Another read from my 20 Books of Summer 2024 project! Cathy from 746 Books has been running 20 Books of Summer since 2014, and I’ve been taking part since 2015 (see all my lists and links here). I received this one as a gift from Matthew who bought it at the San Diego Public Library library sale on a work trip: when questioned, he said he liked the title and the cover, which is fair enough. Out of the nine books I acquired in March 2023, I’ve read and reviewed all of them apart from the two Three Investigators books in Spanish, which represent more of a pipe-dream than an actual reading plan. This of course also accounts for one of my 2024 TBR project reads.

Alice Mattison – “The Book Borrower”

(6 March 2023, from Matthew)

I know you love me. But all the same, sometimes I’m at the lowr limit of what you can stand. (p. 146)

First off, there’s one book that’s borrowed, by one person, and in this experimental and I’d say literary fiction work, we get to read a lot of the book that was borrowed, interspersed with real (fictional) life, to quite surprising effect at the beginning when one of two central characters reads sentences from it while pushing her baby in his pram and, indeed, dropping him out of his pram (he’s OK, as are any dogs we become attached to).

The novel is about a long and somewhat fraught at times friendship between two women who meet in a New York City playground, and we follow their lives over two decades, some episodes almost repeating, and the subject of the book oddly reappearing in different places in their lives.

It’s made a bit odd by the incursions of this other book, but is certainly readable; there’s also something a bit shocking which disrupts it. I’d not heard of this author before, although she appears to have written a few novels, and would read something else by her.

Well-chosen, Matthew, both as a gift and as a 20Books title (I’m almost back on track now as I had a slow work day last week and managed to read this in one day!).

A Bookish Beck Serendipity moment: in this and “Northern Boy“, the central character in a scene complains of the coldness of the house they’re visiting.

This is Book 3 in my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

This is Book 37 in my 2024 TBR project – 104 to go!