Tour guides usually urge people to "look up!" when exploring a city, but a downwards glance can also offer portals into the unknown. Like bellybutton piercings of the streets, the gleam of these cast-iron discs are little glimpses of jewellery not usually seen.
Occasionally troubling, often humorous, always affecting, this episodic, character-driven novel shimmers with perception and humanity. At once entertaining and thought-provoking, it offers an impressive and important look at possibilities—and the friendships from which they spring.
The plot of “The Plot” is so ingenious that it should be assigned as required reading in the very MFA programs it pinions, both as a model of superior narrative construction and as a warning of the grim realities of the literary life to naive wannabe writers.
Like their beauty, peacocks — or any animal, for that matter — don’t exist for us; they exist for the same reason we do. They love their lives as we love ours. In living with peacocks, Flynn discovers that his “birds have personalities and intelligence and foibles and charms and souls,” he writes, “and it all sounds ridiculous but it’s true.”
No, it doesn’t sound ridiculous. It sounds to me like a fine starting point to finding meaning in a world both cruel and beautiful.
If you believe, as I do, that to live life well is to fail in ways that may be unimaginably huge, this strange and confounding book is for you.
Part nature writing, part memoir, part miscellany, every page of this book benefits from the incredible intimacy that Lee has built up with the bird over the years of his “undoubtedly romantic and whimsical” pilgrimages to listen to, and sing back to, nightingales.
Electricity was late and expensive
Coming to Appalachia
Knoxville especially so
Twice a month the coal