Page by Page

Let the Great World Spin -- and book club meeting tomorrow!

The Page by Page Book Club will meet tomorrow night to discuss Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.

This is the best book I have read all year.

The story concerns several characters in New York City in 1974. At first it isn't clear how one character's story relates to another's but gradually, like a jigsaw puzzle, they all link up together. The novel was written post-9/11 but features the true story of a man who actually walked on a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center one day in 1974. Along the way the book deals with emerging technology, the Nixon administration, the Vietnam War, race relations, but what's at its heart is not the big political stories but the stories of ordinary people living their lives.

McCann creates interesting, complex characters and the story is compelling on a macro scale, but it's also lovely on a sentence-by-sentence level.  To pick a couple of quotes:

"There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water -- it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream."

"It is a smile that contains everything, including a shrug."

The emotion in this book is real and it's very sad in places but never hopeless or cynical. I was struck by this line from the New York Times review: "It is a heartbreaking book, but not a depressing one."

I'll be interested in hearing what others think tomorrow night at the book club, but for myself, I loved this book. Some sections were stronger than others but it seemed such a rich portrait of a city and of individual people living their lives in that city.

Tomorrow night, 7 p.m., George House. Hope to see you there!

Devil in the Details

Over the weekend I read Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood by Jennifer Traig.  It's the memoir of her adolescence growing up with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In particular, she suffers from scruplosity, a disorder in which religious rituals are endlessly repeated (Traig, who is Jewish, became obsessive about properly keeping kosher, for example). Traig also suffered from anorexia.  So this is a grim book in places and it's clear that she did not have a particularly happy adolescence, that her mental illness is rather debilitating, and honestly, it's a kind of harrowing book in places, kind of disturbing. But Traig maintains a sense of humor through it all and there are some very funny passages, too. This is one I would recommend.