Thursday, February 07, 2019

Reading and commuting …

… Travelling by train – with Anna Karenina | The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I began The Lost Properties of Love on the 7.48 train from Pershore to London and finished it on the 13.02 from Paddington to Totnes. There could be no more suitable way to read it because this is, among other things, a meditation on train travel, both real and imagined. Indeed, Paddington features here, as the scene of the ending of an impossible affair. Many of the chapters take their titles from railway stations. While herself rattling along the tracks from the north back to her home in Oxford, England unspooling through the windows, Ratcliffe considers love affairs, marriage, books and endings. As she says: ‘A train journey is inherently nostalgic.’
As someone who, for a year,  commuted between Philadelphia and Washington, I know what she means

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