The Book That Did Not Want to Be Read

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The remainder of the books touches on her early life in South Africa, a time in which her ANC supporting father was one day arrested and taken away – she wouldn’t see him again for four years. Then there’s a section when, as a teenager living in a North London suburb, she reflects on her time as a rebellious would be writer living ‘in exile’. These anecdotes paint vivid pictures of both time and place, and show something of what her early life must have comprised. I had told the Chinese shop keeper that to become a writer, I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all." Then there's Elwin — a 54-year-old overweight linguistics professor whose wife has just left him. This has left him feeling discarded and sad. In our first scene with Elwin, he hits a deer with his car late at night, and decides to take it home and save the meat (waste not!) — with an assist from his young-20s neighbor Christopher, a Jersey Shore wannabe who is also one of the highlights of this novel. Elwin's father has Alzheimer's and Elwin struggles to comes to terms with the idea that all the memories his father has accumulated over his life are disappearing, like so many Historical Impulse" - Having recently read Damon Galgut's The Promise, I especially appreciate these reminiscences of the first 9 years of Levy's life spent in South Africa, especially the 4+ years during the period her father was a political prisoner. Apartheid, racism, and sexism are more of the things that Levy wishes she doesn't know about. And yet these are the meat of many histories with which societies are grappling.

b) This is supposedly an accurate quote by Winston Churchill, but taken out of context. When somebody commented on his having ended a sentence with a preposition, he reportedly replied using this sentence, making clear that this "rule" makes for a rather incomprehensible sentence.In this interview from the Family Education Network, Dr. Carbo answered the following questions about how you can encourage reading at home. How well are kids reading these days?

It all starts when a child who can’t sleep asks a grown-up for a story. The grown-up says, “Of course I can read you a story!” But as it turns out, the grown-up really shouldn’t have said that. Because the book the child had found to read was a very special book. A book that did not want to be read. To speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish." This speaks to me personally. The real reason for the two-star review is the same reason books and movies like this often fail -- a ridiculous coincidence. The book follows three unconnected narratives. One is a young couple who squats off the grid in Manhattan, scavenging for food and other goods. Another is a man who has become fairly successful building a debt-collection business and now lives with his sullen wife and stepdaughter in an unfinished suburban development. The third is a college professor of linguistics who has ballooned to 340 pounds after his wife left him. They have only geography and themes of waste in common. Despite alternating chapters throughout the book, only two of the characters meet each other. When they do, it is in a rather contrived, unearned, and rather disgusting scene which no one should read while eating. That many of the characters don't get an ending so much as their stories just stop is another problem. Most of them are left with Requiem For A Dream fates, which they don't deserve at all.This book was amiable enough until it reached a scene at Yankee Stadium. The Yanks are playing the Indians, all well and good, except all the Yankees the author writes about are real and the only Indians player is made up. I could live with that because the scene created around the fake Indians player is funny and couldn't happen with any real Indians player. My real problem was that the real Yankees players in the scene -- Derek Jeter, Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui, Jason Giambi -- didn't play together on the Yankeee in the year (2009) this takes place. Sure, it's a small detail, but the reason such tidbits are included in books are to make it real in a time and place. Getting that detail wrong didn't change the book. It just diminished it for me because something like that could have easily been fixed.

JONATHAN MILES is the author of the novels Dear American Airlines and Want Not, both New York Times Notable Books. His latest novel, Anatomy of a Miracle: The True* Story of a Paralyzed Veteran, a Mississippi Convenience Store, a Vatican Investigation, and the Spectacular Perils of Grace, is published by Crown/Hogarth. Overconsumption: “he understood that with more came less. That there was an equilibrium to life, and that with everything you gained you lost something as well, in the same measure, so that whatever further bliss was available to him would have to be paid with equal degrees of pain. He had just one life, not two, meaning more was an illusion, a traitorous chimera.”

Christmas Gifts

Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure- and unhappy too- but never as miserable as the twenty-first- century Neopatriarchy made us feel. It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled. We were to be Strong Modern Women while being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic. If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong. Chaucer, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and all the great writers of early modern English ended their sentences with prepositions, and it wasn't until the mid-1800's that grammarians "invented" this rule to make English fit the rules of Latin, but since English is a Germanic language, not a Romance one, such rules make for very awkward sentences.

The poor grown-up (first me, then my husband) had to use the book as a steering wheel; deal with muddled up words, tiny words, HUGE words, and disappearing words; stop the book flapping away; turn the book, blow on the book; sing; pet a rabbit…and more! I honestly don’t know if my boys were more amused by the shenanigans of the book, or by how silly it made their parents look. They have asked for it again, and again. Also, apparently my husband is better at reading it aloud – probably because of the silly voices he does, and he’s also better at thinking on his feet when you have to improvise and replace the disappearing words. A compulsively readable, deeply human novel that examines our most basic and unquenchable emotion: want. With his critically acclaimed first novel Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles was widely praised as a comic genius “after something bigger” (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times) whose fiction was “not just philosophically but emotionally rewarding” (Richard Russo, New York Times Book Review, front cover). The title of this book is not a joke. This book does not want to be read. Seriously! Not by you. Not by me. Not by anybody! This is the first volume in Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series of memoirs (later followed by “Things I Don’t Want to Know” but before “Real Estate”) this was published in 2013, two years after her Booker shortlisting for “Swimming Home” While I am alert (awake) enough, I think I'll put in my tuppence worth on the "to out of up for" sentence. My feeling is that it is a little too complex for formal writing, where the intonation is absent, but natural enough for casual speaking. My observations/opinions:Levy divides her book into four sections corresponding to 4 motives for writing: political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm. She speaks of herself at 7, 17, 50, speaking of growing in Apartheid South Africa--with her father imprisoned for opposing it--before going to England in her teen years. She writes of the struggle to speak, to find a voice, to publish while raising two children.