Editor’s note: The opinions of the smart, well-read women in my Denver book club mean a lot, and often determine what the rest of us choose to pile onto our bedside tables. So we asked them, and all Denver Post readers, to share their mini-reviews with you. Have any to offer? Email bellis@denverpost.
com.“Lesser Ruins,” by Mark Haber (Coffee House Press, 2024)“Lesser Ruins,” by Mark Haber (Coffee House Press, 2024)For 20 years, the unnamed narrator has struggled to “escape mediocrity” by writing a book about the 16th-century essayist Montaigne, but obstacles stood in his way: teaching intro courses at a community college, caring for a wife with an aggressive form of dementia, and raising a son obsessed with weird music. So far, all he has produced are scads of notes and a slew of possible titles.
But now he is unemployed, recently widowed, and his son is back at his own home with roommates, so what’s holding him back?Well, the world has become noisier and faster, interrupting and dismantling any attempt to think slowly, and slow thinking will certainly be required if he is to write the brilliant book he imagines. He is also haunted by a lost opportunity in the Berkshires from which he came away empty-handed, at least so far as his book about Montaigne was concerned. While a 300-page tome on writers’ block might not sound like a compelling page-turner, the irresistible sentences are so propulsive that you almost don’t notice each paragraph is 100 pages long.
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