Any system of slavery must be abolished. It had seemed simple in England; yet in Ohio that principle was chipped away at, by economic arguments, by personal circumstances, by deep-seated prejudice that Honor sensed even in Quakers. Honor has traveled from her home and family in England, hoping for a new life in the new world. Her sister is engaged to be married to a man who works with his brother in their general store in a small Quaker town in 1850 Ohio, and Honor has decided to go along with her. Circumstances change quite a bit between the sisters leaving home and arriving in Ohio, and Honor finds herself…

picture found here PARSIFAL IS DEAD. That is the end of the story. The technician and the nurse rushed in from their glass booth. Where there had been a perfect silence a minute before there was now tremendous activity, the straining sounds of two men unexpectedly thrown into hard work. The technician stepped between Parsifal and Sabine, and she had no choice but to let go of Parsifal’s hand. When they counted to three and then lifted Parsifal’s body from the metal tongue of the MRI machine and onto the gurney, his head fell back, his mouth snapping open with no reflexes to protect it. Sabine saw all of his…

Da gets up to go and he pats my dirty hair and I suppose I should be ashamed, but what do I care about anything anyway.  That’s part of being awful, not caring.  And then what’s part of it too is the thought that suddenly jumps into my head.  The thought that it could be a person’s own mother who might make a doll with her daughter’s hair and throw it into a fire.  She’d watch the flames eat it up and then she’d dance off to bed laughing and having sex and bleeding little drops of perfume all over the sheets as if there was nothing to it.  I…

I fished. I’d set down my pack against a still green tree. The kayak sled. My rifle. I passed up the beetle kill, the standing dead trees that broke and fell in a hard wind, and walked further into the green. I always fished a stretch of woods that had not died, or that was coming back. I set down the pack and breathed the smell of running water, of cold stone, of fir and spruce, like the sachets my mother used to keep in a sock drawer. I breathed and thanked something that was not exactly God, something that was still here. I could almost imagine that it was…

Illustration for the Guardian by Neal Fox, found here. The Guardian has an interesting feature, where they distilled the admittedly short novella into just a few paragraphs, all while pretty much keeping the voice. Don’t read it if you’re going to read the book, obviously. “Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is – was – a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary,…

Absolutely appropriate cartoon perhaps via Yoe! Books, though found on FB She does not resist. All she does is avert herself; avert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her: she even helps him, raising her arms and then her hips. Little shivers of cold run through her; as soon as she is bare, she slips under the quilted counterpane like a mole burrowing, and turns her back on him. Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the…

“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Perhaps I read The Great Gatsby in High School. I have vague recollections of spending time my Sophomore year listening to my…

The unnamed narrator of Meg Rosoff’s What I Was is an old man, 100 years old, telling the story of the happiest time in his life, when he was a teenager in the mid 1960s, attending a horrid boarding school near the ocean in the eastern U.K. It’s not that the school is so wonderful, it’s the friend he makes, Finn, who lives in a shack by the ocean, fishes for meals, gathers wood, and does odd jobs in town for the little money needed to survive. The narrator (some refer to him as H) is drawn to Finn, wishes he could live this simple lifestyle, free from interfering parents,…

“Number one. Bring your own Tupperware to a restaurant for leftovers, as often as possible.” “I’ve not eaten at a restaurant in over two years.” “Try bringing your own mug for tea or coffee. Does not apply, I guess. Carry your own cutlery, use no plastic utensils, ditto ditto. Okay, here’s one. Carry your own Nalgene bottle instead of buying bottled water.” “Our well water is good. We wouldn’t pay for store-bought.” “Okay,” he said. “Try to reduce the intake of red meat in your diet.” “Are you crazy? I’m trying to increase our intake of red meat.” “Why is that?” “Because mac and cheese only gets you so far,…

Today is the first day of my winter break…10 days off from work. I feel fortunate to have this time off, as I work in the payroll software industry, and year end is traditionally the busiest time of the year. But I work from home, and if I agree that if something earth shattering happens before Jan 2nd (like Congress gets a plan voted on, and the IRS is then able to put out new withholding tables), I will put in a few hours and get that info to our clients, I can pretty much take the time off. It works well for me. So, aside from Christmas and New…

In preparation for this week’s release of the film version of “The Hobbit”, I decided that I wanted to read the book. I haven’t read “The Hobbit” since High School, which was a few decades ago. If you haven’t read “The Hobbit”, I’ll fill you in a bit. “The Hobbit” is Bilbo Baggins, a resident of Middle Earth, who is recruited by the wizard Gandalf to accompany a company of dwarfs on their mission to reclaim their kingdom under the Lonely Mountain, as well as their treasure. The mountain has been occupied for perhaps a century by a dragon, Smaug, who has laid waste to the surrounding area, terrorizing those…