Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I have tried to work in more BIPOC and female authors on this list, but I also have a pretty big backlog of “old white dudes” sitting on bookshelves around my apartment that I need to read to round out the list. To that end I decided to read an author I have known about for years but never read: Philip Roth and his ridiculous 1969 work Portnoy’s Complaint.
A bizarre, hyper-sexualized tale of trysts and romps all theoretically poured out to a psychiatrist / psychologist in an office, the novel is the tale of one Alexander Portnoy and his weird life of involving himself with women and being obsequious to his Jewish parents. We never technically leave the session as it takes place within the entire book, with only the doctor commenting at the very end of the novel. We come to see how Alexander became the sexual deviant he is in his thirties through extended monologues focused on his childhood living under the thumb of a domineering mother and constipated, insurance-selling father. But the novel jumps around in time a lot more than that and consists of Portnoy’s current lust interest, a woman who is named as Mary Jane but whome Portnoy constantly refers to as “the Monkey.” We also travel with Portnoy to the land of Israel where he is confronted with aspects of his Jewishness that he has never gotten in touch with before the trip. And we see all the times in between where Portnoy wrestles with his budding sexuality and urges as a young child leading up to his first formative relationships, one of which he refuses to continue unless the woman converts to Judaism. This book was an interesting yet off-putting look at what it was like to grow up in a Jewish family during World War II and afterward and how family dynamics played a key role in how the younger Alexander (and his sister, who gets mentioned in the beginning but later gets married off and we don’t see her very much) grows up in New Jersey during these crucial, important years of our nation’s history. We also see the struggles of Portony to unleash his sexual comportments versus his real ambition to do good in the world, from being on a Congressional committee to leading a high up position within the New York City government. But all of this is bogged down by the sexual tension that permeates the novel and while it may read as quiescent today, definitely shocked and appalled readers the world over when it was released at the end of the Sixties. I don’t know that I would recommend this book to everyone as it is full of explicit material and ravages the psyche that is tormented by it. While apparently Roth wanted to use the psychologist’s session as a way to expose life as it really was during the sexual revolution it comes off as just bizarre (not to keep using that adjective) and something that I think a female audience would cringe through reading. I had read for years and years that this was Roth’s master work and while I don’t see that I am still considering reading more of his body of literature as I progress through my own writing career. Roth was indeed a towering force in American letters and influenced a whole generation of Jewish (and non-Jewish) writers to show their lives on the page in this country of ours. Thanks for joining me on this reading adventure.
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Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I have tried to work in more BIPOC and female authors on this list, but I also have a pretty big backlog of “old white dudes” sitting on bookshelves around my apartment that I need to read to round out the list. To that end I decided to revisit an author I haven’t read for seven years, Neil Gaiman and his astonishing 2001 work American Gods.
A novel about gods and their devotees, this was an amazing story that kept me hooked throughout all of its over 500 pages. We first meet one of the two main characters, Shadow, as he is just getting out of prison for the crimes of robbing his former partners and beating them up. Shadow is a big guy, you see, and after he gets out of prison and thinks he is going home he meets the second main character Wednesday, who offers Shadow a job as a driver and bodyguard. While at first Shadow rebuffs him, after he learns the life he led before prison is no longer feasible (his wife and best friend died in a car accident) he takes the job. After a choice encounter with the first god Shadow receives a coin (Shadow’s into coin tricks too) that inadvertently brings his wife back to a sort of life and she ends up following him around the story until the very end. The story becomes a rollicking traveling tale, with Shadow and Wednesday visiting gods in Chicago and Cario, Illinois where Shadow briefly works as an undertaker’s apprentice. Wednesday later has Shadow deposited at the town of Lakeside, Wisconsin where he is supposed to lay low but where he meets some of the more interesting (almost all of them non-god) characters in the novel. Later a major character is killed (I won’t give it away) and that leads to an all consuming confrontation that haunts the rest of the book. Shadow volunteers to be there at the wake for this character which involves lashing himself to an ancient tree for days, where he ultimately dies and