This Year in Books

"For ordinary books are like meteors. Each one has its moment, that instant when, like a phoenix, it flies shrieking into the air, all of its pages ablaze. For that one moment, that single instant, we love them—although by then they are no more than ashes. And sometimes, late at night, we wander in bitter resignation through their congealed pages, whilst they insist, with their wooden clattering, like a rosary, on their dead formulæ." -Bruno Schulz

Permalink Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie - May 9 “It’s no use asking for anything,” Haroun answered in a low voice, “because what I really want is something nobody here can give me.” “Nonsense,” retorted the Walrus.  “I know perfectly well what you want.  You’ve been on a great adventure, and at the end of great adventures everybody wants the same thing: a happy ending. … Happy endings are much rarer in stories, and also in life, than most people think.”
Permalink Moon Palace by Paul Auster - May 6 “It was the summer that men first walked on the moon.  I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future.  … That was a long time ago, of course, but I remember those days well, I remember them as the beginning of my life.”
Permalink The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie, April 27 “Imagination is the politics of dreams; imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket… . Imagine every day is Independence Day and save us from traveling the river changed; save us from hitchhiking the long road home. Imagine an escape. Imagine that your own shadow on the wall is a perfect door. Imagine a song stronger than penicillin. Imagine a spring with water that mends broken bones. Imagine a drum which wraps itself around your heart. Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace.”
Permalink Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson - April 18 “Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,’ he had said. ‘You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.”
Permalink Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut- April 8 My books so far have argued that most human behavior, no matter how ghastly or ludicrous or glorious or whatever, is innocent. And here seems as good a place as any to include a statement made to me by Marsha Mason, the superb actress who once did me the honor of starring in a play of mine. She, too, is from the Middle West, from St. Louis. “You know what the trouble is with New York?” she asked me. “No,” I said. “Nobody here,” she said, “believes that there is such a thing as innocence.”
Permalink The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath - March 30 “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
Permalink Fathers and Sons - March 22 “Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack… The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist… And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something… What chaos! What a farce!”
Permalink Blankets by Craig Thompson - February 25 “I wanted a heaven. And I grew up striving for that world— an eternal world- that would wash away my temporary misery.”
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The day was lovely, and that he lived in a world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence.

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"It was all mad lonely with nothing but a patch of lantern-light between ourselves and the dark, and birds hooting and screeching all round, disturbed by the guns....And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.""

“Guests of a Nation” by Frank O’Connor

Permalink The Absolutely-True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie - February 13 “If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.”
Permalink Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov - February 10 “A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.”
Permalink Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros - February 10 “To women who do not act like women,/ To men who do not act like men.”
Permalink A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean - January 11 “At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”
Permalink Different Seasons by Stephen King - January 9 “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 - Jesus, did you?”