Word: hemingway
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There were literally like a million people waiting for ellipticals in Hemingway after they closed the MAC.” (Technically speaking, there were perhaps 20 people waiting for the ellipticals. Also, closing the MAC is a disastrous idea...
...reading tastes in elementary school weren’t that sophisticated. I mean, I could’ve knocked off some Hemingway in fourth grade, but I chose not to. But nor did I incline toward the trashy Goosebumps or Mystic Mountain High (that’s made up, but you know the type) families. So for a while, I tracked the adventures of Encyclopedia Brown, the finest sleuth this side of the Atlantic. A stretch with that endless series about the Boxcar Children. Then I turned my attention to the Redwall saga, those enchanting tales of mice slaying snakes...
Parker's characters are so tough and self-assured, you want to grab the lapels of their leather jackets and tell them, as Max Eastman once told Hemingway, to come out from behind the false hair on their chest. But Parker is always a breezy read, and in this, his 34th Spenser mystery, the macho posturing is tempered by a plot that turns on his hero's vulnerability and one of his good deeds gone bad. A runaway he rescued from a life of low-rent prostitution (by putting her in the care of a high-priced madam...
...McCarthy is the last survivor of a vanished world. He is, essentially, a modernist, miraculously preserved like a literary coelacanth from the age of Hemingway and Faulkner, writers of high style and high purpose without an iota of aw-shucks relatability. The future probably belongs to the Fraziers, the entertainers, who serve up their profundities with humor and sex and fisticuffs so they go down more easily. McCarthy would never stoop to entertain us, but there's a stripped-down intensity to his work that is just awesome. You sense that The Road, with its world empty of values...
Perhaps cognizant of the summer book lull, large bookstore chains like Borders and Barnes and Noble set out display tables with the classics. Next year, think about reaching for Hemingway instead of Hoag. Or just watch a movie...