Novel & Cerita Good Poetry Books To Read

"There's one in Capitol Hill open until eleven. We could just browse. No agenda." "Okay. Pick me up in twenty." The bookstore is quiet. Soft lighting. The smell of coffee and paper. We split up. An unspoken agreement to explore separately. I find him thirty minutes later in the poetry section, reading with complete focus. "Find anything?" I ask. He shows me a collection by Mary Oliver. "I didn't know I liked poetry. But this is—it's beautiful." "Buy it." "I will." We leave with five books between us. None of them self-help or business strategy. Just novels and poetry and a cookbook.

Definitely not convent-educated like her file claimed. 'Small talk's tedious.' 'What do you find stimulating then?' 'Literature. Philosophy. Ideas that actually matter beyond who's sleeping with whom at Government House.' She smiled. Not the painted-on grimace everyone else wore. Something genuine. 'You might find my Tuesday evening discussions interesting. We explore poetry, philosophy. The sorts of questions that keep thinking people awake.' 'What kind of poetry?' 'Tagore, naturally. Ghalib. Sometimes more contemporary work.' There it was. Contemporary work meant seditious pamphlets dressed up as literature. My cover as sympathetic intellectual was working.