I absolutely love
Little, Big by John Crowley
To describe it is difficult for me. Please don't be put off by it sounding twee and a little silly, it really isn't. I love the prose, the characters and the story, mainly the wonderful wonderful story.
I have also loved/love
Lanark by Alaisdair Gray (the previous mention explained why.)
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker - Basically it's a stream of consciousness on what a man thinks about during his lunch hour, but it's fantastic. I love the footnotes. It's also very funny.
On his shoelace (that had broken that morning)
"And then, checking the 1984 volumes of World Textile Abstracts, I read entry 4522:
Methods for evaluating the abrasion resistance and knot slippage strength of shoe laces
Z. Czaplicki Technik Wlokienniczy, 1984, J3 No. l, 3-4 (2 pages). In Polish. Two mechanical devices for testing the
abrasion resistance and knot slippage performance of shoe laces are described and investigated. Polish
standards are discussed. [C] 1984/4522
I let out a small cry and slapped my hand down on the page. The joy I felt may be difficult for some to
understand. Here was a man, Z. Czaplicki, who had to know! He was not going to abandon the problem with some
sigh about complexity and human limitation after a minute's thought, as I had, and go to lunchhe was going to
make the problem his life's work. Don't tell me he received a centralized directive to look into a more durable weave
of shoe-lace for the export market. Oh no! His very own shoelace had snapped one time too many one morning, and
instead of buying a pair of replacement dress laces at the comer farmacja and forgetting about the problem until the
next time, he had constructed a machine and strapped hundreds of shoelaces of all kinds into it, wearing them down
over and over, In a passionate effort to get some subtler idea of the forces at work. And he had gone beyond that
he had built another machine to determine which surface texture of shoelace would best hold its knot, so that
humanity would not have to keep retying its shoelaces all day long and wearing them out before their time. A great
man! I left the library relieved. Progress was being made. Someone was looking into the problem. Mr. Czaplicki, in
Poland, would take it from there."
and
If This Is a Man / The Truce by Primo Levi
Philip Roth called this "One of the century's truly necessary books". I don't love it, can't love it, but my admiration is inestimable. It is truly the most intelligent book about the Holocaust.
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