And we've also got a few books we've raved about in the last few weeks. Like Room, by Emma Donoghue, which was a creepy thriller that I loved:
Jack is proof that a child should not be the first-person narrator of a novel: His realistically childlike digressions and fanciful metaphors—when he pulls a hoodie over his head, the zipper "chews" his face—make for a horrible narrator. The reader can barely tell what's going on at first, and Jack's self-obsession makes it hard for us to get a clear view of the other characters or setting. Remarkably, Donoghue uses these faults to her advantage.
And superstar books intern Anna Minard had lots of good things to say about the could-have-just-been-plain-depressing McSweeney's memoir Half a Life, about how author Darrin Strauss killed a girl in a traffic accident when he was 18:
It seems he's made an unspoken promise to the reader: I will spare neither you nor myself one single second of the awfulness or mundaneness of this thing. Toward the end of the book, Strauss describes a form of therapy meant to help people cope with experiencing—euphemism alert—Complicated Grief Disorder. Sufferers record a tape of themselves reliving and explaining the tragic event, then listen to it over and over. The point is not to torture the pain away, but to create a concrete object that can contain the pain, an object that can be set aside. "I hoped to make this book my tape," he admits.
Find all these books plus many more at Slog Happy tonight.
