Off the nightstand, back up on the shelves.
James Frey, A Million Little Pieces. Yes, but only barely, and not for the reasons I would have imagined. Most of the conversation about this book has only reminded us that the standard approach to memoir remains naive.
Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot. Yes.
Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. Most Absolutely Yes. A memoir about which we ought to talk.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. An unsettled yes.
Linda Greenlaw, The Hungry Ocean. Yes.
Don Delillo, Libra. Whatever.
Posted by dave at March 6, 2006 7:28 PM | TrackBackThis is a bit late, but I actually liked Libra quite a bit, but that may have been due to the novel's relationship to JFK and other riffs on the Oswald story.
Posted by: Chuck at March 17, 2006 10:42 AM | Permalink to CommentI was definitely too flip about Libra, here (probably a consequence of how much I liked the rest of these books). I was taken with the way it asks questions about reading history (the guy hired to write a futile record of the assassination) and with what felt like a serial-style intersection of biographies (Oswald, the Bay of Pigs veterans, Ruby, et al).
I kept snickering, though, every time that character repeated Jack Gladney's metafictional truism about all plots tending deathward.
Posted by: dave at March 17, 2006 7:18 PM | Permalink to Comment