What To Read While Wandering Through Armageddon

The first two sentences of my annotation of Colson Whitehead's "The Intuitionist" are:

I’m not sure who said, “God is in the details.” But after reading The Intuitionist, it’s obvious that Colson Whitehead was listening.

I fell in love with Whitehead's first book when I read it about four months ago. I had never heard of him and it angered me that there was a writer out there who could write this well about something so completely original.

Naturally, when I saw that he had a new book coming out soon, "Sag Harbor," I added it to my to-buy list. Others jumped it and got in the way, but after reading a couple of articles that have been in the NY Times recently, I think it's back at the top of my list.

This is the Times review of "Sag Harbor," and this is an interview from the Times where he talks about his reasons for writing his new book. One sentence in particular jumped out at me:

What distinguishes “Sag Harbor” from all those first novels that Mr. Whitehead spurned back in the ’90s [when Whitehead worked at The Village Voice Literary Supplement] is that it deliberately avoids a climax or big revelation.

That avoidance, of the big revelation (I can just imagine it now: And that's when it hit me...) is something I strive for in my writing. I don't want to write about the countdown to Armageddon. I want to write about wandering across a scorched earth, always thinking: What now?

And while I'm wandering, it wouldn't be too terrible to have a Colson Whitehead novel in hand.

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More Soon.

JS