Cookbooks and books on food. Ugh.

Maybe I’ll put this quote from her new book under every shot I take of the sun coming up over the city.

“This is how memory works: not as a transcription but as an attempt — as an essay is an attempt (and this is an essay) — to locate meaning between the irretrievable past and the equally unfathomable now.” (125)

Hampl, Patricia. The Art of the Wasted Day. New York: Viking Press, 2018.

Three excerpts from her short stories below:

Two descriptions of reading these stories:

1. Like you’re walking downtown, and a human you don’t know is humming a song you know, a song you know well, in fact a song of your childhood, a song maybe you thought was only yours, and you lean in to hear more, and as you do so the human pokes you in eye.
2. That compromise you made, somewhere in your life, the one you thought well, this is the best I can do right now, or I’ll give I have to live with this, or (ugh) it is what is? She was there, taking notes, so that someday you’ll read one of her short stories, put it down, and you get to feel bad all over again.

Could not recommend these stories more.

I keep thinking about this paragraph, particularly the second line:

Nothing he said, nothing in the way he spoke, had been learned from the radio or the television.

Berry, Wendell. How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership. Berkeley, California: Counterpoint, 2022.

This passage, coming out of the blue, made me laugh out loud. Still, Ms. Tyler, why pick on us poor high-school English teachers?

I appreciated this book and more than a few laugh out loud moments as I read. Here’s one set of passages from early in the book:

Terrific reflection on the nature of memory.

Solnit, Rebecca. Orwell’s Roses. New York, New York: Viking Press, 2021.