This Week in Reading: The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit I reread The Faraway Nearby recently: a book I have been describing as the best book I have ever read since I first picked it up five years ago. There is always a bit of trepidation upon rereading your favorite book—a fear that you have oversold it to yourself and all of the friends whose hands you have frantically pressed it into. I am relieved to report that this book is just as extraordinary as I remembered. Rebecca Solnit is a master of both form and structure. Each sentence is exquisite, each paragraph challenging, each chapter revelatory. It is a book that is beyond imitation, a book that can only be written by someone who has been alive for half of a century. She ties together so many disparate ideas: an overwhelming bounty of apricots, fairytales, Frankenstein, the arctic. It’s a book one cannot research their way into writing, each example is simply an artifact from a historian’s collection, accumulated over a lifetime.
ties that bind
ties that bind
ties that bind
This Week in Reading: The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit I reread The Faraway Nearby recently: a book I have been describing as the best book I have ever read since I first picked it up five years ago. There is always a bit of trepidation upon rereading your favorite book—a fear that you have oversold it to yourself and all of the friends whose hands you have frantically pressed it into. I am relieved to report that this book is just as extraordinary as I remembered. Rebecca Solnit is a master of both form and structure. Each sentence is exquisite, each paragraph challenging, each chapter revelatory. It is a book that is beyond imitation, a book that can only be written by someone who has been alive for half of a century. She ties together so many disparate ideas: an overwhelming bounty of apricots, fairytales, Frankenstein, the arctic. It’s a book one cannot research their way into writing, each example is simply an artifact from a historian’s collection, accumulated over a lifetime.