When a Book Takes Me By Surprise

Favorite read of the summer:

George Saunders’ new book, Lincoln in the Bardo.

I love when a book takes me by surprise. This is a new approach to storytelling. It’s a fresh style of writing that took some initial getting used to, but one that I quickly found enthralling.
Saunders has crafted a book that truly feels like nothing I’ve ever read before. It's hard to even know how to categorize it. But it is utterly readable, fascinating, so well written, so ingeniously conceived. Heartbreaking, historical, fantastical, frightful. I can’t recall the last time a novel had such an impact on me at different levels… spiritually, from an entertainment sense, and as a writer, finding myself so completely delighted by his writing style and this wild ride of a story. It played on a loop inside my head for weeks as I read it this summer. I hope in some way that this style of writing, this pure imagination and genius of the author, in some way impacts my writing and elevates my aspirations as a writer.