Thursday, October 1, 2009

Finding Irving


Last night, for some reason, I felt like reading an old book. You know, something that has been sitting on my shelves for a long time, but which I'd overlooked. As so, last night, I began digging just for fun.

I raked through double-stacks of shelved books, opened boxes, perused titles obscured by dust and neglect, and then suddenly I discovered a small paperback book that I'd forgotten about: Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, by John Irving. Irving was, at one time, a writer whom I followed and read with enormous fascination and admiration. I read his novel, The World According to Garp, in a contemporary literature class at Indiana State in the summer of 1981 and was immediately hooked. And afterwards, I purchased every novel Irving published for several years . . . including The Cider House Rules, which was, some years ago, converted into a movie, with Irving picking up an Academy Award for Best Screenplay adaptation, and for adapting from his own novel, at that. I'm not sure that feat has ever been accomplished by a writer.

Last night, and again early this morning, I read some of the short stories and memoirs in Piggy Sneed. And I was thinking: what writer wouldn't like to create a book title like Piggy Sneed?

Or Piggy anything . . . .

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