Sunday, March 06, 2016

Take your chances, and make your picks …

… Detectives on the Shelves: 50 Favorite Crime Novels.

Real readers are a more various lot than many think. The act of reading is an intensely personal matter. Think of all the times you have watched a movie based on a book you loved, and were disappointed, because you had imagined it all differently. I tend to order my life around certain intrusive moments that prompt me to see things suddenly very clearly. So when I read in Nostromo how "a rowboat emerged into a recrudescence of obscurity," I experienced that as a snapshot of some episode in my life. That gave me the chance to see what my life had thus far amounted to. I knew then wherein the value of literature lay — and maybe told the truth.

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