BIG OTHER

“If he is awake early enough the boy sees the men walk past the farmhouse down First Lake Road.”

–Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of the Lion

There are so many sentences that I could have chosen, that I think about often, but I chose that one because it the first sentence from the first book that mesmerized me as an adult reader–and because those men turn out to be loggers, which eventually leads Ondaatje to a beautiful and somewhat inexplicable night scene where the loggers are skating on the frozen lake, each holding up a sheaf of cattails, their tops on fire.

Michael Kimball is the author of Dear Everybody.