Books I Love (an incomplete list)
I read a lot. Friends frequently ask me for book recommendations. So I’ve started pinning the covers of books I love to a board. My reading taste is catholic (lower case C); I like a lot of different kinds of books, as long as those books work on their terms. I will admit that I am particularly partial to first person narrators, to voice-driven fiction, to irony, and to great sentences. (To me, writing is like music, and I appreciate sentences that sound good, that have rhythm, that surprise me.) I hate purple prose and ponderous writing, but I do love meditative, essay-istic fiction (Sebald, for example), stories of expats, and anything that is smart and insightful, about either culture or human nature or both. I love short stories and novels and poems. I love biographies and narrative non-fiction. I love essays. I’m a sucker for mysteries and spy thrillers. I love sad books and funny books. I’ll read almost anything as long as it’s good.
