the last book I ever read (Moonglow: A Novel by Michael Chabon, excerpt eleven)

from Moonglow: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

I was stretched out on the sofa in my mother’s living room, reading Nine Stories. It was a sofa of the seventies, covered in synthetic wool of lunar gray, poufy yet severe. Beyond my bare feet, a set of sliding glass doors gave onto a redwood deck. At the back of the house the hillside fell away wih alarming verticality. The trees here had been topped to permit constant monitoring, as by some fairy-tale miser, of the two-bridge view in which a puzzling percentage of the house’s value was felt to lie. Down below at the western verge of Oakland, car lights scrolled along the interchanges like cryptic headlines on a zipper. San Francisco was an amber radiance of fog.