Recommendations 3

The Librarian is In, a podcast from the New York Public Library, made me want to be better at readers' advisory (the practice of recommending books to all kinds of readers). General interest listeners will come away with additions to their To Read list. This year's first discussion of a book on the NYPL 125 list prodded me to read Giovanni's Room, a title always lurking on my "should have read" list.



I always describe my GoodReads reviews as "notes to myself" rather than proper reviews. Here's what I jotted down:

Passion and the futility of love in Paris in the 1950s. While David's girlfriend tours Spain without him, he gets evicted from his Paris hotel. He turns to an older man he knows, someone who often helps "boys" like him. They go to Guillaume's bar and both immediately become enamored of Giovanni, the bartender. The larks and liaisons of this (gay) crowd roll along at a leisurely, drunken pace until girlfriend Hella returns. Only, the book tells the story out of order: sooner than we see those scenes we know that something terrible happened and that David and Hella definitely aren't getting married. (Lots of undergrad paper / book club themes to mine: "room[s]" and being trapped; the way the characters -- Baldwin? -- view women; the caricatures of the older men.)