a love like in the butcher shop

Earlier today, before starting in on bathroom remodeling for the day, I finished The Giant's House. Julie had loaned me her copy, which I then lost. So I got a replacement copy, and of course then promptly found the one she'd lent me. In any case, it's a book worth passing on, so now I can get her copy back to her and pass on the other copy. Win! Win!

Here's a passage from the book that I like:

I never felt jealous at weddings. I longed for love, yes, but I never saw that love was in greater supply at weddings than in butcher shops or department stores. The sight of a couple furtively holding hands beneath a restaurant table was more likely to remind me of the hopelessness of my life than any number of ladies dressed in giant christening gowns reciting words to become joined to a man in a rented suit. I do not like public ceremony, not graduations, not weddings, not pep rallies, nor church. Perhaps I simply do not understand trying to share one emotion (love relief, faith, pep) with a quantity of strangers.

The book's full title is The Giant's House: A Romance, and the main plot definitely seems to be about love. But I think the book has an interesting sub-text about tourism and spectacle and memento, about our desire to have something of someone/someplace else that is not quite romantic but that is definitely desperate. I liked it.