Stuck overnight in the empty halls of John Lennon International airport, I read this a couple of times and drove myself effectively insane, having significant ramifications on the following months. Great story.
Dec 3, 2024
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A man begins a drive to nowhere, alternating left and right turns, until he ends up at a dead end, facing the forest. Instead of returning home, he ventures into the forest, and encounters an aura of blinding light. It's a brief, sneaky book, it began quietly and then had an enormous impact on me. Have some Kleenex nearby 💙
Dec 3, 2024
I read this novella all in one sitting on the train to Bath, and I haven't been able to stop thing about it. Set in the 1920s, the main character is shellshocked WWI veteran who ventures into the British countryside to restore a mural in an old church. But it feels like more than an anti war novel, its about the end of summer, the passage of time and modernity, finding your place in a changing world. A Month in the Country is a celebration of brokenness — not the suffering of brokenness but, rather, the vulnerability that brokenness brings.
“We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever — the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.
All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.”
Mar 18, 2025
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the endings of great novels stay with you. a momentous rush that last dot, words and eyes speeding towards it almost with reluctance, until yes that world is done but something ripples out, a faint radiance or shadow, like the dark spot that lingers in your eye long after staring at the sun.
this i felt reading:
—portrait of a lady by henry james
—swann’s way by proust
—the red and the black by stendhal
—ulysses by joyce
—the sun also rises by hemingway
Jan 30, 2024
Top Recs from @matthewxaviercorrigan
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This album feels like playing a banjo on a tiny spaceship made of 2x4s that runs on vegtable oil. If you've ever played The Outer Wilds, this will scratch the itch
Dec 3, 2024
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ok there's a lot i like here. i love the LINER NOTES! the album was written as part of a song-a-day project that seeks to have been iteratively happening over 12 yeaes. It does feel like music that gets written when someone has refined their instincts. I feel like good iterative musical practice is as much about learning to steer impulses, and there's SOMETHING here that sings that. It feels like the gentle and magical result of doing the right thing because you've walked these paths before. idk. i love it. it also just sounds incredible!!!
Dec 3, 2024