Reading, as I ride a train toward the old rebounded forest I live amid, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams. It's fabulous. He has early forestry work and its people down beautifully. 

Sometimes Peeples set a charge, turned the screw to set it off, and got nothing for his trouble. Then a general tension and silence gripped the woods. Men working half a mile away would somehow get an understanding that a dud charge had to be dealt with, and all work stopped. Peeples would empty his pockets of valuables — a brass watch, a tin comb, a silver toothpick — lay them on a stump, and proceed into the darkness of his tunnel without looking back. When he came out and turned his screws again and the dynamite blew with a whomp, the men cheered and a cloud of dust rushed from the tunnel and powdered rock came raining down over everyone. 

It looked certain Arn Peeples would exit this world in a puff of smoke with a monstrous noise, but he went out quite differently, hit across the back of his head by a dead branch falling off a tall larch — the kind of snag called a "widow maker" with just this kind of misfortune in mind. The blow knocked him silly, but he soon came around and seemed fine, complaining only that his spine felt "knotty among the knuckles" and "I want to walk suchways — crooked." He had a buber of dizzy spells and grew dreamy and forgetful over the course of the next few days, lay up all day Sunday racked with chills and fever, and on Monday morning was found in his bed deceased, with the covers up under his chin and "such a sight of comfort," as the captain said, "that you'd just as soon not disturb him — just lower him down into a great long wide grave, bed and all." 

On a walk of this kind in the Mediterranean islands he usually saw tortoises, which he did not dislike at all -- far from it -- but they seemed rare on Gozo, and it was not until he had been going for some time that he heard a curious tock-tock-tock and saw a small one running, positively running across the road, perched high on its legs; it was being pursued by a larger tortoise, who, catching it up, butted it three times in quick succession: it was the clap of the shells that produced the tock-tock-tock. 'Tyranny,' said Jack, meaning to intervene: but either the last blows had subdued the smaller tortoise -- a female -- or she felt that she had shown all the reluctance that was called for; in any case she stopped. The male covered her, and maintaining himself precariously on her domed back with his ancient folded leathery legs he raised his face to the sun, stretched up his neck opened his mouth wide and uttered the strangest dying cry.

'Bless me, said Jack, 'I had no notion…'.

In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm's meta-biography of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm at one point describes reading some letters that Ted Hughes, who was married to Plath when she killed herself in 1962, wrote in the 1980s to Anne Stevenson, who was then writing a biography of Sylvia Plath. Stevenson Malcolm read the letters during a visit Malcolm paid to Stevenson in England. Earlier, Stevenson had mentioned to Malcolm, as a way of explaining what it was like to be around Hughes, that "One thing you must understand about Ted is that he was and still is an electrically attractive man." 

A 3d or 4th time through, and better every time. What happiness, to start this again on a fine spring London day.

'Sheet home. Sheet home. Hoist away. Cheerly there, in the foretop, look alive. T'garns'l sheets. Hands to the braces. Belay.'

A gentle push from above heeled the Sophie over, then another and another, each more delightfully urgent until it was on steady thrust; she was under way, and all along her side was a run of living water.