A Year in Reading: Nick Moran
Let’s start with milk. I saw it everywhere. Last winter and a decade late, I read J.M. Ledgard’s Submergence. I paused to open my phone’s Notes app, and add to something: my list of book details that deserve more context, or perhaps books of their own. This tidbit was early on. It described the fine construction of a hotel, whose “ceiling beams had been soaked in milk for a year to harden them.” Beg your pardon. The story moved past this line quickly; this detail was inconsequential.
Milk piqued my interest because at the time my daughter was five months old. When people notice one blue car on the road, they see every blue car on the road. When I opened my fridge every few hours, I primed myself for distraction.
Still this doesn’t explain the amount of milk I saw, and what I saw it doing. I read John Fante’s Ask the Dust, a classic about wanting the satisfaction of creation without the agony of creating, and a character repaid a loan in milk. (“I can’t give you any hard cash, kid. But I’ll see that you get all the milk you need.”) In the end, the protagonist walks alone into the desert with a bottle of the stuff.
Next I read , a jewel of a novel in which a
