Norman Maclean

So far, so good. That much I can say about 2024 as a year for reading. 

I finished Norman Maclean's story, "A River Runs Through It," this morning. He wrote it when he was in his seventies. I learned about Norman through Kathryn Schulz's piece in The New Yorker. 

. . . You can’t capture Maclean’s brilliance just by quoting him. Much of what he did best was architectural, and the strength of his writing often comes from the soundness of his structures, large and small. A beguiling setup leads to a punch line, or to a gut punch; the oomph of a sentence derives from how perfectly it caps or how swiftly it topples the ones that came before. My copies of his books are filled with underlinings that sometimes run for pages on end before terminating in an exclamation point.