Facts are only the random detritus of our lives until they are connected by story. Stories, to paraphrase Robert Kroetsch, make us real. If there is anything like truth accessible to us in the world, it must be through the ways we tell of ourselves to each other. Tomson Highway's
Locks are like this: to break their purpose you must know them fully, as you would know certain faces. You must understand the flick and tick of tumblers, the swivel of nooks in metal. I did not know how to pick a lock. I tapped the first small silver circle.
The connection is between Nadifa Mohamed's Black Mamba Boy (Harper Collins, 2010) and Rosie Alison's The Very Thought of You (Alma Books, 2009) but these quotations contain ** SPOILERS ** so if you haven't already read these novels and plan to do so, you might want to skip these bits.
These two jumped out at me because I have gotten the Spider Bathtub Rescue down to a science. Or, given the array of materials I keep on hand, perhaps it would be better described as an artform? Although it's particularly hard when they're very young spiders, the almost see-through kind:
I love it when one read brushes up against another and this happened twice with two of mine this reading month.First, in Christina Longford's Making Conversation (1931), I came across this: "Miss Spencer at the High School had always scolded her for saying 'well,' and used to ask, 'Where's
