Review by New York Times Review
Orner opens his meditations with an anecdote. Accused by his daughter of loving only two things - "books and apples" - he protests that of course he dearly loves many things, including her. But, as he wryly notes, he had to suspend his reading to answer her, and while answering had kept his place in his book with his finger. What Orner ponders is the oscillation between reading and living, concentrating on the moment when we look up from the page. Reading takes its color, for Orner, from the ways it is aerated by those interruptions. As a result, this record of his reading life is a fractured memoir, even a travel diary. He tells of reading Cheever stories in an Albanian cafe, "To the Lighthouse" by a lake in northern Minnesota, Álvaro Mutis while volunteering with the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Some of the traveling is simply in time: Orner weaves vignettes from the death of his father and the slow demise of his first marriage with loving, eccentric paraphrases of stories by Chekhov, Kafka, Welty, Wideman and Babel, treating his reading not as an escape from, but a mode of experiencing, his life's unspooling. Too irresponsible to be literary criticism, and too irregular to be autobiography, Orner's book (with illustrations by his brother, Eric Orner) is instead an entrancing attempt to catch what falls between those genres: the irreducibly personal, messy, even embarrassing ways reading and living bleed into each other, which neither literary criticism nor autobiography ever quite acknowledges.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 11, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
A consummate fiction writer (Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge, 2013) and a ravenous reader, Orner reveals the full depth of his literary passion in this engrossing, ruefully confessional, and emotionally suspenseful, linked essay collection. Orner's hunger for books is stoked by his loss and guilt in the wake of his father's death and a divorce complicated by his former wife's mental illness. Consequently he embeds piquant memories and musings within his incisive appreciation for short stories by such masters as Chekhov, Kafka, Welty, Cheever, Mavis Gallant, and Gina Berriault. The resulting evocative memoir-in-books is akin to Will Schwalbe's Books for Living (2016), but it is more nuanced, more artistic, more mysterious, and more wrenching. Orner shares vivid and urgent dispatches from the reading front in Cincinnati, Prague, Mexico, Albania, Chicago, and South Carolina, in which life and literature are potently fused. Reading Breece D'J Pancake is an hour of prayer, while John Edgar Wideman's work is like a shot of epinephrine. Orner confides, I have come to the conclusion that reading keeps me alive, period. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Orner, a distinguished fiction writer (Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge), appears here as a devoted book lover, inviting the reader to an intimate and friendly book group of two. Closely scrutinizing individual stories, he illuminates writers as canonical as Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol, as well-known as Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow, and as far-flung as Alvaro Mutis and Yasunari Kawabata. Eudora Welty gets an eye-opening reading, not as "anybody's favorite auntie" but as a "badass" writer. The heart of this book is with short-story writers, including, among 21 of them, Gina Berriault, Wright Morris, Breece D'J Pancake, William Trevor, and Robert Walser. Orner's recollections of reading are always situated in a specific place and moment; in Albania or Haiti, South Carolina or Wisconsin; while he's searching his book-overstuffed garage for a particular work, or waiting for a traffic light to change; at the hospital where his grandmother dies, or reflecting on the death of his father (for whom this book is very much a memorial). Orner is a pleasure to read, and to read with. Readers will be delighted to join him, grab one of the stories he delves into, and enjoy his company. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of literary tapas.Novelist and short story writer Orner (Creative Writing/San Francisco State Univ.; Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, 2013, etc.) combines short, reflective essays about literature with personal memories. The pieces (some previously published) are literary hybrids, and the book becomes a series of unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir. The big names (Kafka, Chekhov, Melville, Cheever, Bellow, etc.) are well represented, but so too are those outside of the canone.g., Lyonel Trouillot, lvaro Mutis, Bohumil Hrabal and his lightning strike of a novel, Too Loud a Solitude. In the first piece, ostensibly about how Orner likes to read, reflect, look around, and just listen at San Franciscos General Hospitals cafeteria, the author transitions to Chekhovs tender and sorrowful story The Bishop, which he admires for how the author (a doctor) lovingly employs details. He ends thinking about his dead grandmother. In a cabin in Bolinas, California, Orner thinks about his dead father and reads Breece DJ Pancakes story, First Day of Winter, which gets [him] every time. The way a story about characters, nonexistent people, pushes us back to our own. Orner confesses that John Edgar Widemans story Welcome is the saddest story he has ever read, by a wide margin. Again, thinking about his father, he asks, what is the best Fathers Day novel? Hands down The Brothers Karamazov. But Bernard Malamuds My Son the Murderer is the best story. While it takes Dostoevsky 700 pages to get to the bottom of fathers and sons, Malamud can name that tune in under 8. At 22, he accidentally fell out of a canoe but saved the book he was readingthe indelible and generous To the Lighthouseand then anxiously waited for it to dry in the sun so he could finish it. Book lovers will devour these genuine, personal tales about literature and reading. Refreshing, finely turned gems of wit and wisdom from an author who has asked his family to bury him with a decent library. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
