70. HIGH FIDELITY

Nick Hornby 1995

This poignantly funny book rich with references to many of my favorite songs and movies is about the musings of thirty five year old Rob Fleming as he ponders his music, his friends, his loves and his future. He is fond of top five-lists and the book opens with his top five list of past relationships as he analyzes what went wrong with his most current break-up with Laura who has left him for their neighbor Ian. With his record store in London called Championship vinyls barely surviving, his only friends Dick and Barry seemingly losers, his lack of any foreseeable stable future, he is lost, insecure and lonely.

'MY desert-island, all time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order:'(opening line)

'And we no longer admired people who had gone out together for a long time; we were sarcastic about them, and they were even sarcastic about themselves. In a few short weeks, mock-marital status had ceased to be something to aspire to, and had become a cause for scorn. At seventeen, we were becoming as embittered and as unromantic as our parents.'(20)

'What came first--the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?'(24)

'People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands-- literally thousands-- of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.'(25)

'This is how I commemorate my return to the Kingdom of the Single: I sit down in my chair, the one that will stay here with me, and pick bits of my stuffing out of the arm; I light a cigarette, even though it is still early and I don't really feel like one, simply because I am now free to smoke whenever I want, without rows; I wonder whether I have already met the next person I will sleep with, or whether it will be someone currently unknown to me; I wonder what she looks like, and whether we'll do it here, or at her place, and what that place will be like;'(36)

'My shop is called Championship Vinyl. I sell punk, blues, soul and R&B, a bit of ska, some indie stuff, some sixties pop-- everything for the serious record collector, as the ironically old-fashioned writing in the window says.'(37)

'The woman we have come to see is called Marie LaSalle...There are a lot of single men here-- not single as in unmarried, but single as in no friends. In this sort of company the three of us--me morose and monosyllabic, Dick nervy and shy, Barry solicitously self-censoring--constitute a wild and massive office outing.'(60)

'There are many songs that I've been trying to avoid since Laura went, but the song that Marie LaSalle opens with, the song that makes me cry, is not one of them. The song that makes me cry has never made me cry before; in fact, the song that makes me cry used to make me puke... The song that makes me cry is Marie LaSalle's version of Peter Frampton's "Baby, I Love Your Way."(61)

'...sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time.'(63)

'It's only just beginning to occur to me that it's important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you're just clinging on...You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then? '(74)

'The other people I like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windshield wipers when they're driving home from work. Sometimes, something banal and obvious is responsible for the distraction: They have heard it on the radio, or at a club. But sometimes it has come to them as if by magic.'(96)

'A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners, a two-or three- page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV book bases. It was intended to a)dispense with awkward conversation, and b)to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made.'(117)

'She tells me that she thought I was cute, a word that no one has ever previously used in connection with me, and soulful, by which I think she means that I don't say much and I always look vaguely pissed off.'(124)

'I don't belong at home, and I don't want to belong at home, but at least home is somewhere I know.'(133)

'See, records have helped me fall in love, no question. I hear something new, with a chord change that melts my guts, and before I know it I 'm looking for someone, and before I know it I've found her.'(170)

'The most important thing in life, and you can't tell whether people have it or not. Surely this is wrong? Surely people who are happy should look happy, at all times...'(226)

"I'm just trying to show you that you've lived half your life, but all you've got to show for it you might as well be nineteen, and I'm not talking about money or property or furniture." I know she's not. She's talking about detail, clutter, the stuff that stops you floating away.'(266)

'And there is such a thing as the look of love--Dusty didn't lead us up the garden path entirely--it's just that the look of love isn't what I expected it to be. It's not huge eyes almost bursting with longing situated somewhere in the middle of a double bed with the covers turned down invitingly; it's just as likely to be the look of benevolent indulgence that a mother gives a toddler, or a look of amused exasperation, even a look of pained concern. But the Dusty Springfield look of love? Forget it. As mythical as the exotic underwear.'(273)

'Everybody's faith needs testing from time to time...I have to confess (but only to myself, obviously) that maybe, given the right set of peculiar, freakish, probably unrepeatable circumstance, it's not what you like but what you're like that's important.'(280)

