A Country Boy Can Surmise

There are so many mediocre (or downright bad) books, movies, television, and music that it's sometimes hard to remember that there is so much great art being produced these days. So, a list of things I've enjoyed very much recently. Books Little Bee by Chris Cleave. This is the most powerful book that I've read in a long while. The plot is so intricate and wonderful that I hate to even describe it for fear of giving something away, so I'll describe it as being about a young Nigerian refugee who is living with a British journalist and the way their relationship is formed and how it blooms into a profound friendship. The novel is about much more than that, and opened my eyes to atrocities being committed around the world that I had absolutely no idea about. I loved Little Bee especially because it is that rare thing: a literary page-turner. The language is precise and beautiful and the pages fly by due to the feverish plot-driven pacing. I can't recommend th...

I love books.   I love reading them, but there is even more than that.             Touch. I love how cool the pages are when you first open them in the mornings.   Or how warm the pages are if you’ve left it out in the car for awhile in the summer, like something baked the exact right length of time.   The endpapers and the spine and the little letters that are sometimes imbedded in the cloth, a kind of Braille for book-lovers.               Smell.   The new ones: people talk about a new-car scent all the time, but what I love even more is a new-book scent.   They should make little deodorizers of that aroma to go under one’s car seats.   And the old ones:   they smell like history, and rain, and the skin of all the people who loved them before, and every room wherein they lived.               See.    Yes, of course we see them when we read them, but I love seeing them on the bookshelves, too.   Or lying about, covering every available surface, stacked on the stairs, on the night...

A note: I've named this essay "State of Grace," but these might be its alternate titles: Or, A New Kind of Book Review, Or, I ramble aimlessly for a few pages to try and articulate why I love the work of Marilynne Robinson so much. I finished Home by Marilynne Robinson a couple weeks ago and I'm just now able to talk about it because I've been grieving the fact that I turned the last page. A bit dramatic, I suppose, but then again, how can anyone overstate the way it feels when a book moves you and changes you? There isn't enough hyperbole to do justice to that sensation. And the most amazing thing is that I've felt the same way about each of Robinson's three novels. I was introduced to Robinson's writing late: I was in my early thirties before I ever read Housekeeping . It remains among my favorite books. I've never read another book that captured so accurately what it feels like to be different, to be weird, to be a writer. The book is not a...