Travels With My Aunt, by Graham Greene

I don't know why I didn't read this book many years ago. Greene never fails to satisfy. This is the story of Mr. Pulling, a retired banker, bachelor whose mother has recently died. His aunt comes into his life at his mother's funeral, reveals an alarming secret, and changes Pulling's life completely.

Some choice bits:

p. 79

[Pulling moves his lips when thinking. Once, in the bank...] "The habit betrayed me very badly with a woman who was stone deaf and a lip-reader. She was...very beautiful...couldn't help dwelling a little wistfully on her loveliness...One is more free in thought than in speech and when I looked up I saw that she was blushing..."

p. 146

"...as I lay in the...nursery with a night-light beside the bed to drive away the fears...I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and [illegible] and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert."

This last item is the name of a dahlia. I should have mentioned that Pulling raises dahlias.

p. 179

[O'Toole to Pulling]

"...Have you any children, Henry?"

"No."

"You are a lucky man. People talk about the age of reason. There's no such thing. When you have a child you are condemned to be a father for life. They go away from you. You can't go away from them."

p. 218

[Visconti to O'Toole]

"...Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully."

Indie Bound Daily Book Calendar

Last Christmas my sister-in-law Diane gave me a daily tear-off calendar from IndieBound.org,  which represents the American Booksellers Association, an organization of independent book stores.

Each page of the calendar contains something about a work of literature, often in the form of a question with the answer printed upside-down in tiny print at the bottom of the page.

I've had daily tear-off calendars before, often with cartoons on each page, but I've never had one that kept my attention as this one has. As it nears the end of 2010 and the pad has grown very thin indeed, it seems I've begun to notice books that I want to read much more often on its pages. In the last week these books have come to my attention:

• Ghostwalk, by Rebecca Stott
• Travels With My Aunt, by Graham Greene
• The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, by Barry Udall
• Fall on Your Knees, by Ann-Marie MacDonald

I look forward to reading every one of these. I haven't picked up a book by Graham Greene in a long time; the other authors are all new to me.