Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of bewildering events that threaten to undermine his faith in reality.
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[I had been sick for a long time]***
(Faber & Faber, 4 September 2008, first published 2004, 260 pages, ebook, #popsugarreadingchallenge 2019, a book you see someone reading on TV or in a movie, bought from @AmazonKindle)
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I'm a huge fan of Auster and this fantastic little book reinforced how talented he is and how much I admire his work. I loved the premise of the book, it's deceptively simple; a man buys a blue notebook and starts to write again after a long illness. This is when things get crazy. Sidney becomes obsessed with the notebook and what it could mean to him. His obsession only deepens when odd things happen in the real world, things which seem linked to the notebook. The strangest of these is when Chan, his friend, and the owner of the stationary store where he bought the notebook becomes violent and aggressive, threatening his life. He learns painful truth's about his wife's family, truths which come at a high price. I thought Oracle Night was amazing.
