There's a Road to Everywhere . . .

Though one is an account of aspiration and scuffling in Manhattan in the year leading up to the 9/11 attacks (Charles filled a cubicle in the WTC and his account of the day is startling and fresh), and the other is a (quirky, personal) consideration and history of a great band’s neglected masterpiece, the two books actually interlock and engage with each other in a number of interesting ways.

Read the full piece for recommendations by Jennifer Egan, Emma Donoghue, and others.

[A] potent, touching, slow burn of a memoir … Charles has in his back pocket one of the world’s most apocalyptic recent events to tie up his story lines, and it is to the book’s credit that, despite it being almost a decade since September 11, the events are described with both jarring emotional effect and remarkable constraint … From the first loud boom and floor tremble, it’s hard to stop reading.

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So hard to read this book, knowing each sentence propels you forward on an inexorable march toward the tragedy we know is coming, and that the nature of this trauma is both shared and specific; it makes this memoir disarming, and totally captivating. When I say “hard to read” I mean it’s the kind of difficulty, indeed a visceral reading experience, I would take over its opposite any day.

Grace wrote one of the best books not just of the year but of the last ten. Buy her book, and then read her full list of favorites.

… Ostensibly about September 11, but really a kind of contemporary kunstleroman, about becoming a writer in the rather toxic contemporary literary climate.

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Five posts covering a range of issues, literary and otherwise, posted each weekday, December 6 - 10, 2010.

Read them here.