Cornflower offered this invitation this week to see our current reads in an image.
"We had a lot of fun recently choosing pictures to sum up our reading taste (remember this post?), so why not let's all choose an image as I've done here which in some way represents a book, a character, an episode, say. It could be a painting or a photograph, any visual interpretation of something literary."
My current read is The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, and even though this image is a rather literal interpretation of content and mirrors the cover image, it speaks volumes to me. As a conjured image from the reading of a book about the long descent of newspapers, it offers both an image that appears old, wrinkled and worn and an image that speaks to comfort, routine and long Sunday mornings in bed with the paper and tea. Two varying diagnoses of the viability of newspaper print. Will the choice fall to practicality or sentimental attachment?
There is no denying that the life is being quickly sucked from the Roman produced small newspaper with worldwide audience featured here. As in this excerpt from the first short profile in the book:
"Lloyd opens a French current-affairs magazine in hopes of stealing a story idea. He flips the pages impatiently - he doesn't recognize half the names. Who the hell is that guy in the photo? He used to know everything going on in this country. At press conferences, he was front-row, arm raised, rushing up afterward to pitch questions from the sidelines. At embassy cocktail parties, he sidled up to the ambassadors with a grin, notebook emerging from his hip pocket. Nowadays, if he attends press conferences at all, he's back-row, doodling, dozing. Embossed invitations pile up on his coffee table. Scoops, big and little, pass him by. He still has smarts enough to produce the obvious pieces - those he can do drunk, eyelids closed, in his underwear at the word processor."
Desperation. The papers where he wrote successfully are as old and weathered as the image above.
Read the first chapter here.