Yesterday I was reading some of the micro-reviews of one of the best books of 2021 articles in The New York Times, when I came across this sentence: "Kitamura’s sleek and spare prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention, mirroring the book’s concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies — especially between the sincere and the coercive." I will not be reading this book anytime soon, for many reasons, but the main one would be this review.
I have read James Joyce; I am done with authors who break grammatical convention. It's these kinds of authors who make me understand the value of grammar rules that we all agree to follow.
I thought of that review this morning when I saw that Anne Rice has died. Happily, she was not one of the authors who broke grammatical convention, which might mean she was taken less seriously as a writer. I came to her later than some of my friends, and I didn't read her the same way. I didn't read the whole vampire series, although I read one here or there. It was fascinating to read Memnoch the Devil while teaching Paradise Lost. I also read a novel that she published under a different name, but I can't remember which one. At some point this century, I stopped reading her work.
I have had friends who were much truer fans of her writing, but I was always a fan of the way that she lived life. She seemed to support the communities that supported her, both the ones where she lived and the writing communities. In her statements about her faith, I appreciated her ability to talk honestly about various issues.
She was 80 years old, which in some ways, is a long life. In other ways, I was shocked: shocked that she's 80, shocked that it's already 2021, shocked to realize that I stopped reading her along the way. Our world was richer for her being in it.
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