Favorites on Friday -- Books so good you stay up late to finish them

It is the odd book that I can linger over, that I don't have to stay up late to inhale. It was a long few days and lots of Nutella and green tea recovering from the all-nighters that were Markus Zusak's The Book Thief and Leah Stewart's Husband and Wife.

My most recent late-night read was a slim, spare, exquisitely-rendered memoir called Half a Life by Darin Strauss, which I received as part of being one of the authors featured with Darin at Atlantic City's NAIBA conference. It was 11pm when I picked it up off the bedside table pile, intrigued by the unique, half-jacket presentation of the cover. I didn't intend to read it all in one sitting; it was just something to keep me awake until my husband got home from his hockey game since we hadn't seen each other in a few days.

 

It begins, "Half my life ago, I killed a girl." It ended two hours later with me shaken, touched, and grateful for this author's honest, raw laying bare of the details of grief and guilt. Following a no-fault car accident a month before graduation in which he was behind the wheel when a schoolmate on a bicycle was killed, Strauss shares the human ways everyone reacts, the perception and reality of performance, the half-a-life struggle to understand how he really felt about it all. 

Memoir isn't one of my favorite genres--I recently finished Martha Beck's Leaving the Saints, her tell-some memoir about leaving the Mormon church and finding her own faith, and was moved enough to dig around for what I imagined was the 'more to the story'. It was astounding to me to read that she and her husband had both discovered they were gay and that their marriage ended during the time frame she talks about in the memoir, yet none of it was included. Understandably, that is likely 'another book' as she says in one interview, but I also think, how does a writer choose what to share when writing a memoir with a specific angle? What are the events that shape a person; how can anything be left out? I appreciated how Strauss addressed this by touching briefly on all the parts of his life that also happened during the half of his life that he was struggling to come to terms with Celine's death, but acknowledging that they are not part of this story. It is believable and authentic that a teenager can accidentally kill a girl, and still go on to become a ski bum in Colorado and lose his virginity and experience other life events.  

This is worth reading, not only because the story is both moving and moves quickly, but also because of the lyrical and spare way in which Strauss handles the craft of writing. 

QUESTION: So I want to know, what was the most recent book that kept you up late at night?