I’d like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that the “Awful Library Books” Website is the digital gift that keeps on giving. I hope that picture was submitted to the Pulitzer committee that year, and at least one of … Continue reading Bloody your hands on a cactus tree, wipe it on your dress and send it to me
“Actually, we hadn’t really stepped into a clearing: it was more that the thin woods we’d come through had ended, and now in front of us there was open marshland as far as we could see. The pale sky looked vast and you could see it reflected every so often in the patches of water breaking up the land. Not so long ago, the woods must have extended further, because you could see here and there ghostly dead trunks poking out of the soil, most of them broken off only a few feet up. And beyond the dead trunks, maybe … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
“She hadn’t caught me, obviously enough, at a very erotic moment in my life. I had never been much of a pickup artist–a few ghastly encounters in my twenties had seen to that–and the alternative prospect of a euphoric romance not only exhausted me but, in fact, struck me as impossible. This wasn’t because of any fidelity to my absent wife or some aversion to sex, which, I like to think, grabs me as much as the next man. No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
“It was the boredom that comes of being cut off from everything that could make life sweet, or arouse curiosity, or enlarge the range of the senses. It was the boredom the comes of having to perform endless tasks that have no savour and acquire skills one would gladly be without. I learned to march and drill and shoot and keep myself clean according to Army standards; to make my bed and polish my boots and my buttons and to wrap lengths of dung-colored rag around my legs in the approved way. None of it had any great reality for … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
“The judge was a tall big man with blue eyes and a brown billy-goat beard and he seemed to me to be old, though he was only around forty years of age at that time. His manner was grave. On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eight of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
“For the first time, her love for Edward was associated with a definable physical sensation, as irrefutable as vertigo. Before, she had known only a comforting broth of warm emotions, a thick winter blanket of kindness and trust. That has always seemed enough, an achievement in itself. Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else. When she was a late-developing fourteen, in despair that all her friends had breasts while … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
“We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy. We refilled our coffee mugs on floors we didn’t belong on. Hank Neary was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat with a book taken from the library, copied all its pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked to the passerby like the honest pages of business. He made it through a three-hundred-page novel every two … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
I was fascinated by J.D. Salinger before I’d ever read a word of his prose. In retrospect, I missed a lot of the touchstone authors that are greedily consumed by literary-minded adolescents. When I was supposed to be reading Vonnegut and Salinger as a salve against the tumbling indignities of high school, finding solace in voices that served as echoes of my own detachment and societal disdain, I was instead tracking through the works of John Steinbeck when I wanted something pulpy and smart, and the works of Stephen King when I just wanted something pulpy. The authors that were … Continue reading J.D. Salinger, 1919 – 2010
Last night a book made me physically ill. It wasn’t a Gray’s Anatomy book, although my longstanding aversion to televised surgeries is probably a good indicator about that particular tome having a similar effect. Nor was it a Grey’s Anatomy book, although I also suspect that I would have found that to be revolting in its own right. The book that made me sick came from the library. Like all the cool kids, I’ve been taking advantage of our local library system to help feed my book craving as we march through this wintry economic climate. There have been a … Continue reading Every cloud is numbered in the library, so is every kiss and every fly
“There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure out it’s the last we’ll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.” –Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin, 2009 “STOP! DON’T READ THIS SINISTER SHOCKER! NOT UNLESS YOU’RE PREPARED TO LIVE ON THE EDGE OF A NIGHTMARE FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE! WHERE THERE IS AN UNENDURABLE … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
Coffee for Two 