Sometimes, You Just Connect With an Author

Telegraph Avenue came out today. I downloaded the Kindle version this morning.

I read the first paragraph:

"A white boy rode flatfoot on a skateboard, towed along, hand to shoulder, by a black boy pedaling a brakeless fixed-gear bike. Dark August morning, deep in the Flatlands. Hiss of tires. Granular unraveling of skateboard wheels against asphalt. Summertime Berkeley giving off her old-lady smell, nine different styles of jasmine and a squirt of he-cat."

I just had to stop. I re-read it four times. Bathed in it, wallowed in it. The first paragraph of the first Michael Chabon novel since The Yiddish Policemen's Union four years ago. I felt the need to savor it, to hold on to each moment with Chabon's prose. I put my Kindle away, thinking that it might be best to wait until I have the Frankenstein script fully in my head, so I can give these words the attention I want to give them. The attention they deserve.

Yet, I'm DYING to read it. To see the wonders that Mr. Chabon has in store, the gifts that I always receive from his works, but especially his novels. I love that his writing adapts and changes with each genre and style he approaches, and that he embraces genre and style so fully. It's a conversation I've been dying to have with him...someday.

Perhaps I'll go get my hardcover copy this afternoon.