I'm reading Rivka Galchen's first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, and it's so intelligent and funny and sad that it's giving me a woody. Tell me that you don't want to read it after this snippet. I dare you.
"Functionally speaking, Harvey's main problem-- or some might say his "conflict with the consensus view of reality"-- stemmed from a fixed magical belief that he had special skills for controlling weather phenomena, and that he was, consequently, employed as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, an institute whose existence a consensus view of reality would (and this surprised me at the time) confirm. According to Harvey, the Royal Academy dedicated itself to maintaining weather's elements of unpredictability and randomness.
"I would have thought the opposite," I said in our inital conversation.
"Everything we say here is secret?" Harvey asked.