comes back to life reborn. Shadow also learns a major revelation while “dead.” And while the rest of the novel ends in what could be considered an anti-climactic way, I really enjoyed it. There are some wrap up (and to my mind, Stephen King-esque) bits in Lakeside to finish up the novel and then Shadow continues on his travels around the world. This book was an incredible read for many reasons, not least of which are Gaiman’s incredible knowledge of mythology and the gods which populate not just the main story but several asides as well. This is also a great “on the road” novel where we see the main characters Shadow and Wednesday (who turns out to be Odin in disguise, not to spoil too much) recruiting the old gods to fight against the new gods (represented by things like the internet and media). There are tons of characters and each one is interesting and memorable. I also happened to read the 2011 published edition of this novel which is considered “the author’s preferred text” and includes an additional twelve thousand words of content as well as some extras. And I was so into this book that I went back to the original inspiration for wanting to read it, an “American Gods novella” that was included in Fragile Things that I re-read to see what Shadow was up to in the years following the events of American Gods. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a masterful, fantastical read full of magic and mystery and good old fashioned traveling around the United States. While in my review of Fragile Things I noted not all of the stories were for me, American Gods definitely was and I would easily recommend it to anyone looking for a great tale full of great characters. Thanks as always for joining along with me on this reading adventure. Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I have tried to work in more BIPOC and female authors on this list, but I also have a pretty big backlog of “old white dudes” sitting on bookshelves around my apartment that I need to read to round out the list. To that end I decided to go with a book I have wanted to read for ages: David Abrams’s 2012 Iraq War classic Fobbit.
A tale about the boredom and folly of war, Fobbit follows a rag tag group of Iraq War Army fighters at various stages in their careers. Staff Sergeant Chase Gooding seems to be the main character, the titular “fobbit” who stays at Forward Operating Base Trinity and works in the Public Affairs Office under Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Harkleroad. Death tolls come in every day and it’s up to Gooding and others in his office to write the press releases that will sanitize the fallen and show the war to be going great. But we don’t just hang out in the FOB all novel, we also meet several other characters including Lieutenant Colonel Vic Duret and Sargeant Brock Lumley who are actually out in the streets of Iraq fighting the “enemy,” and we meet Captain Abe Shrinkle who manages to make a mess of every “situation” he finds himself in, first shrinking away from killing a terrorist who had rammed an Abrams tank and then killing a mentally ill Iraqi and then another “Local National” when he tries to torch a Coalition truck without realizing there is a man underneath. Shrinkle then gets relieved of his command by Duret and is forced to work in the fitness center gathering towels. He eventually goes rogue and winds up hanging out in the Australian pool where a very tragic event happens that I won’t give away for those who want to read this fabulous book. Of course Gooding’s PAO department is called in to massage the horror and make it palatable for the media, which in this case is damn near impossible. This book was a great read for many reasons, not least of which is that Abrams absolutely nails the stupidity and yet incredible morale of warfare. Each of these characters is fully realized and that makes their observations of the war that much more realistic. As is probably known, Abrams himself fought in this conflict and so his recollections are spot on and deserve commendation. He also started a blog called The Quivering Pen which unfortunately shut down in 2020 but in which I was fortunate enough to write a blog post about my first time writing a novel. Abrams knows about the banality of warfare and how it grates on those who made the decision to go into the armed forces and it totally shows in this work. Even the title is a play on words, calling upon older writers such as Tolkein as Abrams mentions in the beginning of the book. I would highly recommend this book for anyone looking for a rollicking tale about the disastrous invasion of Iraq from 2003-2011 (and beyond, as we still have troops there) and looking for characters that illustrate that conflict in the most imaginative and entertaining way possible. Thanks for joining me on this reading adventure. Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I have tried to work in more BIPOC and female authors on this list, but I also have a pretty big backlog of “old white dudes” sitting on bookshelves around my apartment that I need to read to round out the list. To that end I decided to go with a novel and an author that I had heard about for years was absolutely phenomenal, Michael Chabon and his 2007 work The Yiddish Policemen's Union.
