Books you shouldn’t read in public
From our US edition
Headed to the hospital recently for a rather unpleasant surgical procedure, I figured I’d bring a book to pass the down time. I was about to grab Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy, the novel I’d been reading about a nearly 20th-century Catholic postulant who may or may not have seen a vision of Christ and suffered stigmata on her hands and feet. But the thought of nurses and order-lies glancing at the title, thinking ‘pervert’ and perhaps surmising that my demise really wouldn’t be all that great a loss for human-kind dissuaded me. Instead I brought along the Buffalo News sports section. I told a Kentucky woman about this titular discretion.
