A Box of Matches Paperback – 1 January 2004

I was thinking to get matchsticks box but got book. Its ok it was my mistake but book is also good

Selling books under the category of shower curtains ??? Crazy this is ....

So unique, so full of comedy and life, and still also just a cool piece of concept art … It altered my perspective a little bit …

Not my first encounter with Nicholson, and definitely not my last. But this one stands out simply because of its disarming, uh, simplicity. Meant in the best possible way. It did invite a fleeting comparison with The Mezzanine. Until the persistent absence of convoluted footnotes and meandering thematic excursions (brilliant though they are) soon told me that A Box of Matches is very much its own book.No spoilers. Suffice to say, if you already like part of this author's oeuvre then reading A Box of Matches will make you feel more right than ever. But I'd also recommend it as a first innocuous encounter. Because, let's face it, how could you not like a book that's this perfectly formed, self-aware, and featuring a duck on the cover?

Super

‘I fell asleep a little after ten reading a software manual, and now I’m up and waiting for the train whistle. The fire today is made partly of half-charred loggage from yesterday, but mostly from thin apple branches that I sawed up when I got home from work. I tried the ax first and had a heck of a time. But a handsaw will slide right through with wondrous ease, sprinkling handfuls of sawdust out of either side of the cut, like—I can’t think of what—like a sower sowing seeds, perhaps. Anyway the fire took to burning so readily that I’ve had to move my chair back a little so that my legs aren’t I pain through the flannel.’were it not for the software manual, this paragraph could have been attributed to henry david thoreau. the meditative quality is achieved by arising early every morning, between four and five a.m. and starting a fire in a fireplace built in 1789 and preparing coffee. the writer’s observations are daily, perhaps written in a journal or on a computer. his reflections often turn speculative, productive of homespun wisdom of the marvels of the mundane, the falling of leaves from trees when there is no wind, how the brain uses nightmares as a way of awakening as a summoning to urinate. unlike thoreau, he is no solitary, a medical textbook editor, he is married to claire, and they have a fourteen year old daughter, phobe and an eight year old son, henry.and for such familial reasons, his reflections over his daily risings in robert frost’s dark wintry vermont in the month of january become less, for lack of a better word, profound. his mind meanders to memories and observations of his family life and the family pets, a cat and a duck. not the stalwart companions for adventures of a man in the cold north.in TO BUILD A FIRE, a short story by jack london, the protagonist, with his dog, trapped in the yukon has three matches standing between himself and death. emmet has the luxury of an entire box. comparatively, it’s an easy enough metaphor. a neat novel for use in high school english classes. would it be trite of me to leave the potential reader wondering, if the family ate the duck?

During very early morning hours the author wakes up, makes coffee, lights a fire in the living room and ruminates on his life. It’s a good life. He has Claire, his wife, two children, a cat and a duck. He takes good care of them all; he feels guilty for killing the ants of his daughter’s ant farm. This is a gently humorous, uneventful, humane narrative.