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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19631.Birds_of_America_Stories?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Birds of America: Stories" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1167271890m/19631.gif" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19631.Birds_of_America_Stories?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Birds of America: Stories</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/11746.Lorrie_Moore">Lorrie Moore</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/14040097?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 3 of 5 stars<br/>p. 79: "That had been in Agnes's mishmash decade, after college. She had lived improvisationally then, getting this job or that, in restaurants or offices, taking a class or two, not thinking too far ahead, negotiating the precariousness and subway flus and scrimping for an occasional manicure or a play. Such a life required much exaggerated self-esteem. It engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart. Her days grew messy with contradictions. When she went for walks, for her health, cinders would spot her cheeks and soot would settle in the furled leaf of each ear. Her shoes became unspeakable. Her blouses darkened in the breeze, and a blast of bus exhaust might linger in her hair for hours. Finally, her old asthmas returned and, with a hacking, incessant cough, she gave up. "I feel like I've got five year to live," she told people, "so I'm moving back to Iowa so that it'll feel like fifty. <br/>When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with, which most people in Cassell, Iowa, she felt, could not claim to have done." <br/> <br/>p.95: ". . . she was still bent sideways in her seat, so that her face fell below the line of the table, and he could only see the curve of her heaving back, the fuzzy penumbra of her thin spring sweater, and the garish top of her bright, new, and terrible hair." <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/74897?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>