Reading…
The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear
“One afternoon after he left, I ventured into the garage. I was desperate to be in the spaces he had occupied. The garage was dim, but as soon as I entered I saw something wedged in the bench vise: one of my mother’s shoes. My father had mended the wooden heel and left it there for the glue to dry. I walked over, unscrewed the vise carefully, and placed the shoe on the wooden table among his clamps and filing tools. It was the last thing he fixed before he left his marriage.”
Reading…
The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje
There are times when a storm invades the landscape of the Canadian Shield, where I live during the summers, and I wake up believing I am in mid-air, at the height of the tall pines above the river, watching the approaching lightning, and hearing behind it the arrival of its thunder. It is only from such a height that you see the great choreography and danger of storms. In the house, a few bodies are asleep, and near them the hound, her ears tormented, shaking, as if her heart is about to collapse or be flung out. I have seen her face in the half-light of such storms as if within the velocity of some space-travel experiment, the normally beautiful features thrust back. And while others sleep, rocked in this wild nature, only the river below looks stable. During the rips of light, you see the acres of trees capsized, everything tilted in a biblical palm. A few times every summer this happens. I expect and so prepare for the arrival of the thunder with this dog, this sweet hunter.
Reading…
When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman
“It had been an adventure to me, that was all. An adventure most people said was make-believe, but I had seen it and so had my brother. A year before, it had loomed towards us out of the mist, a large brass bell floating on the waves as if it had been carelessly dropped from some heavenly steeple. It was a bell that called no one to prayer, and yet there we were, moored right next to it.
‘This is creepy,’ said my brother.
‘More than creepy. We shouldn’t be out here,’ I said as I ran my hand across the rough cold metal, and as my brother started the engine, the bell suddenly struck its note and I fell to the floor in tears. I told my brother I had slipped, caught my foot on some rope. But what I never told him was that as the bell chimed, the metal suddenly felt warm; as if it had secretly craved the scanty touch of human contact and the sound it had so suddenly made was actually the sound of its pain.”
Reading…
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
“He was perfectly aware that certain once-canonical writers (always male, always white) had fallen into disrepute. Hemingway was a misogynist, a homophobe, a repressed homosexual, a murderer of wild animals. Mitchell thought this was an instance of tarring with too wide a brush. If he was to argue this with Claire, however, he ran the risk of being labeled a misogynist himself. More worryingly, Mitchell had to ask himself if he wasn’t being just as knee-jerk in resisting the charge of misogyny as college feminists were in leveling it, and if his resistance didn’t mean that he was, somewhere deep down, prone to misogyny himself. Why, after all, had he brought A Moveable Feast in the first place? Why, knowing what he did about Claire, had he decided to whip it out of his backpack at this particular moment? Why, in fact, had the phrase whip it out just occurred to him?”
Reading…
The Guardians by Andrew Pyper
“We remain marked, we small-towners dressed in what, as Randy and I walk into Jake’s, feels instantly like borrowed city-slicker duds. Beneath the camouflage, all of us in this room are branded by shared experience and ritual as indelibly as members of a religion who are alone in understanding its rules and expectations. I’ve noticed over the years how we recognize each other among strangers: something draws me to those who have grown up in a Grimshaw, despite our efforts to hide every embarrassing hickdom, every clue that might give away our corn-fed, tranquilized youths. Part of what we share is the knowledge that every small town has a second heart, smaller and darker than the one that pumps the blood of good intentions. We alone know that the picture of home cooking and oak trees and harmlessness is false.”
Reading…
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt. (Winner of every award ever.)
“Tub was missing when we returned. He had been so weak it did not occur to me to tie him off, but while we were gone he had stood and walked away. I followed the trail of plump, dust-covered blood orbs leading over the short hill that walled in our camp; the far side of this was near the vertical and he had fallen, sliding fifty yards under his own weight before coming to rest at the root of a wide sequoia. He was butted up to this by the spine and his legs were pointed ignobly skyward and I thought, What a life it is for man’s animals, what a trial of pain and endurance and senselessness.”
Reading…
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
“This is my life, I thought, as my taxi slogged through heavy traffic and inched through the tunnel to Logan Airport. I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of my journey still stuck to my feet?”
Reading…
The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert
“You would think a woman in her eighties wouldn’t cry for her mommy, and I don’t really, it’s really for the little girl that I was that I cry after I’ve had three or four whiskeys of an evening. But the weeping is a pleasure. When I cry like a baby, my aches go, and I feel skinned, refreshed afterward. At that moment I’m happy to be sad and wish I could be so melancholy for hours. But it’s fleeting. Sobriety is quick, and the night too long, and as I lie awake with sleeplessness, nervous from drink, I wish I hadn’t drunk a drop.”
Reading…
There but for the by Ali Smith
