How Red Sneakers Changed My Life

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend waking with a tumor, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except the way I stumbled through it, for a while lost in the ignorance of loving someone or something, the world shrunk to mouth-size, hand-size, and never seeming small. I acknowledge there is no sweetness that doesn’t leave a stain, no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet… Tonight a friend called to say his lover was killed in a car he was driving. His voice was low and guttural, he repeated what he needed to repeat, and I repeated the one or two words we have for such grief until we were speaking only in tones. Often a sweetness comes as if on loan, stays just long enough to make sense of what it means to be alive, then returns to its dark source. As for me, I don’t care where it’s been, or what bitter road it’s traveled to come...

When I finish a book, it's not the story or the characters that stay with me long after I've put it down, but the way it made me feel. I buy books faster than I read them, and ever since I found out about www.kitabain.com  (a refreshingly cheap online bookstore that delivers straight to your doorstop and is cool with payment on delivery), I can't stop. So now I have piles of half-read books at home which I'm determined to finish this summer. Believe me, nothing makes me feel more guilty than leaving a book unread. Currently I'm reading A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson. It's set in Austria during the years leading up to World War 2, so yes, even though there is mention of Nazis and Hitler's unsettling regime and the persecution of Jews as any World War 2 story inevitably must have, it's still one of the most different books I've ever read. You normally read about girls trying to break free from an oppressive atmosphere at home and taking on jobs t...