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Light Years 4 stars

Review of 'Light Years' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

 I feel fine, but I'm ill. Possibly terminally. What kind of book do you want to read when you're in that condition if you have no religion? I'm sure there are secular books that are comforting, but my possible demise is not so certain or near that I want to seek those out. Yet. I don't want mindless distraction, but at some point I may re-read A Confederacy of Dunces to see if it can get a laugh out of me.
 I want to read good books and I'd kept James Salter's Light Years on tap, having heard it's his best. It was, for me, the perfect choice. Salter's prose is like poetry and it highlights subtle things about nature and people in ways that help you appreciate them in the book and makes you more aware of such things around you. It's not always pretty and seldom cheering (in my case it makes me aware of things in life I've missed and never done), but it's real in the way I want what I read these days to be.
 A brief excerpt:

In the morning the light came in silence. The house slept. The air overhead, glittering, infinite, the moist earth beneath—one could taste this earth, its richness, its density, bathe in the air, like a stream. Not a sound. The rind of the cheese had dried like bread. The glasses held the stale aroma of vanished wine.