This book satisfied the literary nerd in me, big time and was really the only 'adult fiction' book I managed to read this month. There are four doorways to reading, according to super librarian Nancy Pearl, and these are what draw people into reading and inform their preferences. Most people utilize a combination of these: Story, Character, Setting, and Language. I learned about them during my library degree and maybe I'll write a separate post about the topic, but what you need to know now is that I generally read for story and language. Let me tell you, this book gave me language!!! During my English Lit degree, I always read with a pen in hand to underline things that stood out to me as important or beautiful. This is not a habit that continued into my everyday reading life EXCEPT for when a book gives me language, and I wanted to bust a pen out multiple times during this one (and I did!). It is the story of an unnamed literature scholar giving guest lectures about lost books while at an unnamed university in an unnamed city. The novel is a mixture of his lectures, experiences, and recollections, and has a very modernist feel with its run-on sentences and air of mystery. Yet, the entire book somehow feels like it is also mocking that type of literature. As the reader, I noticed how meta some parts were and the resulting ironies. Also, it was so satisfyingly confusing--the narrator could be the author but nothing is ever clearly real. In fact, the 'about the author' section states that the author loves to work in pseudo-biography but mainly writes fiction. I got this as an advanced reader copy and it doesn't come out until April, but I think other lit nerds will enjoy it!

**Bonus: Here are a couple of the lines that warranted underlining, in my opinion, because of how concisely and beautifully they expressed my own feelings about the topics at hand:
During a discussion about 'good' literature: "I wanted to tell her how I believed that literary greatness wasn't an innate quality but something formed through machinations of culture and society and history. I wanted to talk about the subtle formation of canons and discriminations against particular kinds of taste and style, about race and gender and nation" (Rose, p. 81).
On searching for a book he recalls experiencing in childhood but none of the details of: "I was trying to find something I cannot ever be sure existed, something I myself may have imagined" (p. 84).
About the fallacy of memory (like I wrote about in my post about mis-remembering and mis-quoting!): "That, at least, was how it was in her memory, but memory makes up its own stories every time" (p. 86).