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Occasionally Henry would interject a comment, to show that he was listening and interested,
That's how I converse.
By absorbing so many books he was trying to purge his own failure as a writer.
his hero Melville, over six torrid months in a barn in Western Massachusetts, had written the greatest novel the world had ever seen.
She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.
He should have brought Tocqueville. Or William James. Or Plato. No, not Plato.
Lol
much of one’s life was spent reading; it made sense not to do it alone.
Three hundred degrees? Four hundred?
I was wondering why she didn't ask.
he should make them switch the jukebox at Bartleby’s from hip-hop to poetry. Then you could drop in your dollar, punch up 10-08, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” and soak up some Keats while you drank your beer.
Pella could cruise through James or Austen or Pynchon at seventy pages an hour and remember everything,
Pynchon?!
What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?
comforted only by the thought of never needing comfort again.
This was why people grew so attached to earning money, even money they didn’t need. This was how they justified themselves. This was how they kept score.
A copy of the new Murakami novel, its cover an opulent yellow, poked out of her jacket pocket, bought at the campus bookstore to commemorate her first-ever paycheck.
A moment would come, and then another, and then another. These moments would be his life.
He was wearing a black Melville T-shirt, the concert-style one with the list of the dates of Melville’s travels on the back.
I must have this shirt.
Pella folded her arms beneath her breasts
Whoa! Just had a Wheel of Time flashback.
People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
Sleeping with an alluring female student was the second great topic of American literature,
Disgraced anyone? Not American, but that dude won a nobel prize.
Eighty-six maple go. Eighty-six maple go. Hut hut. The ball came back between Neagle’s gold thighs, snapped into Affenlight’s hands. The pleasure of pebbled leather against his palms. Cavanaugh on the go route, fastest man on the team, a wonder of speed but with terrible hands. Affenlight drop-stepped, scissored, dropped, scissored. The end would come from his blind side.
Baseball! This is a baseball book. Stop it!
If he was the Ahab of this operation, this tournament the target of his mania, then they were Fedallah’s secret crew.
That sums up the book right there.
here there and everywhere.
