Sunday, March 22, 2009

Alternative to Bucket List

I just finished a charming little book, The End of the Alphabet by C.S. Richardson. As the book opens, fifty-year-old Ambrose Zephyr has "failed his annual medical exam." Learning he has about a month to live, he leaves his home near Kensington Gardens with his wife Zappora "Zipper" Ashkenazi, planning to visit a different European city each day, working their way through the alphabet--Amsterdam, Berlin, and so on.

The story is neither maudlin or unbearably corny; it is a love story, pure and simple.
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1 comment:

Kathryn Stripling Byer said...

Nancy, the News/Observer is going to do a piece on our NCETA poetry contest for students!
Now,here are my re-readings--Seamus Heaney, both poetry and essays, Czeslaw Milosz, ditto, R. M. Rilke, ditto, Mary Oliver, almost everything except Red Bird.
K.