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…
Last Book I Loved
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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 malaise.”
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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”…