{"id":123,"date":"2007-02-24T09:22:26","date_gmt":"2007-02-24T13:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books-test\/?p=123"},"modified":"2007-02-24T09:22:26","modified_gmt":"2007-02-24T13:22:26","slug":"black-swan-green-by-david-mitchellrandom-house-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/black-swan-green-by-david-mitchellrandom-house-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Swan Green by David MitchellRandom House, 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, I read this post about reading on the Harvard University Press Publicity Blog<\/a>, which led me to this post in the Boston Globe’s “Brainiac” blog<\/a>, which, in turn, led me to this piece by Lindsay Waters in the Chronicle<\/a>, which contains the following quote.<\/p>\n

I have increasingly come to believe that the key to reading is rereading. Paradoxically, rereading a literary work is not a quick business, but usually slower than the first time round. We learn that the first time we read too fast, and in a complicated feedback mechanism what was deeply buried in the text can emerge.
\n
Lindsay Waters, Time for Reading, The Chronicle, 2\/9\/2007<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With poems I read and then re-read, usually: the whole book, cover to cover, twice. With novels, especially pleasing novels, I read too fast, slowing down only when the writing (like Henry James’s) makes me do so. So it was with this book: I found myself flipping back to earlier chapters trying to remember where that “But it is. But it isn’t. But it is” line came up before, or how what exact phrase was used to describe Double Maths the first time around, or where Madame Crommelynck uses the word “demisemiquaver.” Black Swan Green’s<\/em> simple on the surface (13 months in the life of a twelve-then-thirteen-year-old boy growing up in a small English village in 1982), and exhilarating, but also obviously smart, and clever (different things, of course), and elegant, each chapter a vignette.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, I read this post about reading on the Harvard University Press Publicity Blog, which led me to this post in the Boston Globe’s “Brainiac” blog, which, in turn, led me to this piece by Lindsay Waters in the Chronicle, which contains the following quote. I have increasingly come to believe that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}