This was a fantastic read for many reasons, not least of which would be Chabon’s exacting use of language, but also his captivating use of the smallest bit of world building to give us an expansive universe that makes sense. Meyer Landsman is one of the all time great characters I have encountered in the books I have read, and his continual interactions with his ex-wife and cousin made for a most entertaining read. For those who don’t want the novel spoiled too much I won’t give away too many plot details, but it probably does help to mention that this book is set in an alternate timeline from our own in which the persecuted Jews of the Holocaust were re-settled not in Israel in 1948 but in Sitka, Alaska, on a small island near the south of the state. However when we meet the main characters this is threatened with “reversion” as the time limit has expired for the area to become once again part of Alaska. On the face of it this novel reads like a classic detective story, with Meyer being introduced and the discovery of the body happening immediately. Investigating the local chess scene (a board was found near the body with an unfinished game), Meyer determines that this was Mendel Shpilman, a person of much importance within the world of the mafia in Sitka. Meyer conducts his investigation through several hilarious set pieces, including getting into the mother of Shpilman’s car at the funeral and going out to a strange place that is controlled by the Verbovers (the mafia) and getting caught by the local police. Behind this place is a diabolical plot that Meyer discovers a bit too late to prevent, but he does end up solving the murder. As stated this was one of the most unusual and unique novels I have ever encountered, and with each page I was blown away by Chabon’s use of language. He even included a Glossary of terms, both made-up and real, of Yiddish in the back of the book to help readers such as myself. Also included in my edition of the novel was Chabon’s 1997 Harper’s essay “Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts” where some of these ideas were beginning to be fleshed out. If I did have one criticism of the novel, it would be I wish we had more discovery of the other things changed in this world. We get a brief mention that Berlin was destroyed by a nuclear weapon in 1946 and a few other tantalizing details of other nations but we don’t get a full picture of how different this world is from our own. But that’s a minor quibble with what is overall an excellent story and one I would highly recommend to anyone wanting an excellent detective yarn that also dabbles in what-if type scenarios. Thanks for joining me on this reading adventure. Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I have tried to work in more BIPOC and female authors on this list, but I also have a pretty big backlog of “old white dudes” sitting on bookshelves around my apartment that I need to read to round out the list. To that end I decided to go with a book and author I have wanted to read for ages and never got around to: Vladimir Nobokov’s 1957 tale Pnin.
A bizarre college story wrapped around an enigmatic main character, Pnin revolves around the titular hero (first name “Timofey”) as he navigates the collegiate world of Waindell (based on places the real Nabokov taught) and attempts to continue his Russian language studies and teaching. When we first meet Pnin he is on the wrong train to give a lecture. Fortunately he gets that straightened out and we see him giving the lecture to a throng of what he perceives to be dead people from his life. We then see him reconciled with his ex-wife Liza and we learn that she tricked Pnin into coming to America to marry, only to leave him for a psychologist, Dr. Eric Wind. Pnin finds a place to stay with the Clements but is kicked out when their daughter returns. Later Pnin meets Liza’s son for a visit but is flummoxed by his inability to relate to the boy, Victor, with books and a soccer ball. We then see Pnin entertaining people at a lodge by his Russian aptitude and that of his croquet playing, and the novel wraps up with an epic faculty party hosted by our main character. We are finally led to understand how the narrator knows Pnin as the narrator describes his run-ins with Pnin over the years and how the narrator is now the leader of the Russian department at Waindell college and wants Pnin to stay teaching, but sadly our main character has already left the grounds in his car. This was without a doubt one of the weirdest and yet funniest books I have encountered in years, and made more so knowing now that it was based on much of Nabokov’s life as a college professor. The descriptions alone of the various characters are worth the price of admission (which comes in the form of many dense Russian phrases Pnin uses over the course of the book), and the story itself weaves its way from that part of the world to America. The other characters are all unique creations but by far the most work went into Pnin and his wanderings and thoughts. I don’t think I have come across a “college faculty” book that entertained me this much since Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who has yet to read Nabokov as I did, as it is a hilarious take on the collegiate world and the great writer was at the top of his game when he composed this ridiculous tale. Thank you for joining me along on this reading adventure. Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I have tried to work in more BIPOC and female authors on this list, but I also have a pretty big backlog of “old white dudes” sitting on bookshelves around my apartment that I need to read to round out the list. To that end I decided to go with a book I managed to pick up at my former job working at a bookstore that I have always wanted to read: Colum McCann’s 2009 National Book Award winning Let the Great World Spin.
