currently road-tripping with my family, so here's something for fun: oregon is a happy place for me. there's something about it that puts me at ease, something about its natural beauty that calms me and fills me with a sense of warmth and contentment, and i can't say that many physical spaces make me feel this way.
i've been reading alexandra kleeman's forthcoming short story collection, intimations, when i can catch little moments to read on this road trip, and it's actually the perfect book for this kind of reading -- you know, reading on stolen time -- because the pieces are short, enchanting, written in that same haunting, sticky, heavy mood that made her debut novel, you too can have a body like mine, such a stellar read. you too can have a body like mine is one of those books i say has staying power because it's a book that's stuck with me, even months down the road -- it isn't a novel i've shed or left behind -- and i simply love her prose, the atmosphere she creates, this sense of things being off-kilter but not actually so off-balance at the same time.
and so i kind of weirdly think that intimations is the perfect read for these unearthly views -- a lake formed in the crater formed by a volcanic eruption, a lake with a surface like glass made of the clearest, cleanest blue. a world that doesn't belong to us but to itself, that lets us encroach just enough that we can pretend we've made it ours, but it will never be because we are merely human and beauty like this lies outside of us.
