Just Arrived: “Commonwealth” by Ann Patchett — With A Riff To “Bel Canto”, Inverse Correlations & Pascal

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett is one of my favourite books — it took me by surprise when I first read it and I absolutely loved it from about, oh, page one…! (Don’t you love it when a book does that?)

Now, here’s the odder thing—well, I think it’s odd anyway, even though the observation is at my own expense—I loved Bel Canto so much that I actively avoided reading Ann Patchett’s other novels because I was afraid of being disappointed. There was definitely an inverse correlation at play between th...