This novel was a great read for many reasons, not least of which would be McCann’s ineffable ability to tell a stunning yarn narrated by so many different people. The story revolves around New York in the 1970’s and an event that really happened: a man named Philippe did spread a wire between the twin towers and tightrope-walked across it in 1974. The entire novel circulates around this event and we are introduced to two of the main characters, Corrigan and Ciaran, in the second chapter. Corrigan is very devoted to the Order, a religious organization that demands his entire life. Ciaran is visiting him from Ireland after having grown up with his brother there. There is a burst of tragedy involving two other main characters and a freeway after Corrigan is driving some prostitutes home from court after being arrested, and we lose one of the main characters just like that. The rest of the novel delves into various themes: personal familial loss during the Vietnam War, artists trying to find inspiration in the dirty seventies New York and instead locating parties and drugs, the life of a prostitute on those same mean streets and how she survives, as well as other themes like graffiti and whether or not it should be considered art. We meet Claire and Solomon, parents of a young boy who goes to Southeast Asia on a mission to count the war dead, and we meet Lara and Blaine, the artists who have swore off the bad life and moved to a remote cabin in upstate New York, and we delve into the life of Adelita, the young nurse who falls into Corrigan’s life and turns it upside down. As stated this was one of the best books I have encountered in a long while, mostly due to the masterful way in which McCann weaves the rich tapestries of each individual live into something that is more than its parts, but also somewhat due to the narrative framing device of the tightrope walker. Most characters have something to gain and to profoundly lose, and are hoping for a better future for their children, but are not always granted it. In a very moving section towards the end we see one of Claire’s friends in loss, Gloria, adopt the very children of the prostitute that died in the before-mentioned car crash, and one of those children gets to narrate her own part of the work in returning to New York to see the dying Claire. It’s an amazing ending to a quite remarkable collection of stories and helps wrap them all up. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for a great New York narrative (one before I read it I thought pertained to 9/11 and the WTC, but that horrible event looms silently in the future of most of these tales) from the seventies that also ties together many different characters and settings into one fantastic novel. Thanks for joining me along this reading adventure. Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I have tried to work in more BIPOC and female authors on this list, but I also have a pretty big backlog of “old white dudes” sitting on bookshelves around my apartment that I need to read to round out the list. To that end, I decided to revisit a writer whose novels I hadn’t read since the first year of this experiment, Ernest Hemingway. I had long wanted to read his 1929 work A Farewell to Arms as it is considered one of his greatest novels, and now I can see why.
The story revolves around Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an ambulance driver during the Great War, and Catherine Barkley, the nurse that helps take care of him after he’s injured. But this novel is about far more than that: the pointlessness of war, the desire for human connection even in a world torn apart by it. The first time Henry is sent to the front he is injured by artillery fire in his leg; he is subsequently taken to the hospital in Milan to recover where he is reunited with Catherine and it is here they become intimate. He gets kicked out of the hospital for contracting jaundice because he drank alcohol. Henry returns to the front only to find the Italian side (for which he is fighting, as an American) is in retreat. He helps them return and they take the ambulances up to another town. After the retreat he is put into a line of officers who are considered to have betrayed the Italian army for their retreat. He jumps into a river to escape it, which leads him to a train. He makes it back to Milan and then he reunites with Catherine in a different town. They hatch a plan to get Henry out of the war zone for good and up to Switzerland, which they execute at night by rowing over a lake. At first they live in the forests of Switzerland but Catherine soon needs to have her baby. They move to another town with a hospital, where the operation to have her baby commences, and I won’t give much more away than this for those who want to read this incredible (yet tragic) work. This was a great read for many reasons, not least of which is something I have covered before: Hemingway’s sparse prose. There is never any more than is needed to flesh out each scene, whether that’s a battlefield or the inside of a hospital or a hotel. And yet he always manages to provide enough description to set the scene from nature or within the city. This novel also reminded me of other great anti-war novels in that the main character escapes the military and is wanted for desertion, and makes his way out of the war. This is now the fourth Hemingway work I have encountered (after The Old Man and the Sea, his shorter works, and For Whom the Bell Tolls) and I am still amazed after all this time of his command of language, even if this was not my favorite of his works. I would say my initial lessons from reading this amazing author (keep it simple, using a novel to tell a deeper truth about life) still hold up. That’s going to do it for the Reading List for this year. Thanks for sticking with me as I have found a new job and with it comes less time for reading. We’ll start this whole thing up again in the new year. Thanks for joining me on this reading adventure! Hello readers and welcome back (finally) to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned in previous entries, I have made it my goal to include more BIPOC authors on this list. To that end I decided to read Salman Rushdie’s landmark, multiple Booker-winning 1981 work Midnight’s Children.
