#487 The Landing- Lydia Davis

#487 The Landing- Lydia Davis

A nervous passenger recounts her experience during an emergency airplane landing. The landing itself is not much of a story, but the narrator’s fearful thoughts makes up the core of the story. It doesn’t appear that they are in all that much danger, but she is phobic and so goes through some of the steps of grief and acceptance.

“Our lives might be almost over. This required an immediate reconciliation with the idea of death, and it required an immediate decision as to the best way to leave this world. What should be my last thoughts on this earth, in this life?”

That would make for a fun dinner party conversation, or possible the topic of a thesis paper in psychology: If you could choose, what would be your last thought before you die?

Rating: 7-7-6-6 Total= 26

#279 Flytopia- Will Self

#279 Flytopia- Will Self

We are following Jonathan in the small Suffolk town of Inwardleigh:

-“…a town which had been marooned by the vagaries of human geography, left washed up in an oxbow of demography, run aground on the shingle of a failing economy, and land-locked by the shifting dunes of social trends…”

-“…some places achieve character, Inwardleigh had been visited only with anonymity.”

-“But then no one much wanted to live in Inwardleigh and its environs, where self-abuse was rife and the vet shot up his own horse tranquilizer.”

-“It was a landscape of ingress and repose: a tired body lying down on an old, horsehair mattress.”

So the town itself is not that exciting. Then there is the heat, the boring food, the smells, and the bugs of course, bugs, bugs, bugs, everywhere. Bugs of all sorts, doing bug like things on bug like ways.

The story almost lost me when Jonathan was thinking of earwigs during sex. The misery and disdain wasn’t as humorous as it was supposed to be. However, then the story took a fun turn. Jonathan found a way to survive his entomophobia, and his imagination turns his dull boring surrounding into something a whole lot more interesting to read about.

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29