"[This] is his first novel. It was written back in the 1980s. I’m a big fan of Geoff Dyer and I’d read most of everything he’d written since then, but not this first novel, which is being reissued by Graywolf, this month I think. And I was just so impressed, A. by how good it was, that Geoff was already writing at that level in his first time out, but B. that it contained in embryo all of his later obsessions that worked their way out in other books, like the book on photography or the book on D.H Lawrence, the travel book. All these little things are contained in the book on jazz that comes into this novel. He hadn’t even thought of writing these books yet and yet they’re there in the characters’ interactions and the way they live their lives." – WL
Light and Dark by Natsume Soseki:
"I had read his masterpiece, Kokoro, because a Japanese literature professor at UC Berkeley had given me a copy. This [professor] was a real proselytizer, and he wanted everyone to read this book. And it was a great book, and I’d never heard of Soseki before, although everyone in Japan has, and then this new one, Light and Dark, came out from Columbia, and I ordered it for myself. Of course it’s not new, it was written in 1915 or whatever, but it’s a really great novel of a sort that you don’t imagine if you are like me and you have a certain narrow-minded view of Japanese literature. You don’t think of it being Dostoyevskian in its emotional reach, and that is what Light and Dark is. And like the other novels of his I’ve read, it’s mainly just a little domestic, intimate portrait of a man and his wife and their relationship and then their relationships with their family members on the side and a few work-related people, but the degree of the intensity of the emotion, is amazing, I think. So he’s a great discovery for me." -WL
Watching You by Michael Robotham:
"Michael Robotham is a mystery writer that I discovered within the last month. I’m always on the search for new mysteries, because I use them up. I mean I read them in a day and they’re done. And if they’re a series, all the better. I can go through the whole batch. I started, unfortunately, with Watching You, which is the most recent one. Because that’s the one that Amazon said, oh you would like this, so I bought it. But it turns out that I should have started with The Suspect. I had to pick a recent book, so I picked Watching You for your readers, but let me tell you readers, don’t start with Watching You, start with The Suspect, which is the first in the series and introduces Joe O’Loughlin. And they’re very good mysteries, they’re well-constructed, and the two main characters, O’Loughlin and his sidekick on the police force, Ruiz, are both great characters." -WL
The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham:
"The Cunningham novel, which I just finished, I loved so much I’m now acquiring copies to give to friends. It’s called The Snow Queen and it has a little excerpt from the Hans Christian Anderson story at the beginning, but it’s really about some people in New York in the period from 2004 to about 2009 who mainly live in Bushwick and are scrabbling on the edge of existence. But deep and important things happen to them: the deaths of friends, their own spoiled love affairs, a very close relationship between brothers. And bits and pieces of Hans Christian Anderson, like the ice fragment in the eye, which is something I’ve always remembered from those stories, reappear, as images in the book but they don’t intrude in a kind of heavy-handed authorial way. Michael Cunningham just slips them in and then has his characters exist as if they were real people. It’s a very moving book, because the people seem absolutely real." -WL
