Friday, November 17, 2006

Book club, November reminder

Just 10 days left to pick up and read your copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay so you can dazzle everyone with your insights (and also explain to me all the parts I didn't get). Here's a little teaser that I think isn't too much of a spoiler:

As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing--common enough among the inventors of heroes--to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only how to fake.

That's to get you to go read it. Discuss on November 27!

4 comments:

B.G. Christensen said...

Argh! Stop reading books I want to read!

Samantha said...

-L-: You can say what you want about getting a complex, but you are The Great -L-. Thank you. It's really helpful to know I'm not alone.

Anonymous said...

I finished the book! Wonderful story! Everyone should read it! Yes, I know I am shouting it, but I liked it that much! :)

Loyalist (with defects) said...

I finished as well. I cant say that the end left me satisfied, but I did like the read.