My father rarely recommends books to me. Twice now, he has given me a physical copy of a book and asked me to read it. He said this one was his favorite novel of all time. 
 The last book he gave me was about vampires and really stupid people. It sucked. Before this one, it was the only book he'd EVER given me. It's weird, my father is a cultured individual, and he'd given me a really shitty thing to read. With that window into his tastes, I wasn't jumping up and down about this one. 
 But, in fairness to him, he gave me that first book to read for a specific reason, and it wasn't the vampires. I suppose I just can't separate the overall poorness of the book from the specific reason I was reading.* 
 Regardless of all that, this book, he also gave it to me. So this is the SECOND novel he's personally given me to enjoy. Thank the gods, it was actually very good. I can see how it could be someone's favorite. I fell in love with the prose, and with the rich inner-lives of the characters. The novel didn't have an obvious good guy to root for, it was populated with people with more realistic motivations that a lot of novels that I read. Yes, it was somewhat literary and probably has expectations of fitting more neatly in that genre than the stuff I normally read. 
 Well, whatever. I liked it, a lot. It wasn't perfect, it hooked me hard early but lost steam for a bit as some characters seemed to float through the story without doing much of anything before having a pretty exciting climax. 
 So, there. 
 In other news, the past few months in my personal life have been busy. I can't recall reading as little as I have been since I've been an adult. Things probably won't get back to normal for at least another month. My backlog has been hundreds of books long for years now, that list has only grown. Sigh. 
 Oh yeah, and I forgot, the novel is about a damaged woman that has her home repossessed due to a clerical error by the city, and the new owner is scraping himself up from poverty and has no intentions of giving the home back to its former owner. Both people get increasingly desperate for what they both consider rightfully theirs. Also, there was a movie of the same name that covers this novel as well. 
 *My father lived for a whole year at a base in the Antarctic in his youth and I spent many an hour grilling him on the details of how day-to-day life was living there, from the semi-permanent light (or dark) and the type of cold that doesn't exist in most places on earth. This vampire book, he said, gave the most accurate descriptions of living in that part of the world he'd ever seen. That was the only reason I was given that book, and that was, he noted, the only reason HE read it.