Beautiful Ruins is the kind of book that justifies beach holidays, so you can read it lounging in the sun. I don’t mean that as anything but a compliment.
Here is a bit I liked, because it is a bit that I resonate with. After all, for all the fancy literary criticism you can read about books much more highly regarded than this intricately plotted musing on memory and love, it always comes down to what we can resonate with:
Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway – its true religion? Wasn’t the theatre our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons – but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it!
Your Correspondent, Thinks it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.