skopia
Every American house is a set of clues: roof pitch, window shape, porch depth. McAlester supplies the vocabulary, from Georgian mansions to postwar ranches, and you walk out able to name your street.
Charles Pooter, a London clerk of vast unearned dignity, records every slight from tradesmen and every dinner-party triumph. He paints his bath red with enamel and mistakes the dissolving water for blood.
Fisher wrote about oysters, wartime rationing, and eating alone, and made food a way of writing about hunger of every kind. The poet W.H. Auden said nobody in America wrote better prose.