D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • Beautiful sentences

    He was pale with high red cheeks, a fellow traveller who wanted her to ask him why he was flying to Miami and if that was his final destination. He wanted her to tell him she was going on to South America so that he would be impressed and ask her what she planned on…

  • Beautiful sentences

    Every year I tell my BU undergraduates that there are two worthy pursuits for college students. One is preprofessional—preparing for a career that will put food on the table and a roof overhead. The other is more personal—finding big questions worth asking, which is to say questions that cannot be answered in a semester, or…

  • A thought on the state of the church

    Over the past year as we’ve been adapting to the new language of the liturgy, I’ve found myself thinking that this would have been a good point for me to have converted to Catholicism since the self-consciousness of not knowing the responses as well as those next to me in the pews would be ameliorated…

  • The big countdown

    Tomorrow is my birthday so today I did the life expectancy calculator at  http://calculator.livingto100.com/calculator This year, I was told I will live to 87, a year less than last year’s calculation, I think largely in consequence of my lack of good exercise. Apparently, I could add 4.5 years to my life by exercising more.

  • Beautiful sentences

    There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles. Ann Patchett, State of Wonder.

  • Recommendations are hard

    In today’s e-mail. I’ve chosen not to identify the online bookstore behind these recommendations. They’ve suffered enough.

  • Beauiful sentences

    I found the notion of a religion designed to humble the proud thrilling. I also loved the Quran’s habit of the question—“Do you not understand?” (2:44); “Have you not seen?” (31:20)—despite the fact, because of the fact, that these questions were rarely answered. Stephen Prothero, God is not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World.

  • Beautiful sentences

    Never losing the drive to get them ready for the cold hard world that they will someday attempt to join and that will, in the end reject them. Kris D’Agostino, The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac.

  • “An Abduction” by Tessa Hadley

    Some months ago, I stashed away a link to An Abduction in Instapaper and finally got to reading it last week. I was drawn into the story immediately. Hadley writes in a wonderful voice, giving the opening almost the feel of non-fiction: Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed. This happened…