reading
As much as a good story is one we believe and get invested in, this is a good story. The character is not eloquent or expressive but his story is. There are only a handful of paragraphs in the whole book where an explicit emotional probe goes deep enough to be convoluted, and I loved this one in particular:
His aim didn’t seem to be so much to win himself as to show that he didn’t care that István was winning. It was like he was trying to undermine the value of winning itself with his indifference, so that it was almost as if there were two different games being played, one in which the aim was to win at tennis, which István himself was still playing, and another in which the aim was to mock and devalue that objective, to deny its validity as an achievement, which Thomas was playing, and it seemed obvious to István that the reason Thomas was playing that second game was that he had no hope of winning the first one – and that in that sense the two games were really a single game, the second being just a continuation of the first by other means.
This is where I keep track of the things that I read, watch, listen to and make. It's kind of my blog-pinterest-twitter and bookmark folder all in one. I keep it mainly for myself, because I have a bad memory, but it's public because I'm generous like that.