The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks by Donald Harington
My rating: 5/5 cats
yes. donald harington. yes.
do i frequently get enthusiastic here on goodreads.com this blog o’mine?? do i bark at the mailman, chase balls, and develop a fondness for legs? guilty, yes. but besides dfw, who is my soul, who are the big three?? jonathan carroll, thomas hardy, and dear donald harington. that is not to say that other-enthusiasm is false or fleeting or unwarranted, but these three authors tame my beast and make me stop yipping and running in circles, and absorb all my attention as i curl up and get lost in their words for a few hours.
i am abandoning this metaphor…now!
so this book. if you are not going to follow my advice and read them all in order, this is probably the best starting point. i’m not a doctor, i don’t know what’s best for you, but i feel like i am qualified to make a recommendation based on loving donald harington more than most people. this book covers many generations of the ingledew family, just one of the families harington dreamed up before lovingly crafting and effortlessly detailing their lives and speech and motives. reading this will give you teasers about other characters, other places, right places, but will not give away too many surprises along the way. when i read this book, i did so after having only read one other of his books (choiring of the trees), and i put it down, thinking—“man, i wish i knew more about _____.” or “_________was such a great character—i could read a whole book about her.”
guess what??
one of my favorite parts of this book is the focus of an entire other book!! how many authors will do that for you?? did dickens write a whole novel about the origin story of miss havisham from her perspective?? no he did not, selfish man. harington knew what we wanted and he gave it to us.
you will learn about buildings, yes, but you will learn about the people whose lives revolved around those buildings; you will wish this book had been your history textbook in elementary school because even though it is not real, it feels real. harington is that good at creating a world—a town with people whose lives sometimes work magic but always always entertain.
i feel like a literary explorer out here. i need him to be more known and loved than he is—i want this to be my gift to you readers.
he is not an author to miss out on, but he is an author to miss. terribly.
