"Baseball – what a boring game! One player threw the ball, another caught it, a third held a bat. Everyone else stood around." Chad Harbach's debut novel shares its title with a guide to playing baseball, which includes meditative observations on the art of life itself. It's a
Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (2003) Boston: Mariner-Houghton Mifflin, 2004 In Anne of Green Gables, Anne muses: "How do you know but that it hurts a geranium's feelings just to be called a geranium and nothing else?” The act of naming is one of primary importance -- from PEI to India
E.M. Forster's The Longest Journey (1907) When I started reading The Longest Journey, I was reading Keith Oatley's novel, Therefore Choose, which also opens with a scene at Cambridge. He writes: "If one were to go back a hundred years, the clothing would no doubt be different but the young men would
Jeffrey Eugenides' "Extreme Solitude" The New Yorker - June 7, 2010 issue There has been some chatter about magazine subscriptions lately (at Inklings and Pickle Me This) and that's gotten me feeling even a little more guilty about not keeping up with my "New Yorker" issues (as opposed to the
Austin Clarke's More Thomas Allen, 2008 I can't help it: when I see a stack of new books at the library, I am compelled to, at the very least, ogle them. Usually I pick one up. Often I pet one (even if it's just a shinier version of a favourite