This novel was quite a read for many reasons, not least of which is the time span that Rushdie includes within his narrative. Ostensibly it is the tale of one Saleem Sinai, who was born exactly at midnight during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, and therefore gains magical powers from that event. But the narrative actually starts decades and a generation before him, with Aadam Aziz, Saleem’s grandfather, and his journey finding love and marriage and children. The story really picks up with young Saleem realizing his gift of telepathic communication with the hundreds of other “midnight’s children” who were also born at that time and received amazing gifts. But this is merely scratching the surface of this story as we get introduced to multiple characters in the family as well as the exile of Saleem to live with his uncle and aunt at a certain point. The overall story revolves around an older Saleem telling it to his soon-to-be wife Padma and his son, who is not really his son but that of Parvati (a “witch” who befriends and saves Saleem’s life) and Shiva (Saleem’s enemy throughout most of the tale). There is an incredible reveal about halfway through the novel that makes the reader question much of which has gone on before and gives a different perspective to the entire novel. We see the horrific after effects of war take place in a serious way against the family, and later Saleem goes on a pilgrimage joining the army which was to my mind the most interesting part of the novel. After which he finds both his memory and his way back to his old “ayah” at the pickle factory where he is telling the story in the present tense of the book. This was without a doubt one of the weirdest and most unusual books I have ever read. Rushdie definitely has his own way of writing, which includes a lot of repetition of three words in a row and the use of the letter “O” throughout. Like Homeland Elegies there were a ton of Indian and other words I had to look up throughout reading. These elements help shape the narrative toward the magical realist themes of the tale and give it its own style. The story occurs over several decades in Indian history and is an analogous tale to the reality that took place during the partition, political upheaval, war, and “Emergency” times under Indira Gandhi. I learned a lot about Indian history while reading this book. Thank you readers for bearing with me as I have taken on a new job and thus have a little less time for reading; therefore this epic tale took a few months to read. Thanks as always for joining me on this reading adventure. Hello readers and welcome to this installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously, over the past years I have made it a goal to include more BIPOC authors on the list. To that end I decided to read Richard Wright’s landmark 1940 work, Native Son.
This novel was an incredible read for a few reasons, and made all the more incredible knowing that it was Wright’s follow up to his collection of novellas Uncle Tom’s Children. The book centers around a black character named Bigger Thomas who lives in a cramped one-room apartment on the south side of Chicago with his mother, brother and sister. He has plans to become a pilot someday but is not allowed to take classes because of the color of his skin. Bigger has issues gaining employment and is often hanging out at pool hall where he roughs up one of his friends in a misunderstanding about their plans to rob a hardware store. Later in the day Bigger goes to the rich and white Mr. Dalton’s home to inquire about a job he gains through the relief service. Here he learns he is to become Mr. Dalton’s driver and also be the driver for his daughter Mary. That evening he is instructed to take Mary out to her university classes but Mary tells Bigger she instead wants to go out and meet up with her boyfriend, the Communist Jan. They also want to go to a place to eat that is in Bigger’s neighborhood, as in their clueless way they want to understand how black people live. All three of them proceed to get drunk and then they drop Jan off. Bigger has issues getting Mary into her house because she’s so drunk and it is at this point in the story he commits an accidental crime that I won’t mention for those who want to read this exceptional book. From here on out his job with the Dalton’s is in serious jeopardy and Bigger is eventually found out for what he has done; he then flees for his life. He is eventually caught and put on trial for his crimes, a trial in which the prosecutor running for office describes what his punishment should be and the Communist lawyer set to defend Bigger delivers a lengthy speech contextualizing his client’s actions in a racist America. Finally we see Bigger meeting with his lawyer again at the end in his jail cell before the end. This book was a very powerful meditation on black life in the 1930’s even in a supposedly less segregated city like Chicago, and despite the plain language and slow pace of the novel Wright has much to