It’s that time of year again. This time I’ll include a few quotes I highlighted in the book. Thanks for all of your support this year and your kind words!
Feel free to add a few of yours in the comments… I love to hear from you.
In no particular order:
“River of Names” from Trash
A brutal short story of a family history. The narrator speaks to the reader through Jesse, her partner, who is a stranger to the things she has experienced, whose “chin that nobody ever slapped.”
“He would climb down roughly, swinging down from the door handle, laughing, staggering, and stinking of gasoline. Someone caught him at it. Someone threw a match. “I’ll teach you.” Just like that, gone before you understand.”
“Liberation Day” in Liberation Day: Stories
From his latest book of stories of the same name, this story was particularly gripping and kept me thinking and rethinking it for months. It was inspiring to see (and feel) how powerful a short story can be again.
“A feeling adult son Mike has, sadly, never known. He has no work, no art, no dreams, no joy. He just has anger and a fondness for being correct in his energetic, self-righteous disapproval of all that he sees.”
The Farthest Shore
Earthsea Cycle #3
This year I read the first book of this series again, then the second for the first time. It was this book, the third installment, that really blew me away, right from the beginning. The levels of interiority and the complexity of emotion portrayed here is just…wow. There is a great afterword in my edition on how the dragons were formulated. Winner of the National Book Award.
“But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.” How could such a man, thought Arren, be in doubt as to who and what he was? He had believed such doubts were reserved for the young, who had not done anything yet.”
The Book of Delights: Essays
It was nice to pick up this book and read the essays in no particular order. It’s a chronicle of things/events/people that delighted the author and why. A great meditation on so many things: gratitude, ashy skin, gardening, aging, the list goes on and on. Some essays are simple, short and delicious as pie, others a bit more involved and multilayered.
”…joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.”
Circe
An outsider story told from the perspective of the daughter of a Titan. This book is so good I can’t wait to read it again. I also enjoyed The Song of Achilles a few years ago as well.
“There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line.”
❤️ good picks 💯