'OK. Definitive top five. Number one, 'Let's Get It On,' by Marvin Gaye. Number two, 'This Is The House That Jack Built,' by Aretha Franklin. Number three, 'Back in the USA,' by Chuck Berry. Number four, 'White Man in the Hammersmith Palais,' by the Clash. And the last one, last but not least, ha ha, 'So tired of Being alone,' by Al Green.'(313)

Riverhead Paperback edition, August 1996
323 pages
Book borrowed from JRMD

69. A LESSON BEFORE DYING

Ernest J. Gaines 1993

This is a very moving novel, narrated in simple but effective prose. Set in 1940, in Bayone Louisiana, Grant Wiggins a teacher at odds with what his future life should be, debating whether to stay or leave his teaching job at a plantation school, is requested by his aunt and godmother to impart and teach life lessons to Jefferson, a young man falsely accused of murder and awaiting electrocution. Grant is to teach him how to die "like a man". Jefferson's lesson before dying affects Grant's own search of identity, beliefs and convictions.

'I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be. Still, I was there. I was there as much as anyone else was there.'(Opening lines)

'She knew, as we all knew, what the outcome would be. A white man had been killed during a robbery, one had been captured, and he, too, would have to die.'(4)

'But let us say he was not. Let us for a moment say he was not. What justice would be there to be to take his life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.'(8)

"The public defender, trying to get him off, called him a dumb animal." I told her: He said it would be like tying a hog down into that chair and executing him--an animal that didn't know what any of it was all about. The jury, twelve white men good and true, still sentenced him to death. Now his godmother wants me to visit him and make him know--prove to these white men--that he's not a hog, and he's a man. I'm supposed to make him a man. Who am I? God?"(31)

'What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?'(31)

'I don't know when I'm going to die, Jefferson. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe today. That's why I try to live as well as I can every day and not hurt people. Especially people who love me, people who have done so much for me, people who have sacrificed for me. I don't want to hurt those people. I want to help those people as much as I can.'(129)

"No matter had bad off we are," I said, "we still owe something. You owe something, Jefferson. Not to me. Surely not to that sheriff out there. But to your godmother. You must show her some understanding, some kind of love."(139)

'They sentence you to death because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, with no proof that you had anything at all to do with the crime other than being there when it happened. Yet six months later they come and unlock your cage and tell you, we, us, white folks all, have decided it's time for you to die, because this is the convenient date and time.'(158)

'We black men have failed to protect our women since the time of slavery. We stay here in the South and are broken, or we run away and leave them alone to look after the children and themselves. So each time a male child is born, they hope he will be the one to change this vicious circle--which he never does. Because even though he wants to change it, and maybe even tries to change it, it is too heavy a burden because of all the others who have run away and left their burdens behind. So he, too, must run away if he is to hold on to his sanity and have a life of his own.'(167)

'And for Irene and for others there in the quarter, it's the same. They look at their fathers, their grandfathers, their uncles, their brothers--all broken. They see me--and I, who grew up on that same plantation, can teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. I can give them something that neither a husband, a father, nor grandfather ever did, so they want to hold on as long as they can. Not realizing that their holding on will break me too. That in order for me to be what they think I am, what they want me to be, I must run as the others have done in the past.'(167)

'A whole gallona vanilla ice cream. Eat it with a spoon. My last supper. a whole gallona ice cream.'(170)

'A hero does for others. He would do anything for people he loves, because he knows it would make their lives better. I am not that kind of person, but I want you to be. You could give something to her, to me, to those children in the quarter. You could give them something that I never could. They expect it from me, but not from you. The white people out there are saying you don't have it--that you're a hog, not a man. But I know they are wrong. You have the potentials. We all have, no matter who we are.'(191)

'I want you to show then the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.'(191)

'A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they're better than anyone else on earth--and that's a myth. The last thing they ever want is to see a black man stand, and think, and show that common humanity that is in us all. It would destroy their myth. They would no longer have justification for having made us slaves and keeping us in the condition we are in.'(192)

