Books I Go Back To
Reread Season
Hello!
If you’re here because of The End of Romance or The Invisible Years, thank you. If you came to see me on tour for The End of Romance or The Invisible Years, thank you. If you have engaged with those books in no way at all and are simply here for some recommendations, thank you! I live to serve.
One of my greatest treats is rereading books. Life as a critic is not especially reread-friendly, given that I’m always trying to keep up with new releases while also deepening and broadening the pool of other work I can compare those new releases to, and so I only let myself go back to old favorites under three circumstances: I have a writerly reason to do so; I need comforting; or I feel that I’ve been very, very good. #2 and #3 both applied to the week before The End of Romance came out, and so I permitted myself a second trip through Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.
You need to read The Line of Beauty. It has some of the century’s most elegant sentences. Better depictions of love, longing, horniness, and doing cocaine in the immediate vicinity of Margaret Thatcher do not exist. But Hollinghurst is in the air lately. He gets discussed at length in this Critics at Large episode. I saw a cute boy reading The Line of Beauty on the Green Line (also a line of beauty) the other day. I think it’s Hollinghurst’s year, and I recommend you get on board.
But as you may have noticed from reading the start of this letter, I released not one but two books last month, which means I got not one but two rereads. My second choice was motivated by jealousy. My husband was reading Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina, which I’d already read in Anne McLean’s translation as Soldiers of Salamis, and listening to him talk about it, I got so envious that I had no choice but to read it again.
