15 Books You'll Want to Tell Everyone About
These riveting reads are perfect to discuss with your book club, make time fly by on your morning commute or keep you company on a weekend afternoon.
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The Folded Clock
By Heidi Julavits
304 pages;
Knopf
Novelist Heidi Julavits’s best book yet isn’t a work of
fiction, but a “journal” written for public consumption. The Folded Clock is
a cleverly crafted thoughtfully entertaining series of meditations on
personhood and culture inspired by a diary the author started keeping when she
was 8.
Young
Heidi’s journal was full of a child’s flat assertions of desire’ “I want to
have a thin lovely figure...” reads that girlish record of her former self,
“popular, lots of friends, no pimples, a nicer nose.” Happily, the 40-something
Julavits’s diary is a far more complex and captivating read that contemplates
everything from awkward social obligations to materialism, motherhood, and
little white lies—even why The Bachelorfranchise has redeeming value.
A
fixture
of the literary scene, Julavits chronicles art shows and encounters with
this
or that unnamed writer friend, now and then touching on the competition
she
feels at times with her writer husband, Ben Marcus. Both overtly and
covertly, she raises the questions, "How do we curate our own lives when
everything about them may wind up in print?" "Can we ever expect naked
truth from a diary, or do we invariably receive a sanitized version?"
Maybe,
Julavits's work suggests, the best we can hope for is a deeply mediated
honestly—for words are always equal parts mask and revelation.
— Lydia Millet
Published 03/31/2015