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chelseamartinez 's review for:
All The King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
I cannot tell a lie, Rebecca - this is definitely my most favorite book that I have read all year. Partly this is because Alex recommended it to me out of the blue when I did not know him very well and a commercial for the Sean Penn movie version came on during Project Runway. Not that book recommendations are this lofty thing, but it was really nice to have this person who I had really either only drank a lot of bourbon with/drank a lot of beer with/drank a lot of sparks with tell me something semi-serious.
This is actually backward projecting because at the time I didn't even know the book was going to be so good. Anyhow Perry-Castaneda Library had this tiny red hardcover version in the stacks, which I liked the look of but once on my shelf at home didn't remind me of its existence. In grad school you can check books out for years without any consequence, so I didn't actually start reading it for maybe 4 months. This was a situation where the timing was not right and for some reason I needed to wait till the spring of 2007 to read it. I don't think this is true of all books but of the ones you really love, it is.
And this is not just because Jack Burden is a grad school dropout, it is because this book is this amazing piece of writing which is modern and rural and depressive and vivid. I told Chance more than once while I was reading it that if I were to write a book, this is what it would be like, but that is not true because although I can ramble on apace with Robert Penn Warren about my feelings and how I know that they at times have led me to make the wrong decisions about things, I'm not old enough to guess know how things are gonna turn out for me, and I'm not old enough to be satisfied with knowing that most people go to their grave never being satisfied.
This is actually backward projecting because at the time I didn't even know the book was going to be so good. Anyhow Perry-Castaneda Library had this tiny red hardcover version in the stacks, which I liked the look of but once on my shelf at home didn't remind me of its existence. In grad school you can check books out for years without any consequence, so I didn't actually start reading it for maybe 4 months. This was a situation where the timing was not right and for some reason I needed to wait till the spring of 2007 to read it. I don't think this is true of all books but of the ones you really love, it is.
And this is not just because Jack Burden is a grad school dropout, it is because this book is this amazing piece of writing which is modern and rural and depressive and vivid. I told Chance more than once while I was reading it that if I were to write a book, this is what it would be like, but that is not true because although I can ramble on apace with Robert Penn Warren about my feelings and how I know that they at times have led me to make the wrong decisions about things, I'm not old enough to guess know how things are gonna turn out for me, and I'm not old enough to be satisfied with knowing that most people go to their grave never being satisfied.