Books on Monday: Be Near Me

Andrew O’Hagan has taken the unseemly involvement of Catholic priests with teenage boys and completely rearranged its contours – and produced a dryly lovely novel in the process. (I should love to know what Colm Tóobín thinks of this novel.)

I’d like to say something like this: “Ordinarily, I write up books during August without posting about them at The Daily Blague,” but that would be nonsense, because I haven’t been blogging long enough for anything to become “ordinary.” This year, of course, I spent the month preoccupied by reapplying the old look and feel (which I rather like) to a new blog. I read a great deal but I didn’t write very much, and now I have a stack of books on my desk and a handful of dimming recollections. I do hate that. I like putting a book down and writing about it straightaway.

¶ Be Near Me.

PS: I fixed the link to my write-up of The Nines, in case you were interested but met with a 404. I apologize for the inconvenience, but I hope that some readers are learning to find things at Portico on their own.