The Grumpy Librarian
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
A recommendation for those lovers of sardonic memoir-ish fiction about the complications of connection.
♥ Loved: Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels
♥ Loved: Teju Cole, Open City
X Hated: Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Recommendation: A series of educated guesses: You eat lunch on a bench in a public park at least once a week. You’ve gotten into at least one argument about how smartphones these days remove you from the Real Life Out There. You have a Kindle, but you only load it with library books. How’d the Grumpy Librarian do? Has she found a new calling, or should she just stick to book recommendations?
Oh, for a lover of sardonic memoir-ish fiction about the complications of connection, the bookstore is your oyster. A nice big doorstopper of a bad time is Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2009), the fictional autobiography of an SS officer recollecting the little bureaucracies of war. Or you could go with The Kindly One’s nonfiction second cousin, Günter Grass’ 2006 memoir Peeling the Onion, an oblique investigation of memory (and also sort of his “surprise, and sorry!” about the SS thing). Or you could go with that Karl Ove Knausgaard fellow everyone’s nattering on about — but you probably own My Struggle already, don’t you? No Updike though: The GL thinks you’ve had quite enough of that sort of thing.
