The New York Times Book Review - Nicholas Dames
What Orner ponders is the oscillation between reading and living, concentrating on the moment when we look up from the page. Reading takes its color, for Orner, from the ways it is aerated by those interruptions. As a result, this record of his reading life is a fractured memoir…Too irresponsible to be literary criticism, and too irregular to be autobiography, Orner's book…is instead an entrancing attempt to catch what falls between those genres: the irreducibly personal, messy, even embarrassing ways reading and living bleed into each other, which neither literary criticism nor autobiography ever quite acknowledges.
Publishers Weekly
08/22/2016
Orner, a distinguished fiction writer (Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge), appears here as a devoted book lover, inviting the reader to an intimate and friendly book group of two. Closely scrutinizing individual stories, he illuminates writers as canonical as Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol, as well-known as Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow, and as far-flung as Álvaro Mutis and Yasunari Kawabata. Eudora Welty gets an eye-opening reading, not as “anybody’s favorite auntie” but as a “badass” writer. The heart of this book is with short-story writers, including, among 21 of them, Gina Berriault, Wright Morris, Breece D’J Pancake, William Trevor, and Robert Walser. Orner’s recollections of reading are always situated in a specific place and moment; in Albania or Haiti, South Carolina or Wisconsin; while he’s searching his book-overstuffed garage for a particular work, or waiting for a traffic light to change; at the hospital where his grandmother dies, or reflecting on the death of his father (for whom this book is very much a memorial). Orner is a pleasure to read, and to read with. Readers will be delighted to join him, grab one of the stories he delves into, and enjoy his company. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in Criticism
"An entrancing attempt to catch what falls between those genres: the irreducibly personal, messy, even embarrassing ways reading and living bleed into each other, which neither literary criticism nor autobiography ever quite acknowledge.” —Nicholas Dames, The New York Times Book Review
“The underlying force of the book is the desire to recover the 'weight of what's vanished' and fiction's alchemical ability to do so.” —The New Yorker
"Orner has excellent taste: The subjects of his rhapsodic appreciations range from Eudora Welty to Lyonel Trouillot, and his love for the written word is palpable." —The Washington Post
"The most beautiful, moving book I’ve read in a very long time, and I’ll use any opportunity to mention it . . . I encourage anyone who loves reading, I mean who truly loves reading, to immediately go to a bookshop and demand a copy.” —Alexander Maksik, The Huffington Post
"Sometimes it's hard to buy a book for a book nerd, because you don't know what they haven't read yet. But any book-lover will be enthralled by this spirited exploration of life as a reader." —Melissa Ragsdale, Bustle
"Made me want to close myself in a dusty bookstore for a few months to read until my eyes burn and my soul is washed clean of the trivial. Alone there, yes. But with all the world before me." —Leilani Clark, The Spine, KQED Arts
"Orner, a distinguished fiction writer, appears here as a devoted book lover, inviting the reader to an intimate and friendly book group of two . . . Readers will be delighted to join him, grab one of the stories he delves into, and enjoy his company." —Publishers Weekly
"Book lovers will devour these genuine, personal tales about literature and reading." —Kirkus Reviews
"This book, thank god, defies any category. It's partly an ode to reading, partly a memoir of Chicago and family, partly a travelogue, and often it's all of these things in one four-page essay. Orner reads Cheever in Albania, thinks about Salinger in Haiti, salutes his father from a taqueria in San Francisco. Although some will want to dive in randomly and skip around, reading these exquisite essays in order allows the book to develop a momentum and cumulative power that sneaks up on you and knocks you back.” —Dave Eggers
"Brisk, beautiful essays about reading, and (as a bonus) it's also a wry, self-examining memoir of being a child, a partner, and a parent. It will remind you of important books you've forgotten and make you want to read ones you haven't, and it really will make you feel less alone." —Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
Kirkus Reviews
2016-08-21
A collection of literary tapas.Novelist and short story writer Orner (Creative Writing/San Francisco State Univ.; Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, 2013, etc.) combines short, reflective essays about literature with personal memories. The pieces (some previously published) are literary hybrids, and the book becomes a series of “unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir.” The big names (Kafka, Chekhov, Melville, Cheever, Bellow, etc.) are well-represented, but so too are those outside of the canon—e.g., Lyonel Trouillot, Álvaro Mutis, Bohumil Hrabal and his “lightning strike of a novel,” Too Loud a Solitude. In the first piece, ostensibly about how Orner likes to read, reflect, look around, and just listen at San Francisco’s General Hospital’s cafeteria, the author transitions to Chekhov’s “tender and sorrowful” story “The Bishop,” which he admires for how the author (a doctor) lovingly employs details. He ends thinking about his dead grandmother. In a cabin in Bolinas, California, Orner thinks about his dead father and reads Breece D’J Pancake’s story “First Day of Winter,” which “gets [him] every time. The way a story about characters, nonexistent people, pushes us back to our own.” Orner confesses that John Edgar Wideman’s story “Welcome” is the “saddest story” he has ever read “by a wide margin.” Again, thinking about his father, he asks, what is the best Father’s Day novel? “Hands down The Brothers Karamazov.” But Bernard Malamud’s “My Son the Murderer” is the best story. While it takes Dostoevsky 700 pages “to get to the bottom of fathers and sons,” Malamud “can name that tune in under 8.” At 22, he accidentally fell out of a canoe but saved the book he was reading—the indelible and “generous” To the Lighthouse—and then anxiously waited for it to dry in the sun so he could finish it. Book lovers will devour these genuine, personal tales about literature and reading. Refreshing, finely turned gems of wit and wisdom from an author who has asked his family to bury him with a “decent library.
