Changing My Mind

After finishing Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind this past Saturday, I can resolutely proclaim her my Favorite Living Writer. She rocks. She's smart, discerning, funny, careful in her choices but not afraid to dish out just desserts. I love her the most, and so I leave you with some of her (superior) words.

On Netherland:

" . . . to read this novel it to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It is perfectly done - in a sense, that's the problem. It's so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis . . ."

On finishing her last novel:

"The last time it happened to me, I uncorked a good Sancerre I'd been keeping and drank it standing up with the bottle in my hand, and then I lay down in my backyard on the paving stones and stayed there for a long time, crying. It was sunny, late autumn, and there were apples everywhere, overripe and stinky."

On Steven Spielberg:

"I think Spielberg is one of the great popular artists of our time, and I base this upon the stupidity/pleasure axis I apply to popular artists: how much pleasure they give versus how stupid one has to become to receive said pleasure. The answer with Spielberg is usually: 'not that stupid.'"

Go read it already!