The joy of reading

a new series where I will post excerpts from my current reading material. A moment with a dead robin in it was the first entry.

One day when she was four years old, while leafing through Sylvia's beauty magazines, Allegra had taken offense at how much white space she found. "I don't like white," she said. "It's so plain." She burst into tears. "It's so plain and there's so much of it." She sat for more than one hour, sobbing, working her way through the pages, coloring in the whites of people's eyes, their teeth, the spaces between paragraphs, the frames around ads. She was sobbing because she could see that she would never be done; her whole life would be used up in the hopeless, endless task of amending this single lapse in taste. She would grow old, and there would still be white sheets, white walls, her own white hair.