Currently Reading

Posted at 1:23 pm on Tuesday, July 10, 2007, in Reading, and tagged syracuse.

Fresh off the disaster that was the Fowles experiment, I’ve picked The World According to Garp by John Irving off of my dust-gathering bookshelf…

Image: Amazon.com

I first became interested in John Irving with A Prayer for Owen Meany in high school. I must have purchased Garp somewhere along the way since then, most likely at Syracuse. Irving’s liberal use of semicolons led to one of my first major transformations as a writer. (Read: I started to use a lot of semicolons, which has since subsided.)

In the Owen Meany English class in school, I post-scripted a letter to the author (for a class assignment) with, “You use a lot of semi-colons.” When Irving responded a couple months later, he didn’t comment on my statement, but I am sure he nodded in agreement, and then tucked my letter beneath his pillow, where it remains to this day.

This is a classic, and twenty-or-so pages in, I am already hooked.

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