Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Bought: Loaned to me probably around 2004 or 5.

Read: Around that time; I read it right when I got it.

I was given Motherless Brooklyn by my mother to read a few years ago. I don't really remember why it was that she gave it to me; it wasn't a gift, it was a loan (although it's resided on my shelf since then, despite the fact that, as I will get to, she hasn't yet read it herself.)

This was a good book, the story of a man with tourette's who works as a sort of henchman. Really, there's very little that I remember about the plot. I think that the main character's boss was killed and the story is largely about him trying to solve the murder. I can remember a couple of passages fairly well--him talking about the difference between taxi and car services, a scene near the end where he switches from being fixated on the number five, and changing to four, and throws his shoe into the ocean.

This was a good enough book that I went looking for some more information about it, and found that there was a movie in the works with Ed Norton slotted to play the main character (I wish I could remember his name....) It would seem that no progress has been made on this, but I do hope that it happens. Oddly enough, it wasn't until Fortress of Solitude, Lethem's first book was mentioned in The Polysyllabic Spree that I even thought to go looking for it. The scan here is actually the same cover as the copy I have, so it's strange to me that I didn't think to look for it, since it's mentioned on the cover, but perhaps it's evidence of my laziness. Even when I've read a good book, I often will not feel ready to pick up a new book right away. It takes some time for me to get engrossed in a book, at which point, I often cannot put it down until it is done. On the other hand, before I've become engrossed in it, I can easily be distracted from it, and end up abandoning a book. It's an odd thing, though, because I can only remember a few books that I never finished. Most of them were school-assigned books in high school or even junior high. I Che is one that was during college, and When Nietzsche Wept which I started before my 2L year, and I don't know if I'll ever go back to it. I picked it up because I was intrigued by the author's other book (which I also bought at the time,) The Schopenhauer Cure. I still don't know if the two are actually related, but I tend to doubt it, so I might go to the Cure instead of going back to Nietzsche, which, around 100 pages in, which is usually well far enough to get me interested, was just not holding my interest. I've wandered a bit from the subject of this entry, but I expect that won't be uncommon.