Category Archives: Reading

Reading

"The Quiet American"

I asked Rockford to pick up a book for me from my to-read list. “Our Man in Havana” wasn’t in, and Rockford was in a hurry, so he grabbed the first Graham Greene title he recognized: “The Quiet American.”

It was a fortuitous thing. This is a great book. I saw the movie when it came out on DVD, so I already knew the story. But the writing was so good that I got caught up in it anyway, even to the point that I forgot to jot down my favorite phrases. I did catch a few:

… “Phuong,” I said — which means Phoenix, but nothing nowadays is fabulous and nothing rises from its ashes …

… I was a man without a vocation — one cannot seriously consider journalism a vocation …

The last line of the novel is stunning, but I’m not going to write it out here. You’ll have to read it for yourself.

Reading

Thrifty Belgians

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — Thrifty Belgians are causing a headache for Dutch supermarkets by gathering large numbers of plastic Coca-Cola bottles and bringing them across the border to the Netherlands to collect the deposit.

The scheme takes advantage of a recent move by Coke’s Dutch arm to introduce new bottles that are identical to the ones used in Belgium — but the Dutch bottles carry a 30-cent deposit.

While the Netherlands’ NOS television reported that Belgians were bringing bottles across the border in “massive" numbers, a Coke spokeswoman downplayed the story.

“There are incidents, but I probably wouldn’t use the word ‘massive’," Marte van Esser said.
Coke raised its Dutch prices by 30 to 40 percent on average when the bottles were introduced in January. The company is attempting to recover from a two-year price war in Dutch supermarkets that left its products selling near the same price as in-house brands.

Sija de Jong, a spokeswoman for the supermarket industry group CBL, said she doubted any bottle-returners were becoming millionaires.

“It’s a sporadic phenomenon, but it’s obviously an annoyance for the supermarkets," she said.

Reading

"Some Boys are Born to Wander"

American Life in Poetry: Column 048

By Ted Kooser
U.S. poet laureate
Every parent can tell a score of tales about the difficulties of raising children, and then of the difficulties in letting go of them. Here the Texas poet, Walt McDonald, shares just such a story.
This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Some Boys are Born to Wander
From Michigan our son writes, How many elk?
How many big horn sheep? It’s spring,
and soon they’ll be gone above timberline,

climbing to tundra by summer. Some boys
are born to wander, my wife says, but rocky slopes
with spruce and Douglas fir are home.

He tried the navy, the marines, but even the army
wouldn’t take him, not with a foot like that.
Maybe it’s in the genes. I think of wild-eyed years

till I was twenty, and cringe. I loved motorcycles,
too dumb to say no to our son–too many switchbacks
in mountains, too many icy spots in spring.

Doctors stitched back his scalp, hoisted him in traction
like a twisted frame. I sold the motorbike to a junkyard,
but half his foot was gone. Last month, he cashed

his paycheck at the Harley house, roared off
with nothing but a backpack, waving his headband,
leaning into a downhill curve and gone.

First published in “New Letters,” Vol. 69, 2002, and reprinted from “A Thousand Miles of Stars,” 2004, by permission of the author and Texas Tech University Press. Copyright (c) 2002 by Walt McDonald.