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03 December 2007

Early Reviews

LibraryThing (What? You don't know about LT? Go here!) has an Early Reviewer program where LT members can opt into a lottery for ARC's. I just received an email indicating that I snagged another one: The Story of Forgetting, by Stefan Merrill Block. It's a debut novel and it sounds interesting from the description of it on the LT web page:

..."[t]hree narratives intertwine to create a story that is by turns funny, smart, introspective, and revelatory....Through the fusion of myth, science, and storytelling, this novel offers a dazzling illumination of the hard-learned truth that only through the loss of what we consider precious can we understand the value of what remains.

I'm looking forward to this and hope I get my copy before my next business trip. An interesting novel is always good to take on a long plane ride, especially in winter when delays are possible.

I'm struck by this in the author's bio on the publisher's (Random House) web page: ...was born in 1982. I expect that he is an awesome writer if he has a first novel published at age 25. I won't hold it against him that I have shoes older than that. A bit humbling, actually, considering that it sometimes takes me an hour or more to write a simple blog post, and the various short stories & other writing ideas I have seem to develop at a glacial speed. To be clear: that's the speed glaciers have moved over the past centuries, not the speed that global climate change is causing them to melt.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, ah, glacial speed... I'll use that expression! I find myself a little prejudiced against very young writers, but it's stupid from me. I look forward to your review of the book!

Anne Camille said...

I understand the prejudice. In fact, I wonder if I haven't been a little prejudiced by knowing that this author is so young, wondering how someone 25 can really know about loss. But, then I think about all sort of painful loses that people I know have incurred before that age and realize that it is biased to assume that there is some magic age where this understanding occurs. And, of course, there is not. I admire anyone with the courage and determiniation to complete a novel & to persist in getting it published -- whether that happens rapidly or not.

glacial speed is my favorite oxymoron. I wouldn't claim that I coined this, although I have never heard anyone else use this. I used to use this in a job I had several years ago where one person would persist in asking me to 'fix' the computer so that it went at galactic speed (I think he meant the Star Trek "warp speed", and I would mockingly tell him that we could only do galacial speed.