Tender and sparse and lovely.
Mar 18, 2025
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I think this one stuck with me so much because it was so short and I had just read a succession of long-ass books (Plus Johnson is an Iowa Writers workshop alum).
Johnson tells a panoramic story with a wide enough lens to capture both the valleys and mountains of the North Western corner of the US, as well as the better portion of the book’s protagonist’s life.
Simultaneously, this books captures the tiny moments effortlessly and there’s plenty to be pulled out of the details.
all that comes together to paint what i can only imagine to be an accurate depiction of the life of a man in the 20th century. Could any other time in history be so big and yet so small at the same time?
Jan 24, 2024
Jan 19, 2025
I read this novella all in one sitting on the train to Bath, and I haven't been able to stop thing about it. Set in the 1920s, the main character is shellshocked WWI veteran who ventures into the British countryside to restore a mural in an old church. But it feels like more than an anti war novel, its about the end of summer, the passage of time and modernity, finding your place in a changing world. A Month in the Country is a celebration of brokenness — not the suffering of brokenness but, rather, the vulnerability that brokenness brings.
“We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever — the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.
All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.”
Mar 18, 2025
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Apr 14, 2025
The vines are consuming fire hydrants and power lines and stop signs and every gust of wind is filling the air with a delicious magnificent jasmine scent and I feel delirious and reborn and glad to be alive
!!!
Take a walk, take a whiff :-)
Apr 8, 2025
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This is something that I started doing last year and they are now fundamentally important to me.
A dessert walk is an after dinner stroll you take ideally during sunset. You walk to a grocery store and buy a sweet treat or piece of fruit and a fun beverage. For me usually a peach and a kombucha. You walk for a bit as the sun sets and return when your treats are consumed.
A delicious end to your evening that helps you digest.
Feb 22, 2025