This book was chosen by my bookclub. It's doubtful I would have read it otherwise. Though there were some interesting parts, overall I really struggled with the author's style. The third person Omniscient Narration made it hard for me to get attached to any of the characters. The almost total lac...
Rick Bass's new collection contains a broad range of characters and settings: the title story concerns a woman recovering from cancer; "Pagans" tells, at forty years' distance, of a girl and two boys -- one of whom was in love with her -- and the dangerous games they played; in "Her First Elk," a...
This is a war book, but not in a "black hawk down" way. It's a history book, but not in the "four score and seven years ago" way. It is a wilderness book but not in the "look at all the beauty of nature" kind of way. For some readers, this may seem to drag on a bit, but for me, the Epilogue ga...
I. In Which I Extol the Virtues of SolitudeThe last few winters I’ve been living alone in a house on a hillside in the north of Thimphu valley, way outside the city. The house is almost at the edge of the forest, and no people live around me. Once in a while when it snows the mud track to the hou...
I have read this collection of short stories twice, and two of the stories several times. I'm not sure why the alchemy happens between an author's words and a reader, but Rick Bass is one writer who I seem to connect with more often that not. These stories are quiet, even when they are adventurou...
One of my favorite short stories is Rick Bass, “Where The Sea Used To Be.” Some days I don’t qualify it; I don’t say “one of,” it’s just my favorite story. Other days, another Rick Bass story is fresh in my mind so I get around it and say “one of.”This is the novel, by Rick Bass, by the same name...
I live on a million-acre island in northern Montana. A cold, wide, deep mountain river bounds me to the south, as do Idaho's castles of mountains to the west and Canada's clearcuts to the north. I am bounded on the east by a vast lake, like a moat. My valley is an island, and within the cold and ...
They return again and again to such a landscape, like animals drawn nightly to the same oasis. And perhaps it was in this pattern that Marie found herself unable to turn her back entirely on the dream; or as if, even in turning her back, she could not be separated fully from it, for now it follow...
A sign out front advertises it as the Sports Therapy Clinic. It's run by a mother, Shirley, and her daughter, Connie. Part of their training, as I understand it—one of their specialties—lies in the treatment, the massage, of horses; but if your back, or neck, or anything, is hurting badly enough,...
But he was as big as a horse, and to look at him no one would ever have guessed that he was not completely healthy. Sissy knew it, as they had had numerous conversations, increasingly intimate, on their lunch and dinner dates during the last month, though she was keenly aware that there was much ...
Before too much time had passed, we had all changed our minds, had given up on dreams of glory and were fighting only to win. And not too much longer after that, all that was on our minds was a good cool drink of water; and before it was over, all any of us wanted was simply to get back home. How...