Angle of Repose

 

As any person with more than an ounce of style and fashion sense can tell you, accessories matter. It's not just about the clothes, it's also about what you wear with the clothes. Yes yes, this means purses and jewelry and scarves and shoes, etc etc etc. But it also means the magazine you read on the subway (no Star or People or Celebrities R Gr8, puh-leez), the color of your laptop case, and the book you read on the plane-train-automobile. Is this horribly snobbish? Definitely. Should you care if someone is judging you for your splashy tabloid rag? Definitely not. Will you care? Maybe. So if you're anxious to be judged as a stylish and smart person with the sort of gravitas and opinions one would want to invite to dinner parties AND/OR (this is very emphatically an and/or situation) you just want to read a good book, read on.

Angle of Repose is blooming brilliant. It's about a historian by the name of Lyman Ward, confined to a wheelchair in his retirement, who is chronicling his grandmother's life in the West. As Lyman digs through all the hardship, triumph, grief, and wind that one expects from a pioneer story, he reflects on his own life during the tumultuous 1970s.

Why it's a Good Book:
-Stegner's writing is simply great. It's beautiful while still being conversational, it's perfectly descriptive without being overwhelming, and he creates a page-turner without letting his readers skip over anything.
-The characters are 100% believable and all of them are sympathetic. You just want the best for everyone and suffer the pain of knowing that it just can't possibly work out that way. It's a Pulitzer Prize-winner. I'm fairly certain there's a requirement for it to be somewhat depressing.
-Even when it's depressing, Stegner manages to make it uplifting and hopeful.
-Even if you've never been there, it wonderfully captures the feeling of the Midwest.

Why it's a Book that will make you look Good:
-It's a Pulitzer Prize-winner.
-The title is sort of ambiguous and implies that you're smart enough to know what it means. It uses the word "repose."
-Wallace Stegner is well-known enough to make people furrow their brows and say, "Hey, he sounds familiar..." but not so famous that people think you're reading him to look good.
-It uses a nice font. And the colors are eye-catching without being garish. Same goes for the cover photo.
-It's respectably thick.

Friends, put down Fifty Shades. Everybody is on to you and, like P.J. O'Rourke has warned, you will be embarrassed if you die in the middle of it. Pick up Angle of Repose. Your eulogies will be better.

Got a Book That Makes You Look Good? Leave it in the comments!

(This post was originally published, with minor differences, on VintagePixieBoots, where I was formerly a contributor and where I got the idea for this blog.)