This post, friends, is going to be quick and dirty.
I am in the final haul of shitgottagetdone before I leave for a glorious 10-day vacation to Puerto Rico with my parents for Thanksgiving. I am super-psyched, but there is so much to do between now and then, so this will be fast.
After a few…shall we call them “guilty pleasures”…I was in the mood for a book that had a bit more heft to it. Literally.
I’m working my way through Mark Helprin’s 800-page tome Winter’s Tale, which is testing my ability to suspend disbelief, as well as my shoulder strength. But hopefully it will pick up soon – as soon as everything else is off my plate and I have time to just immerse myself. I wish I could say that time were coming on Monday, but alas, I’ll be spending most of the vacation’s free time, completing my last final exam for the semester. I’m hoping to finish that early though, as I want plenty of time to read on the beach.
While Winter’s Tale isn’t my ideal beach reading, it’ll be great for this weekend when I need a break from everything else I’m trying to finish, and for reading on the plane.
Trusted bookseller/blogger/banana candler that she is, Liberty recommends it highly, so that’s enough for me. This book actually has two first lines, both of which are equally enrapturing.
The first is in the page-long prologue:
A great city is nothing more than a portrait of itself, and yet when all is said and done, its arsenals of scenes and images are part of a deeply moving plan.
And the first line of the first chapter:
There was a white horse, on a quiet winter morning when snow covered the streets gently and was not so deep, and the sky was swept with vibrant stars, except in the east, where dawn was beginning in a light blue flood.
Gorgeous, huh?
Also if you missed it this week, I was over at Book Riot talking about this book and the difficulty I have reading seasonally, when my so-called seasonal book – like this one – doesn’t fit my surroundings – like Puerto Rico. Go check it out, and I’d love some input.
I’ll try and post while I’m vacationing, but if I can’t, happy Thanksgiving, American buddies!
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Oh! I do hope you get more into this as things settle down. It is one of my all-time, be-all-end-all favorite books, though I haven’t read it in several years (in large part because of the seasonal/appropriate reading time issue you hint at above). Helprin’s sentences are just so downright lovely, though you are absolutely correct that there is a certain suspension of disbelief required to really become invested in the story.
So, there’s definitely some magical realism going on here, right? Cause I can’t tell sometimes if he’s being metaphorical or magical. The man does know how to write a sentence though.