For Anna McGovern there is a satisfying, sensory pleasure to be had in rinsing milk bottles: “The very best thing about getting your milk delivered is ‘rinsing and returning’. Don’t cheat by putting your bottles in the dishwasher. Wash them, by hand. Put a small amount of water in the bottle, slosh the water around, put your hand over the top, shake it up and down, upturn the bottle, glugging the water out, then head for your doorstep and put out the bottle with a ‘plink’”.
This is one of many meandering, seemingly mundane tasks that McGovern delights in describing in her new book. Another is pegging out the washing (“Pull it out of the basket in a long, sweet-smelling, damp lump.”) In fact, when we speak about pottering, McGovern tells me she has done just that to “help order her thoughts”.
Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, published in London in 1687, nonetheless went on to become a scientific colossus. It unlocked the universe with its discovery of gravity and laws of planetary motion, and laid out a method of inquiry that became the gold standard. It was known as simply the Principia, the Principles.
Now, historians have discovered that the first, limited edition of the seemingly incomprehensible book in fact achieved a surprisingly wide distribution throughout the educated world.
At home in Scotland, as I gaze at the familiar view above Caddon Water, I think of Dorothy and her gift for finding the profound in the local. Her example seems increasingly important as restrictions have tightened across the country. Like Dorothy, we cannot go too far from home, but while we cannot access distant lands or grand vistas, we can come to know the places where we live. Through the same kind of everyday attentiveness that Dorothy brought to her Grasmere walks, we can, walk by walk, day by day, create a sense of belonging, and call our hearts to quietness.
In a moment, having finished this, I’ll go down and eat one, safe in the knowledge that it might see me through – not just to the first splash of tonic this evening, but in its own small way to when all this is over, and the world roars back to life at last.
Obama’s extraordinary first book, “Dreams From My Father,” was published in 1995, a year before he was elected to the Illinois senate, and traced his family history alongside his own coming-of-age. “A Promised Land” is necessarily less intimate and more political, offering close-up views of the major issues that Obama faced during his first term, including the economic stimulus, health care, immigration, the environment and the forever war in Afghanistan.
Presumably left for the future volume are, among other fraught subjects: the 2016 election, his abdication of his own “red line” in Syria, the entrenchment of the surveillance state and a discussion of drone strikes. This isn’t to say that “A Promised Land” reads like a dodge; if anything, its length testifies to what seems to be a consistently held faith on the part of the former president — that if he just describes his thinking in sufficient detail, and clearly lays out the constellation of obstacles and constraints he faced, any reasonable American would have to understand why he governed as he did.
One Night Two Souls Went Walking is a triumph of a novel, and one that arrives at the perfect time — we're all living in an injured world, hoping for some kind of deliverance. And deliverance has a way of coming whether we believe in it or not, Cooney seems to say, the darkness may just yet be punctured by light, or something like it. Or as the chaplain wants to tell one of her patients: "Please imagine what hope is, and please then have it."
Written in the Stars has two often-used romcom tropes — opposites attract and fake relationships — at the center of its story. This does risk a predictable plot, but Bellefleur uses her tropes not only as obstacles to romance but as a means to fill in the gaps in her characters' personalities.
Time is filled with beginners. You are right. Now
each of them is working on something
and it matters. The large increments of life must not go by