say about the relations between the races and why Bigger did what he did. I hesitate to call Bigger that more modern term “antihero” because what he does is grotesque, but as Wright says in later letters along with my copy of the novel his goal was to “objectively” show this character for what he does and thinks. I will also mention a trigger or content warning here regarding some events that take place within the novel, including sexual assault (which the main character is charged with but doesn’t commit against Mary, but does to his girlfriend Bessie). Despite that I would still recommend this novel as an unflinching look at black life during this time and how black people were treated vastly differently than white people leading up to the civil rights era. There was a helpful essay included in my copy of the book entitled “How ‘Bigger’ was Born” in which Wright elucidates a bit more about how the character came to be in his mind and how he worked on the novel. I also broke my regular rule about not watching film adaptations and viewed HBO/A24’s fairly decent modernized take on the story, although I did not like how it changed the ending. Thanks as always for joining me on this reading adventure. Hello readers and welcome back to a new series for the website, which as I stated previously began as an outgrowth of a file that’s been sitting in my Google Drive for months now so I thought I’d just break out some of the more important elements. That initial post was called “What’s a Reader For?” and was an attempt to look at all the sources we bring into account each day as we try to understand the world. In the age of the internet and social media I realize that could be an infinite amount so I’m going to break it down into the topics and sources I try to follow each week.
Last time I rounded up some of the most important sources I use to figure out what is going on in the world of books and literature. So what are some more important sites and newsletters to use? I’d be remiss if I didn’t kick off this “part two” list with a magazine I have come to enjoy over the last year(s) that has really been a great resource: Writer’s Digest. I have signed up for their email newsletters and get something interesting to my inbox every week. The magazine is chock full of handy tips for craft and also for those a little farther along in their publishing journey. They always interview an author for every issue and include agent spotlights as well. It’s just overall a great resource for writers at any stage in their career. (They also offer critique services as well as a shop for classes.) [ I should also note that my wife purchased me a subscription to another magazine years ago called Poets & Writers that was helpful though I did not get as much out of it; however I still follow them on Twitter. ] Up next I’ll mention a few more literary newsletters I try to get to each week. The Millions is a site that has been around for twenty years and publishes book previews, reviews, essays, question and answer sessions and all other kinds of writing that I have found to be very helpful over the years. (One of their writers, Ed Simon, helped me flesh out a post I wrote a few years back during the pandemic, and he’s one I would highly recommend.) Another newsletter I try to peruse each week is Arts & Letters Daily as they collect some of the best essays and articles published around the web and in journals. Another phenomenal creator (and the author of Steal Like an Artist among many other books) I follow is Austin Kleon, who each week posts ten things worth sharing to his email newsletter (he also posts regularly on the Tweet Machine). Another great newsletter is New Left Review’s Sidecar as they post essays and reviews that are highly worth your while. And a final newsletter/journal worth checking out is one I have stumbled across in the last few years, The New Atlantis, which tends to publish science-related essays but covers a lot more than that. Finally there are a few independent publishers out there that I try to follow as they have very interesting newsletters: OR Books, Haymarket Books, and of course our very own local and highly regarded Graywolf Press. Well once again this “part two” list is just scratching the surface of the many amazing websites, journals, magazines, and newsletters available that will help you understand the literary world and its various aspects while also honing your craft as a writer. And of course once again as with the previous entries in this series, feel free to add your own source lists in the comments. There may be one more part in the books/literature series (those places I follow via feedly) before I move onto another topic: environmental news. Stay tuned and stay informed! |
AuthorJohn Abraham is a published author and freelance journalist who lives in the Twin Cities with his wife Mary and their cat. He is writing a speculative dystopian novel and is seeking representation and a publisher. Archives
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