A book I reread every year and which I teach is David Markson’s Reader’s Block. First of a tetralogy, this book takes on mortality, anti-Semitism, and the form of the novel, disabusing us of the notion of the artist as “hero” by revealing the flaws and the failures of both the artists and the world they live in. Written in tiny paragraphs, made almost entirely from quoted or paraphrased texts (kind of like a cento), the book has a subtext that pulls the reader along. I can’t resist. My students can’t resist. And in that way my own reading and my teaching life join again and again.
