How To Be Bad by David Bowker
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin. ISBN: 0-312-32826-5

Mark Madden is an unremarkable twenty-three year old bookstore owner in London. Specializing in rare and collectible books, Mark leads a somewhat monotonous routine existence. Mark’s obsessive compulsion for making innumerable lists about both mundane and esoteric things, and his rather innocent and uneventful love life are the most notable aspects to Mark’s clearly unexceptional life.

Things, however, begin to change one day for Mark when he runs into Caro Sewell, his former girlfriend whom he hadn’t seen in nearly six years.

My review of this book appeared originally in another publication and is reprinted here:

Brooklyn Follies
By Paul Auster
Henry Holt and Company, $24.00, 304 pages
ISBN 0-8050-7714-6

Meet Nathan Glass. He is eager to tell you all about himself. But to hear Nathan tell it, he is—at least at the outset of this superbly comic novel—a cynical fifty-nine year old man who has returned to Brooklyn for only one reason: He is quietly waiting to drop dead.