Stuff I've read

Stephen's and my apartment building has this excellent culture of putting unwanted, but still usable, things at the bottom of the main stairwell. Almost always, you can find an assortment of odds and ends, including books. It's become one of my favourite things about our new home; even though we've not met many of our neighbors, they're the sort of people that are happy to recycle good reading material, and I like that.

This month's book, Sea Glass, was a stairwell find. We were on our way out one Sunday morning when the author's name caught my eye. I've read novels by Anita Shreve previously, and I really enjoy how her writing resonates. So, I picked up Sea Glass, and that was that.

It's a really great book. Sea Glass is set on the cusp of the Great Depression, chronicling the successess and downfalls of a newlywed couple, a mill-worker leading a strike, a woman whose lover left her because he went broke, and a young boy who had to leave school to support his family. Each chapter is narrated by one of these characters, allowing the reader to watch the story take shape from numerous perspectives.

It's not a coming-of-age tale; it's something more like the rise and fall of life, the allure of the perfect love, be it romantic or otherwise, and the way the world caves in on itself when real tragedy darkens your doorstep. Almost Shakespearean in its sadness, Sea Glass is light and heavy at the same time. It's one of those stories where so much is said through the saying of so little, and when it was over, I actually cried.

He thinks that she is beautiful. She isn't classically beautiful and she isn't magazine beautiful either, but she is wife beautiful. 

She finds scraps of celadon and cucumber and jade, specks of pea and powder and acquamarine. She doesn't like the browns, but occasionally she collects a topaz or a tea.

You read a word like massacre and you think, I know what that means. It means the slaughter of innocent people...But then...when it happens to you, when you live the word, you realize that the word itself means nothing. It tells you nothing at all. It doesn't begin to convey the horror, does it?