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That thing where
You dip into a book, and the part you read happens to be an iconic part of the story.
... I don't actually know if the part I read is iconic, but I bet it is. I just bet.
The book, which I've never read, is Angela's Ashes. The healing angel has to read it for school and doesn't want to, so I said, We'll read 20 minutes tonight. (That was last night.) Then this afternoon when he got home from school, I quit work for ten minutes to read another little bit. Yesterday the two brothers had to pick up leftover bits of coal from the street to light their Christmas fire, and their bag had a hole in in it, so the coal kept falling out, and then it started to rain. The rain was the icing on the cake of desolation, and we laughed like the heartless creatures we are at the awfulness.
That wasn't the moment that I think was iconic though. It was when the dad tells them that their new baby brother was brought for them by an angel who left the baby on the seventh step. Seventh from the top or the bottom of the stairs, the narrator asks. The top, the dad explains, because angels come down from heaven, not up from someplace as miserable as their flooded kitchen. And later the narrator sits on that stair waiting for the angel and imagining talking to him.
... That was beautiful and I figure it has to be iconic. Just chance that the healing angel (speaking of angels) should pick that section.
... I don't actually know if the part I read is iconic, but I bet it is. I just bet.
The book, which I've never read, is Angela's Ashes. The healing angel has to read it for school and doesn't want to, so I said, We'll read 20 minutes tonight. (That was last night.) Then this afternoon when he got home from school, I quit work for ten minutes to read another little bit. Yesterday the two brothers had to pick up leftover bits of coal from the street to light their Christmas fire, and their bag had a hole in in it, so the coal kept falling out, and then it started to rain. The rain was the icing on the cake of desolation, and we laughed like the heartless creatures we are at the awfulness.
That wasn't the moment that I think was iconic though. It was when the dad tells them that their new baby brother was brought for them by an angel who left the baby on the seventh step. Seventh from the top or the bottom of the stairs, the narrator asks. The top, the dad explains, because angels come down from heaven, not up from someplace as miserable as their flooded kitchen. And later the narrator sits on that stair waiting for the angel and imagining talking to him.
... That was beautiful and I figure it has to be iconic. Just chance that the healing angel (speaking of angels) should pick that section.
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The passage about the steps does sound beautiful, though.
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There is some relief from the misery: there's a doomed romance straight out of a Dickens novel, there's a dirty comedy with a kid nicknamed Quasimodo Dooley. If you want something non-miserable, read just the scene where the narrator is six and is taken for First Communion. But if you don't read the rest of the book, you're not missing one of the great classics of our time, or anything.
I met Frank McCourt once, at the Norman Rockwell Museum the day after he'd done a reading at Tanglewood. I was a teenager, he was late fifties, neat, small, silver-haired, with a slightly beaky profile and an attractive voice. We were both just walking around looking at art, so I went over and fangirled at him a bit. I gushed about being a fan of his work and he thanked me and asked me the usual nosy-old-person questions about where I was going to go to college and what I intended to do when I grew up.
By the way, I had a hard look at his teeth, because all the descriptions he'd put in the book about people's teeth rotting and turning green and falling out of their heads had frightened me and I was concerned about him, but Frank McCourt had an ordinary set of teeth that looked healthy. Either they were a false set which looked natural, or he'd learned to take care of his teeth in later life.
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One thing that impressed me was how, although there were very few [at least in the 30-odd pages we read] specially spelled words, when I read the dialogue parts out loud, it felt quite natural to fall into an Irish accent. That's skill, to evoke an accent just in the word choices and how they fall in the sentence.
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