The Living and the Dead
(Munro vs. Atwood + Dickey, with a side of Prachett)

Oh, Alice Munro. The short story "Hateship Friendship Loveship Courtship Marriage" (from the book of the same title) has joined "The Dead," from James Joyce's Dubliners, as my favourite works of fiction. They both do in fifty pages what few novels can do in 500. I've been thinking about if for a week, and expect to remember it for years.

I guess that shows my preferences as a reader are the same as my obsessions as a writer: memory, forgetfulness, compassion, regret, second chances, miracles. Which is perhaps why I like Munro, who is interested in all those things, and not Atwood, who is interested in none of them.

The Amazing Maurice was good too. So I'm just about recovered.

Right now I'm reading James Dickey. I found "Selected Poems" at a book and junk shop in an old house in Stratford, where the shelves are chockablock with tattered hardcovers, odd teacups, dolls with tilting eyes, blue enameled colanders, model ships, and Cliff Notes (I found, but did not buy, Sir Gawain). Rhinestones in the pastry case and Abba on the stereo. Great place.

Good to read "The Heaven of the Animals" again; one of my favourites, that. "The Firebombing" needs five or six reads, but rewards them. I need, though, to get away from the War for a while.