One of my favourite books of all time: Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
It's a strange mix. A text heavily laden with literary references and philosophical ponderings, shaped like a mock-academic syllabus, yet such a pageturner that I stay up way too late reading. A thriller with many twists. I remember the heart-wrenching ending, yet when I'm rereading the book for the third time - though it's been a few years since the last time - I can't puzzle out the mystery until the end. Maybe not even then.
When I finish it, my insides ache with grief but my mind is yelling that I need to go out and live my life.
Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.
"Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond - James Bond - you best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed-potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began - with a wheeze."
Given such rigid parameters, I always assumed I wouldn't have my Magnificent Reason until I was at least seventy, with liver spots, rheumatism, wit as quick as a carving knife, a squat stucco house in Avignon (where I could be found eating 365 different cheeses), a lover twenty years my junior who worked in the fields (I don't know what kind of fields - any kind that were gold and frothy) and, with any luck, a small triumph of science or philosophy to my name.
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