Welcome to the first of many book review columns, exclusively on X RETICENT REVIEWS, a website your humble narrator is sure you managed to stumble upon through sheer accident (or you happen to personally know one of the writers). But since you’re here, please sit back in your chair and allow your humble narrator to explain why a book reviewer was added to the already exceptional staff at this website, and what I will be attempting to do with this column.
First off, yes, I am indeed quite the book nerd. Ever since I picked up a worn out copy of Tales of a Fourth grade Nothing by Judy Blume from my Catholic school’s library in the third grade, I was hooked on the power of words to tell stories. From there, I devoured more books and little by little, the fiction section of the library at said Catholic school became obsolete (the selection being pretty slim considering it was a CATHOLIC SCHOOL). What is an emerging book nerd to do when no more books can be read? Turn to video games? Watch more Charles in Charge reruns? Dare he… play outside? The horrors!!
No, what I did was discover that timeless bastion of knowledge, the town public library. For free, one could have access to the entire world! A wealth of knowledge readily accessible to a young mind! Of course, I went straight to the fiction section and discovered books like The Outsiders and Hatchet. Soon I was to discover the one man that would alter his life forever….Stephen King.
Sure, after graduating from Penn State University with a degree in journalism and a minor in English, I learned to appreciate, and even love, writers like Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the list goes on and on, but one never forgets their first love. Stephen King was my first love. Which brings us full circle to the quote that led off this brief (long) introductory column.
What I believe is that fiction is a way to expose truths through lying. Yes, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby never existed, but that doesn’t mean that capitalism isn’t flawed and money can buy happiness. An old man probably never went out on a small boat off the coast of Cuba, hooked the greatest marlin in history, simply to watch sharks devour his prize catch as he sailed back to shore, but many a man have grasped their dreams just to see them whither away by forces out of their control. That’s what I think Mr. King was talking about truth being inside the lie.
So what books will I be reviewing for you, the grand readership of xreticentreviews? I will try to review books that aren’t commonplace in the literary canon, but feel they deserve to be. Current literary fiction combined with some popular fiction and some non-fiction thrown in. Authors like Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Lethem. These are names that some of you may have heard of, but haven’t dared pick their work up yet. I hope to help you in that respect.
This is the inherently hard part of being a devoted reader. Movies are a different beast because they are more mainstream, therefore much more accessible to reviews. One can go to rottentomatoes.com or rogerebert.com to get a feel if a movie might be worth their $9, but what about books? I can spend 3 hours in a book store and leave empty handed because I couldn’t decide. Why couldn’t I? I didn’t have a guide. I hope that I can be some sort of guide for you.
So sit back and I hope I don’t bore you to death. This looks to be a bi-weekly column. For the first months, I’ll be reviewing books that I have read in the past two years, so expect a lot of four star reviews. Once I start getting into the books I am currently reading, expect to see a more balanced review list. So two weeks from today, the review will be Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
