A Playlist by Anthony Doerr

First started reading Doerr earlier this year, really good stuff.

from Paper Cuts blog (NYT):

Living With Music: A Playlist by Anthony Doerr

Supposedly some writers work in rowdy coffee shops or compose whole novels to Megadeth but when I write, I wear a pair of chainsaw operator’s earmuffs. Every morning, I clamp those things around my head, the world sheds its noise, both literal and figurative, and a level of concentration comes over me that I’m hard-pressed to reproduce in other parts of my life.

Sometimes I’ve got the muffs on for six or seven-hour stints, and when I take them off I feel as if I’ve been yanked suddenly to the surface from the bottom of a well. Then it’s a bunch of e-mail or a bike ride in the hills, but when I get home? When dinner is done, and bills loom and the kids are hurling Legos across the carpet? Then it’s Music Time.

Review of his new book, Memory Wall:

The Nonpersistence of … What’s That Remembering Thing Called Again? By JANET MASLIN

A single overarching preoccupation connects the six brooding stories in Anthony Doerr’s “Memory Wall.” It is Mr. Doerr’s relentless fascination with memory and with the way memories are destroyed, eroded, drowned, faded or eaten away. “How can it be such a frail, perishable thing?” he asks about memory in the title story. He finds an assortment of somber ways to answer that question again and again.