New Books
With my Christmas giftcard to Barnes and Noble (it was too good a gift, I couldn’t save it) I got two books: The Man in the High Castle (finally) and The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Both are very good books and I recommend them.
(And now I’ve lost my check card. Brilliant, LP.)
Anyhow, there’s one passage from Man in the High Castle that struck me, so I thought I should put it up. Forgive any typos I may incur.
“But above and beyond everything else, he had originally been drawn by her screwball expression; for no reason, Juliana greeted strangers with a portentous, nudnik, Mona Lisa smile that hung them up between responses, whether to say hello or not. And she was so attractive that more often than not they did say hello, whereupon Juliana glided by. At first he had thought it was just plain bad eyesight, but finally he that it revealed a deep-dyed otherwise concealed stupidity at her core. And so finally her borderline flicker of greeting to strangers had annoyed him, as had her plantlike, silent, I’m-on-a-mysterious-errand way of coming and going. But even then, toward the end, when they had been fighting so much, he still never saw her as anything but a direct, literal intervention of God’s, dropped into his life for a reason he may never know. And on that account- a sort of religious intuition or faith about her- he could not get over having lost her.”
That, to me, is beautiful. For many reasons, but mostly because it’s real.
