Currently reading
The Collected Stories
Middlemarch
Omensetter's Luck
Swann's Way
A Naked Singularity (Paper)
The Master and Margarita
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews
Infinite Jest
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
Maps and Legends
Like another reviewer, I turned first to the Alice Munro short story, "In Sight of the Lake", and of course it was wonderful. She has returned to Munro country, in southwestern Ontario. She said several years ago that she was retiring from writing but there have since been a few short stories published here and there, including at least a couple in the New Yorker. I'm glad she has changed her mind. "Thirty Girls" by Susan Minot was a powerful short about a nun who is a headmistress of a girls' school in Uganda, and she sets out to reclaim her students who were abducted/confiscated/stolen by rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army.
Anne Tyler's "The Beginner's Goodbye", about a newly-minted widower, was gently funny and poignant without being sentimental. And one could say the same about John Barth's "The End?"
