pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

This book begins with an appropriate quotation, and I’m going to share that with you as well as the beginning of Cooper’s writing.

“It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, thought they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory.” –Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

I am a visible man. By all appearances white, middle-class, heterosexual. Male.

I like the parallel drawn, and the contrast noted, to Ellison’s work. I haven’t read Invisible Man, but I’d like to. (It fits into a recent reading pattern of mine. And I’ve finally worked out Ellison’s Invisible Man vs. H.G. Wells’s, whew.) I think the essence of this book is well foreshadowed in those brief words of Cooper’s, too.

What are you reading this week?

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

Filed under: book beginnings | Tagged: memoir, nonfiction |