Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews

To be brutally honest, I always look at these lists and brace myself. “Please God,” I say. “Do not let any of these books be by people I went to college with. And if that’s too much to ask, let them not have been in creative writing workshops with me.”

So I held my breath while scanning, and was SO CLOSE TO MAKING IT OUT ALIVE, and then I saw that my college acquaintance Jim Fingal is the co-author on this totally dynamite sounding exploration of facts, and exhaled.

Because, let’s face it, if it’s gonna be someone, it might as well be Jim, who was always an exceptionally nice and interesting person. Congrats, Jim!

Now, for the others. This year in books could have been yanked directly from my pleasure center.

I am tremendously excited about the three big Books By Professionally Jewish Men on this list (Shalom Auslander, Nathan Englander, and Etgar Keret), as they are three of my most favourite favouritest writers. I am excited about the new Marilynne Robinson, the new Alan Bennett, the new Lionel Shriver, the new Rosecrans Baldwin, the new Denis Johnson, the new Hilary Mantel, the new Aleksander Hemon…and the next installment of Robert Caro’s LBJ biography, which can go on my shelf with the previous three volumes, none of which I have actually read, but wasn’t The Power Broker genius? I am even excited for the new John Irving, even though I’ve been on a break from John Irving since about…2001?

It is going to be a wonderful time to be alive and literate, my friends. And, now that the flurry of new-babyness is behind us, I look forward to writing long, rambling, literature-based posts once more.

In the meantime, I will be at the Awl tomorrow doing the latest installment of Classic Trash, and we will be discussing Book One of The Secret Circle. TEEN WITCHES IN LUV ZOMG 4-EVA.