I often tell people Black Swan Green is pretty much my favorite book. I have had more trouble picking a favorite novel than a band or a song or movie because I return to novels so seldomly...even reading one twice means that years have passed since the previous experience, and I fall in love with a good book pretty easily, and comparing old feelings to the flavor of the week makes the whole favorite thing tricky. But after recommending this to the blog and anyone else who would listen, and reading your loving comments, I felt it was time to revisit and rejudge for myself.
The plot and love for this book has been well documented on this site, so I'll digress a bit. What makes this book so special is not the story (though its a good one) but the way it is told. In poking around the internet I discovered that this book is a) semiautobiographical and b) apparently part of the storied literary genre bildungsroman (more famous examples of which are Candide, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Catcher In the Rye). The semiautobiography makes sense...the other thing that makes this book so special is David Mitchell. His writing is not only realistic, its so casually beautiful that every few pages I would think, that passage there, that is the one I am going to copy down and put in the blog. After a certain point I stopped trying to remember the last one I thought that about. Which saddens me, because I want to pick such a beautiful passage that everyone who has read this book goes "oh yeah, that WAS beautiful" and everyone who hasn't says "I must read it NOW" and everyone says "Josh can sure pick a beautiful passage". Maybe I'll go back and add one.
Read this book.
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