enthusiastic reader

Taking a page from Quivering Pen and Lynne's Book Notes , here are the best sentences I read this week. At the time, I was wondering how I could tweet them for fullest impact, but this is better: From "Differently," published in Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth: The bleak apartment in the run-down building, the bad-tempered old woman who was knitting a sweater, the doctor arriving in his shirtsleeves, carrying a brown-paper bag that Maya hysterically believed must contain the tools of his trade. In fact, it contained his lunch--an egg-and-onion sandwich. Maya had the smell of that in her face all the time he and Mme. Defarge were working her over.

Alice Munro Friend of My Youth Vintage Contemporaries, 1990 #s in the I will read and take brief notes on 300 short stories series #34-43 Friend of My Youth This is a nested narrative wherein the narrator has recurring dreams that her mother, afflicted by some kind of neurological disease at the end of her life, returns to the narrator fully formed and healthy. "I would say [to her dream mother] that I was sorry that I hadn't been to see her in such a long time--meaning not that I felt guilty but that I was sorry I had kept a bugbear in my mind, instead of this reality--and the strangest, kindest thing of all to me was her matter-of-fact reply. Oh well, she said, better late than never. I was sure I'd see you someday." The bulk of the story is another  story, a memory of the mother right before she was married, when she taught school and boarded with a family who practiced an extreme form of Prebyterianism. Two sisters (one married, the other not) live in an una...

In the first episode of the sixth season, Betty Draper glibly suggests to her husband that he "rape" the fifteen-year-old friend of Sally, Betty's daughter. Henry looked shocked (as anyone would) and many people who blog about Mad Men said that she had crossed a line, even for Betty. But Betty has always crossed lines of behavior, whether for shock value or for the volt of adrenaline that Don mentions elsewhere in the episode. I can think of a number of incidents: 1. She shot the neighbor's pigeons. 2. She manipulated a situation where a friend succumbed to lust and then Betty shamed her for it. 3. She teased the mechanic in the dead of night on a dark road. 4. She seduced a stranger in a bar in the backroom. 5. She allowed the neighbor boy, Glen, to cut a lock of her hair and didn't fully realize why the mother thought it was weird. 6. She became angry and jealous because Glen became friends with Sally. 7. And in this episode, she hangs out in the flophou...