◆ PARALLAX

Long-time reader, first post. I made the account because of this thread, which is probably not what the registration page had in mind.

I am reading J. A. Baker's The Peregrine in a second-hand copy with someone else's tide tables tucked in the back. I do not know a hawk from a heating vent, but the sentences make me look up from lunch as if the office window has suddenly become countryside.

Thank you for the quiet corner.

Welcome, Bywater. A person who enters with a bird book and tide tables may stay.

I found Dubliners in the diner lost-property box tonight, which is either providence or poor inventory control. "The Dead" is still unfairly good. I read the last page twice and then made coffee for a man who complained about the coffee.

Balance is important.

Can I ask a beginner question? I read Foundation and liked the clever parts but not the people so much. I read The Hobbit and liked the people. I have The Left Hand of Darkness because somebody here mentioned Le Guin in another thread.

Is that the next one or should I read something else first? I am trying to read better books instead of just more books.

Read the Le Guin.

This is off brand for me but: do not try to solve it like a puzzle. Let the weather and the manners do their work. If you bounce off it, A Wizard of Earthsea is shorter and cleaner and will still do you good.

I am now going to go say something irritable elsewhere to restore equilibrium.

March shelf-tidy.

Bywater brought hawks and tide tables. Cass rescued Joyce from a diner. LittlePrince is doing the dangerous thing of asking a sincere question on the internet, and Occams answered like a teacher who forgot to put on the frightening mask.

For anyone newly reading along: titles are welcome, summaries are welcome, spoilers are less welcome, and nobody has to perform cleverness to sit here.

I have been carrying Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow in my coat pocket and reading a little before the shop opens.

It is not a sermon, though a sermon may be hiding in it like a boy behind a tree. Mostly it is a man looking back without pretending he was wiser than he was. That is useful company in Lent.

The Baker book has moved from Bywater's lunch hour into my train carriage. It is almost comically intense. A man watches a bird until the watching changes the man.

I am also rereading Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us. It has the calm authority of someone who has no need to shout because the tides will make her point eventually.

Natural history remains the best corrective to melodrama I know.

Bea, if Carson is working, try Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey. It occasionally wears a hat I would not personally wear in public, but the man can write about bones without making them dead.

No debunk attached. Please mark the calendar.