Your Daily Awesome

Last week I had the chance to interview the author of my two favorite novels, The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1995). Both books are about a divorced sportwriter-turned-real estate agent named Frank Bascombe, who struggles to keep his head above water in the choppy mundanity of adulthood. Quite literally, no books have impacted me so much in adulthood as these two novels. When I was in my 20s (not so very long ago), Bascombe made a lot more sense and seemed to possess better strategies for coping with life to me than most of the adults I knew, so I (unconsciously) adopted him as a role model—a sort of homing pigeon who had flown into the cave of adulthood and reported back with what had and hadn’t worked for him.

It’s been 11 years since Independence Day came out, and I had no idea until very recently that a third Bascombe book was on the way. That book is Lay of the Land, and to my great relief, it’s pretty incredible. It starts off a little slow, but around 100 pages in, it turns into a story of uncommon emotional depth and clarity. (If you haven’t read any of these books before, I’d recommend starting from the beginning.)

So last Friday, within an hour and a half of finishing The Lay of the Land, I was on the telephone with Richard Ford, talking about the new book, Frank Bascombe, and why we read. It was a pretty incredible morning. You can read the interview HERE.

I want books to be smart. Books are my opportunity to be smarter than I could be in any other way of living. That’s what I go to literature for. When I read novels, I want them to tell me something that I couldn’t have been told any other way. I always go to novels rather hungrily. I don’t know if all readers do that. Maybe they don’t. Obviously we know lots of readers who go to books just to be diverted or just to have their attention drawn to something else, but that’s not why I go to literature.—Richard Ford