Sep 06
18
Time to curl up
I cannot speak to points East and West, but we’ve reached the end of the season in Denver, and none too soon. The unrelenting string of hot and sunny days has a way of making this librarian surly. Now that we’ve hit a stretch of what I can genuinely call autumn weather, it’s time to brew the coffee extra black and sink into some reading that reflects the season.
Over the weekend I started The Exquisite by Laird Hunt, a readable (so far) piece of modernism set in a Manhattan made unfamiliar by the shadowy fallout of 9/11 and Hunt’s ability to make readers doubt anything offered by the author or his characters at face value. Though I am roughly a quarter of the way into the novel, I have already picked up on the circular quality of trick playing Hunt plies on his readers; his characters often make a statement of fact, then contradict themselves rather definitively, only to restate the original statement a few passages later. Is our author unreliable, or merely his characters?
So far, Hunt’s world of mental institutions, dinner parties and natural history museums is an inviting one. Please do not consider this a review, I have not read far enough for the plot to trap me, but I am recommending it because I recall that several of us are fans of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, The Exquisite seems to extend that dialog.
So, what’s made your fall reading list?