Second Monday selection. I always enjoy Hornby but didn’t find this as good or as believable as his usual standard. Just one word I learned, mandem, and a few short quotes:
- “Cooking kept the evening away from the afternoon—it was a punctuation mark, stopping the long sentence of the day from tripping over itself and becoming garbled.”
- On an unpromising blind date, “you could provide uninformed and unasked-for opinion, and you could be as nosy as you wanted.”
- “He was very interested in feathering caps, and he didn’t mind which bird the feathers had fallen off.”
- “He’d cross that bridge if the bridge ever got built. There wasn’t even anything for the bridge to go over yet.”
- What the protagonist learns about the lute watching the movie Heartstrings – “who knew … that, if you listened to the lugubrious sound of the lute for nearly two hours, you wanted to gather up every lute in the country and burn them on a gigantic bonfire?”
- “maybe there was no future in it, but there was a present, and that’s what life consists of”