Category: Reading
Possession by A.S. Byatt
The Waves by Virginia Wolf
Anything by Robertson Davies
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
The MIlagro Beanfield War by John Nichols
The Road to ‘Wellville by T.C. Boyle
Sabbath’s Theatre by Phillip Roth
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle
The Ghormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peak
An Equal Music by Vikram Seth
The Piano Man’s Daughter by Timothy Findley
The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
The Magus by John Fowles
Captain Correlli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Quincunx by Charles Palliser
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
The Lost Domain by Alain-Fournier
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Middlemarch by Geoge Eliot
Anything by Iris Murdock
Anything by Jeanette Winterson
Anything by Louise Erdrich
Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Mr Fujimoto trailed his fingers through the air. ”Why do things happen the way they do? Since the gas attack on the subway, watching those pictures on TV, watching the police investigate like a crack squad of blind tortoises, I’ve been trying to understand . . . Why do things happen at all? What is it that stops the world simply . . . seizing up?”
I’m never sure whether Mr. Fujimoto’s questions are questions.” .. “Do you know?”
He shrugged. ”I don’t know the answer, no. Sometimes I think it’s the only question, and that all other questions ar tributaries that flow into it.” He ran his hand through his thinning hair. ”Might the answer be ‘love’?”
I tried to thin, but I kept seeing pictures. I imagined my father–that man who I had imagined was my father–looking out through the rear window of a car. I thought of butterfly knives, and a time once three or four years ago when I was alking out of McDonald’s and a businessman slammed down onto the pavement from a ninth floor window of the same building. He lay three meters away from where I stood. His mouth was gaping open in astonishment. A dark stain was trickling from it, over the pavement, between the bits of broken teeth and glasses.
. . . “I’d rather be too young to have that kind of wisdom.”
Mr. Fujimoto’s face turned into a smile that hid his eyes. ”How wise of you.”
Is that wonderful prose, or what?