Small-Press-Club

I read this for my small press book club. I am not sure why I stuck with it. On page 11, we have this sentence: Sylvia, our mother, reminded Henry daily, such was the routine of marriage, about fixing the ladder daily and went about partitioning the attic space, figuring if they were to have children, they would need a place to store them. I know it is snobby of me to take issue with the writing, and I know there are better things I could do with my time than critique a published author. But, really, where was the editor? My emphasis in the above highlights just one problem, a strange repetition that doesn’t make sense. There is also too much going on in the sentence. 39 words! That’s 15% of the Gettysburg Address! Too long. I also think it’s trite. The same-word-in-one-sentence problem didn’t recur often enough for me to notice, but overlong sentences full of overdone triteness became the standard. ...

I think this is my favorite book I’ve read in a book club. I am afraid to share what I love so much about it. But I see myself in this book in a way I never have so completely. Not all of Leda is me, but so much is that it felt fragile and scary to read at times. Sometimes it was a loving familiarity, or even a pleading with him to do something different. My copy is riddled with sticky tabs sometimes two to a page and often every other page so that it looks like the centrepiece of a research project. I have filled the margins with pencil scratchings. I have no idea if I could ever describe my feelings for it. ...

I read this for the small press book club. It’s good! I finished it about 15 minutes from the meeting and so it hasn’t really digested yet. It is 430 pages focusing on, basically, one day in the life of a mother and her tiny baby. This is misleading because there is a great deal of literary history and engagement with ideas of literary writing, time, space, and perception. ...