People go to bars for different reasons: you have those who truly like bars. And you have those with other intentions in mind. The latter, by the way, are now better served by the online dating services that inundate the web these days. If you fall within the first category, there is no doubt this is your book. If you are kind of on the fence, this book may help dissipate your hesitations. But if you, sorry my friend, don’t feel particularly attached to bars, you’d probably be better off reading about the reproduction of mammals in the African savanna.
Work, family, movies and miles of running. Work, friends, shows and gallons of craft beer. Work, travels, parties and a tones of wasted time online. In half a year there is room for plenty of things and probably not enough for all those goals you had in mind for the New Year. Although, when you leave January behind, does this really matter?
In this world of incessant breaking news, emails, texts and notifications of every kind it is hard to believe that the passing of E L Doctorow could draw much attention to his figure. Let alone to his books. We shouldn’t fool ourselves.
Some of us in the WD family were in Madrid during the Feria del Libro (the World biggest Book Fair in Spanish) and lived, ate, drank and mainly talked literature for a couple of days. Paraphrasing the old ads of a popular beer, we say: books are good for you. And for everybody. Here is why.
Nobody with a minimum amount of common sense would ever consider neither one of these books Ablutions (Patrick DeWitt, 2009) and Love Me Back (Merritt Tierce, 2014) as inspirational. On the other hand, what anybody can easily see is that when it comes to writing fiction, these two know pretty damn well what they are doing. In fact, it is really hard to believe that we are talking about a couple of debut novels.
John Williams, an English Academic at the University of Denver, wrote “Stoner” in 1963. In a conversation with his agent in which she gave him little hope of commercial success, the author answered her with this words: “The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s a good novel; in time it may even be thought of as a substantially good one.” Time proved him right.
Once there was a kid in a remote provincial town in a forgotten corner of Spain, which on its own, was a forgotten country at the time. And the kid came across with a book and read its first line “Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice.”
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