story: “The Watch” author: Elie Wiesel year: 1964 where: NYU Abu Dhabi Library note: rereading to teach on Sunday a line: “The glorious masters of our municipality were jubilant: they were rid of us, there would be no more kaftans on the street.”
story: Come Running author: Tim Raymond year: 2017 where: Al Reem, post-bath note: a Glimmer Train read a line: “It’s like God took a big ice cream scoop and scooped out the place in my stomach where all the invisible butterflies live. Then God said, ‘You don’t even know what butterflies are. That’s my point.'”
story: Train to Harbin author: Asako Serizawa year: 2016 where: Abu Dhabi, my gold chaise lounge note: This is a story both epic and intimately personal about a Japanese doctor stationed in Pingfang (now Northern China, then the Japanese puppet-state Manchukuo) during WWII, where terrible war crimes, including human experimentation, were committed. a line: “Perhaps it is simply the mind, which, in its inability to accept a fact, returns to it, sharpening the details, resolving the image, searching for an explanation that the mind, with its slippery grasp on causality, will never be able to […]
story: Spring in Fialta author: Vladimir Nabokov year: 1936 (English 1947) where: Dubai, Al Habtoor Polo Resort note: sometimes on an ordinary day, you need to read a masterpiece a line: “And regardless of what happened to me or to her, in between, we never discussed anything, as we never thought of each other during the intervals in our destiny, so that when we met the pace of life altered at once, all its atoms were recombined, and we lived in […]
story: Dance in America author: Lorrie Moore year: 1994 where: bedroom, taxi, a couple places note: homesick a line: “’We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney,’ explains Simone.”
