Of the suburbs
Something that makes me smile:
“It is the bottom of the day, the deep well of shadows and springy half-light when late afternoon becomes early evening and we all want to sit down in a leather chair by an open window, have a drink near someone we love or like, read the sports and possibly doze for a while, then wake before the day is gone all the way, walk our cool yards and hear the birds chirp in the trees their sweet eventide songs. It is for such dewy interludes that our suburbs were built. And entered cautiously, they can serve us well no matter what our stations in life, no matter we have the aforementioned liberty or don’t. At times I can long so for that simple measure of day and place–when, say, I’m alone in misty Spokane or chilly Boston–that an unreasonable tear nearly comes to my eye. It is a pastoral kind of longing, of course, but we can have it all.”
From Richard Ford’s the Sportswriter.
To whom would I recommend this book? Not people who want a quick read–this book took me a little under a month to finish. People who aren’t necessarily the best kinds of people. People who sometimes find small bits of wonder in every day things. Frank Bascombe is my favorite kind of hero: the one who’s entirely unaware, the one who isn’t even really a hero at all. I loved this book. I’m so happy to have finished it–it was rough there for a bit.
April 9th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
whoa header image! you css maven!
i liked that excerpt. you should have made this an All-Literative April post since I neglected to do mine today.
April 9th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
When I was posting that I was like “Oh man, another piece of fiction that Snags would hate.”
That picture isn’t mine. Theme defaults. Mine were all wonky so I folded to the magic of WordPress defaults.