Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Hi, everyone. Jules here. Eisha and I were excited to participate in our first Wicked Cool Overlooked Books entry. If you haven’t already noticed, Colleen Mondor at Chasing Ray started this series idea (talk about a wicked cool overlooked book the first Monday of every month), and a handful of bloggers participated last month. We weren’t able to play ’til now, because our blogger interviews are every Monday. But we cleared today to participate and got to work on our first entry.

So, together we composed a co-review of sorts about two wicked cool overlooked books. And, blammo! I inadvertently deleted. the. entire. post. Time seemed to move in slow motion while I watched this rather long-ish post fade from view, due to a misunderstanding I was having about the admin functions of the blog, and slip from our hands altogether. Yes, a thoughtfully-composed post on both of our parts; I had spent most of my Sunday thinking about these books and trying to find the words to articulate why they work and why I find them so beautiful. And Eisha had made such lovely contributions to the post (she was joking about them being overbearing “former-lit-major pontifications,” but they weren’t at all). She was very understanding about my stooooopid mistake, but I still hate that it happened.

Anyway, life goes on. Sweat the big stuff. But here is — for what it’s worth and since I simply do not have the energy this morning to try to recreate all the many, many profound and insightful and amazing things (heh) that we had to say about the books in the post I deleted; it would have changed your life, indeed — the EXTREME Cliffs Notes version of our first Wicked Cool Overlooked Books entry. And forgive the, uh, slight lack-of-detail:

Jon McGregor rocks. He wrote two stunningly beautiful books (both adult fiction). The first, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), was reviewed by Eisha here around this time last year, and it’s pure unadulterated loveliness, as Eisha put it. Go read that review. His second novel — So Many Ways to Begin, a companion novel to the first one — was just published in March and is also beautiful, and I promise we had lots of things to say about McGregor’s techniques as an author and all the stunning prose (and maybe we can start over again and try to co-review it one day soon). For now, you can read this review from The Observer. The End.

We promise we’ll get this right in July! (And thanks again for understanding, Eisha) . . .