I might say, give the second one a try, as I remember liking that one much better, but don't beat yourself over the head with it.

I might try it then. I'm also wondering if they'd be appropriate to pass on to my voracious reader of a 9-year old niece. She LOVED the HP and Narnia series.

This just in: The Borough I live in sucks, and it's stupid of me to try and seek redemption from my traumatic childhood; that's not how real life works.

[link]

Maybe I'm taking this a little too personally.

What a whiny piece of crap that article is.

Self-righteous sour grapes define their attitude to Gotham.

Wow. Projecting much? Seriously, I'm not a fan of sentimentalism...ism, but he makes happy endings and closure sound like a crime against literature.

The whole thing seems to boil down to "those dirty hippies/bohemians/yuppies/idealists, they wouldn't know an honest day's narrative labor if it hit them in the face!"

In fact, trauma’s never overcome. That’s what defines it.

Says who? It all makes me wonder if maybe he has a point buried under all that, but the bitterness, inferiority complex, and anger buried it before it could see light.

I couldn't get past the first paragraph. Pompous ass-h.

Also, I love Brooklyn. It's one of my most favorite places to visit. so there!

What a whiny piece of crap that article is.

Seconded. Also, Brooklyn? As the center of anything? I think that is called "it would be Manhattan except hey guess what we're not millionaires."

And if it were Manhattan, nobody would say boo to a goose about it.

If I woke up a millionaire tomorrow, I wouldn't move to Manhattan. My lottery fantasies all involve Cobble Hill brownstones.

Also, a couple of (I can only assume wilful) misreadings. From Everything is Illuminated:

Despite the deaths of hundreds or thousands of Jews from this specific location and millions more throughout Eastern Europe, she survives, not merely as an individual, but as a repository of an entire history. Trachimbrod lives.

Yeah, and it's a crazy little old lady, and she gives the protagonist a box, and the box is stolen before he ever finds out what's inside. If Trachimbrod lives, it's not for very much longer, and its meaningfulness is disappearing.

From Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close:

It ends with a flip book of what appear to be photographs that bring a fuzzy figure of a human being who has jumped from the doomed World Trade Center back toward the top of the page. It was all a bad dream.

Aside from the part where the essayist appears to misunderstand the fact that it's a dual narrative, and appears to forget that one of the narrators is a child, he can't differentiate between "dream" and fantasy, which is what the child-narrator has been doing throughout the book. The difference is, by the end of the book, Oskar is clear on the fact that it's a fantasy, and nothing he can do will bring back his dad. They open up the empty coffin, and because they can't bury a body, they bury the papers instead.

The hell of it is, I didn't like either of those books! I find Foer contrived and vaguely cloying. I couldn't even get through Dave Eggers (though I've read his short stories), so I can't even comment about what might be wrong with the analysis of that work. And yet, although I disliked Foer's novels, I can still tell what the point was, and neither of them is about tender, redemptive hoodoo in the manner that this essayist insists. (I'm convinced that they're about tender, redemptive hoodoo in a totally different way, but that's just a worse knock on the analysis, picking wrongheaded examples from texts where better examples are available!)

but beneath the sarcasm lays real disdain

And oh my total god, the essayist is illiterate, too!!

Oh, whew, I wasn't the only one not into the first The Dark is Rising book. I was just meh on it. Maybe I'll also try the second one.

I just finished The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright, which was really great, if totally sad [link] Dare Wright wrote and provided photography for the Lonely Doll books [link] which if I remember correctly came out originally in the late 50s/early 60s. I saw the Lonely Doll book at a comic shop and fell immediately in love with it as it is both cute and creepy, my absolute favorite combination. I then went on Amazon looking for others in the series and found the biography on Dare Wright. The user comments were really intriguing so I picked up the bio. Poor Dare had quite a traumatic, sad, and, yes, lonely life. Really interesting read and very well-written.