The Travel Bug

Even though I've been there, Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul is making me want to pack my bags...

And then you read something...

Happy 2010, everyone. Apologies for the long lag since my last post. I was in a bit of a predicament: I wanted to post, but I was in a reading rut.

First, I went through a series of books that were mind-blowingly inane.

Then, I started 2666, which was fantastic, but I just couldn't finish it. It's a massive tome, and with all of the life changes, I couldn't devote enough time to the novel to truly do it justice.

And then, just when I was giving up hope, a friend lent me Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Have you ever read something that's so incredibly beautiful that it feels like every line is piercing your heart? That you're going to explode from the sheer beauty of the prose? It's been years since I've read something that's moved me so deeply... but it's nearly impossible to excerpt here. There's no one line, no one passage, that jumps out at me: nearly every page had me laughing and thinking. So, with that caveat, here is a sample of how absurdly talented Jonathan Safran Foer is. (By way of explanation, the novel is narrated from the perspective of a nine year old boy.)

"What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet."

And that's just the first page.

Of course, now I find myself in a new predicament: how am I going to read anything in 2010 that tops this novel?