Word: woode
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...Most of Oxfam's 730 shops across the U.K. are slightly dowdy affairs, crammed with a wide variety of used clothes, bric-a-brac, books and CDs. But the Notting Hill shop - one of three in London recently reopened as high-fashion boutiques - looks downright chic, with polished dark-wood flooring, arty light fixtures, and top-brand ladies' wear displayed on stylish wrought-iron racks. The shop also sells brand-new fair-trade clothes and accessories typically made by London College of Fashion students from organic fabrics, as well as one-of-a-kind items made from recycled clothes...
...pleasure of the book lies in watching Wood read. For Wood, the history of the novel is itself like a novel, in which genius-heroes perform astounding feats of literary innovation. Proust finds a new way to render character in Swann's Way ("Progress!" Wood shouts); Flaubert ("the bearish Norman, wrapped in his dressing gown") writes prose with a precision that until then had been reserved for poetry, and in the process inadvertently invents realism as we know it; Tolstoy narrates the fading consciousness inside a freshly severed head. Wood's enthusiasm is glorious. Reading alongside him is like going...
...Wood writes about books the way other people write about sports; authors aren't so much Olympian as Olympic. Woolf writes, in The Waves: "The day waves yellow with all its crops." Wood reads this sentence so hard that he practically topples into it: "The effect is suddenly that the day itself, the very fabric and temporality of the day, seems saturated in yellow. And then that peculiar, apparently nonsensical 'waves yellow' (how can anything wave yellow?), conveys a sense that yellowness has so intensely taken over the day itself that it has taken over our verbs, too--yellowness...
...point of How Fiction Works is supposed to be Wood's theory of the novel. And yes, we dutifully make the rounds of narration, dialogue and so on, topics that inspire in even the most passionate reader a special, pure kind of boredom. But as Wood himself observes, "The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it." The novel is corrosive to systematic thought--whatever is good about it is precisely that increment that resists theorization. The great pleasure of Wood's book lies in the examples, not the points they...
...peaks, and I am sitting with my friends Hussein, Nabi and Zia in the garden of a 19th century fort. Nearby, 10 carpenters who work with my nongovernmental organization (NGO) are creating a library for a buyer in Tokyo. They're fitting slivers of wood into a delicate lattice and carving flowers into the walnut shutters. They work fast and smile often. But Nabi, a gentle-voiced 66-year-old cook, is not smiling. He is pessimistic about his country. "We have been promised progress by every government since 1973," he growls, "but it is getting worse and worse...