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the decade in reading

The decade of the 2010s happens to begin with the year I turned 35, which makes for an interesting endpoint here. Sometime in the late 2000s I’d got around to reading two authors for the first time: Graham Greene and John O’Hara. I loved them both, but O’Hara particularly blew me away because although I was more or less aware of Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8 (though I’m not sure I knew they were by the same author), I knew nothing about this writer who was right in my sweet spot – a slightly younger contemporary of Fitzgerald and other Lost Generation writers, who was explicit in his aim to be the best portraitist in American fiction of the first half of the 20th century. I used to have a sort of obsessive bent in my reading (it’s still there: it operates at different scales and speeds now, I think). In college, when I read Fitzgerald and Mark Twain for class, I proceeded to read everything else they’d written – novels, short stories, unfinished manuscripts, letters. (My
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