ship is small and thy sea is so wide!” – Joshua Slocum, sailing through a storm south of Tierra del Fuego. When Joshua Slocum (author of Sailing Alone Around the World, first published in Great Britain by…
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The Last Book I Loved: Sick City
In classic noir fashion, Sick City opens with a death. Jeffrey, a male prostitute junkie, goes to wake up his lover and sugar daddy (a retired Los Angeles cop with a taste for kinky sex) only to find him dead.…
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The Last Book I Loved: Hopscotch
Would I find Cortazar? But I wasn’t really looking for Cortazar when I read his masterpiece, Hopscotch. I was, I’m sorry to say, looking for myself. And just to make the cliché complete, I was looking for myself while living…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
If you couldn’t tell by the last name of “Cohen,” I am a Jew. And not surprisingly, I find myself with a proclivity for Jewish-American fiction. Maybe it’s because of my religious (perhaps cultural is a better term) background or…
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The Last Book I Loved: The House of Mirth
It’s fitting that I only finally read The House of Mirth, Wharton’s great novel about the decline and fall of a socialite by the name of Lily Bart, around the time I was leaving New York. Given my current state…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Zero
Not in recent memory have I read a book so enthralling, heartbreaking and with such deadpan humor. In what he calls his “9/12” novel, Jess Walter’s The Zero follows “hero cop” Brian Remy, who is trying to make sense of the…