April 28, 2006

Luck

I’m now reading Luck by Joan Barfoot, which is absolutely good and I recommend it. The narrative voice is quite an extraordinary achievement, the most sarcastic and amusing fly on the wall that I’ve ever come across. And this is significant, because I heard Joan Barfoot read from this book in January. She started with the first chapter, and so of course when I started the book, her voice came back to me. And throughout the book, this marvelous narrator has been speaking in that voice and it’s sort of eerie to hear it in my head. And so anyway, I’ve been pondering lately the attraction of readings at all. I do believe that reading is an ideally solitary pursuit and that public readings are part of a recent drive to institutionalize reading. Which isn’t necessarily bad, but is admittedly strange. But then again you get an author whispering in your ear after the fact, and there’s something a bit delicious about that.