HOBART

Sabina Murray’s new collection Tales of the New World, which is out tomorrow, gets some Oprah love. Looking forward to this one.

harthousereview:

Concentration

When she drove her daughter to school at seven she was careful not to cross the center line. It took all of her concentration…

All the responses are about rereadings that were “worth it” (which makes sense; the question was “Have you experienced re-readings as better readings? ” but I think rereadings that lessen books are interesting takes too.

newyorker:

“One cannot read a book: one can only reread it,” Nabokov said. Book Bench contributor Nathaniel Stein thought of that line while reading “On Rereading,” Patricia Meyer Spacks’s charming and strange blend of memoir, literary criticism, and scientific treatise.

For Nabokov, another reading…

Some say that when the Jesus of the Dakotas fed his blue ox Babe to the five thousand there were thirteen baskets of Babe-flesh left over, and the Babe-flesh was discarded beside a pond where it ossified or petrified or what have you, into a whale. A whale with a slide head and a diving board tail. But that’s stupid.