Ginnie's review
The Giant's House: A Romance (P.S.) by Elizabeth McCracken
The first time I read this book I kept copying chunks of the words into my journal. The language dazzled me - not so much the plot or the characters - but McCracken's way with words.
" I am a librarian, and you cannot stop me from annotating, revising, updating. I like to think that--because I am a librarian--I offer accurate and spurious with no judgment, good and bad next to each other on the shelf. But my memories are not books. Blessing if they were. Then maybe someone would borrow one and keep it too long and return it, a little battered, offering money for my forgiveness, each memory new after its long absence.
My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can nev...more
" I am a librarian, and you cannot stop me from annotating, revising, updating. I like to think that--because I am a librarian--I offer accurate and spurious with no judgment, good and bad next to each other on the shelf. But my memories are not books. Blessing if they were. Then maybe someone would borrow one and keep it too long and return it, a little battered, offering money for my forgiveness, each memory new after its long absence.
My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can nev...more
