Literary Fiction
Fat City by Leonard Gardner
★★★☆☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
What a depressing, sad, miserable book. I read this for the literary reviews and the focus on boxing, but wow. I had a hard time getting through this short book. The pointless dialogue that would go on for pages between Tully and his girlfriend was grating (I suppose it was meant to be). The whole book was a misery.
Highlights
Pigeons the color of the street pecked in the gutters, flew between buildings, marched along ledges and cooed on Tully’s sill. His room was high and narrow. Smudges from oily heads darkened the wallpaper between the metal rods of his bed. His shade was tattered, his light bulb dim, and his neighbors all seemed to have lung trouble.
…The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
An interesting way to write about the atrocities of war and the holocaust — from the perspective of Death.
We follow the story of little Liesel whose five-year-old brother dies on a train in the opening pages, only to be dumped off herself at a foster home by her poor, sick mother. We expect mistreatment, but her foster parents are kind hearted saints who hide a Jew in their basement and suffer through the consequences of doing that. Lots of side stories that support a message that humans in power are mostly awful, and bravery is rare and endearing, and usually punished harshly.
Death as narrator provided an omniscient narrator with an attitude and a heart. The book ends with this haunting quote:
…“I am haunted by humans.”
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I didn’t expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. This one touched me. Ove felt very real to me. Backman has a gift.
Highlights
People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.
She loved only abstract things like music and books and strange words. Ove was a man entirely filled with tangible things. He liked screwdrivers and oil filters. He went through life with his hands firmly shoved into his pockets. She danced.
…So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
★★★☆☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Highlights
Where a hardier boy would have run away from home or got in trouble with the police, I sat with my nose in a book so I wouldn’t have to think about things I didn’t like and couldn’t prevent happening.
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.