Second paragraph of third chapter:

Cardboard boxes crowd the linoleum floor like little barges bristling with their cargo: pots and pans, Mason jars, oven mitts, steak knives, more stuff than Alice can imagine she ever needed. The mood she’s in, she’s ready to turn out the cookstove. She doubts Harland would notice if she stopped cooking altogether. When she met him he was heating up unopened cans of Campbell’s soup in a big pot of water every night. It amazed her to see the cans rolling around like logs in the boiling water. “Don’t they bust?” she asked him, and he shyly put his hand on hers and allowed as how sometimes they did. His idea of a home-cooked meal is when you open the can first and pour it in a saucepan. Alice has been wasting her talents.

This is a sequel to The Bean Trees, which I very much enjoyed last year. I enjoyed this as well; the previous book ends with a dodgy adoption ceremony, which Pigs in Heaven then needs to resolve between Tennessee and Oklahoma. It’s a nice, quirky journey to get there, and although the happy ending is maybe a little too convenient, it put me in a good mood so I was prepared to be forgiving. You can get it here.

This was the top unread book by a woman and the top unread non-genre fiction book on my shelves. Next on the first of those piles is The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard; next on the second is The Bastard of Istanbul, by Elif Shafak.