'I cry, not from reaching any conclusion by reasoning, but because, lowly as I am, I am still part of the whole. '(194)

'Cause reading, writing, and 'rithmetic is not enough. You think that's all they sent you to school for? They sent you to school to relieve pain, to relieve hurt--and if you have to lie to do it, then you lie. You lie and you lie and you lie... You tell them that 'cause they have pain too, and you don't want to add yours--and you lie.'(218)

'i kno i care for nanan but i don't kno if love is care cuttin wood and haulin water and things like that i dont know it thats love or jus work to do an you say thats love but you say you kno i got mo an just that to say an when i lay ther at nite and cant sleep i try an think what you mean i got mo cause i aint done this much thinkin and this much writin in all my life befor

'sun goin down an i kno this the las one im gon ever see but im gon see one mo sunrise cause i aint gon sleep tonite
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First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, June 1994
256 pages
Book borrowed from the library

68. A NORTHERN LIGHT

Jennifer Donnelly 2003

Set in the Adirondacks, in 1906, the novel begins with a true story: Grace Brown, a 19 year old guest at Glenmore Hotel has drowned. This story is woven into a coming of age historical fiction involving 16 year old Matty Gokey, a young bookish heroine who begins her day with a word from the dictionary. She longs to be a writer and attend Barnard College. Told in alternating formats, she reads Grace Brown's letters and reconstructs her mysterious death as she recalls her life while growing up in poverty taking care of the household, her Pa and siblings Abby, Lou and Beth as well as her friendship with neighbor Weaver.

'When summer comes to the North Woods, time slows down. And some days it stops altogether. The sky, gray and lowering for much of the year, becomes an ocean of blue, so vast and brilliant you can't help but stop what you're doing--pinning wet sheets to the line maybe, or shucking a bushel of corn on the back steps--to stare up at it.'(opening lines)

'Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get--a cold, sick feeling deep down inside--when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to but you can't stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again be quite the same person you were.'(2)

'Weaver Smith should abandon his abcedarian efforts at eloquence, say uncle, and admit that Mathilda Gokey is the superior word duelist.'(39)

'It's my word of the day. I pick a word out of the dictionary every morning and memorize it and try to use it. It helps build vocabulary. I'm reading Jane Eyre right now and I hardly ever have to look up a word.'(53)

'And we must have a good, working acquaintance with the classics if we are to understand the works that follow them and progress in our own literary endeavors. Understanding literature is like building a house, Mr. Bouchard; you don't build the third story first, you start with a foundation...'(62)

'I remained on the ladder, looking at the figurine in my hand. You're wrong Auntie Josie, I thought. It's not pride I'm feeling. It's another sin. Worse than all the other ones, which are immediate, violent, and hot. This one sits inside you quietly and eats you from the inside out like the trichina worms the pigs get. It's the Eighth Deadly Sin. The one God left out. Hope.(114)

'They leave the thing behind sometimes, the guests. A bottle of scent. A crumpled handkerchief. A pearl button that fell off a dress and rolled under a bed. And sometimes they leave other sorts of things. Things you can't see. A sigh trapped in a corner. Memories tangled in the curtains. A sob fluttering against the windowpane like a bird that flew in and can't get back out. I can feel these things. They dart and crouch and whisper.(134)

'Furtive, my word of the day, means doing something in a stealthy way, being sly or surreptitious. Sneaky would be another way of putting it. I did not wish to become a sneak, but sometimes one had no choice. Especially when one was a girl and craved something sweet but couldn't say why, and had to wait till no one was looking to wash a bucket of bloody rags, and had to say she was "under the weather" when really she had cramps that could knock a moose over, and had to listen to herself be called "moody" and "weepy" and "difficult" when really she was just fed up with sore bosoms and stained drawers and the fact that she couldn't just live life in the open, swaggering and spitting and pissing up trees like a boy.'(161)

'People in books are good and noble and unselfish, and people aren't that way... and I feel, well, hornswoggled sometimes. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn't that way?... Why don't they tell how a pigpen looks after the sow's eaten her children? Or how it is for a girl when her baby won't come out? '(202)

'How was it that I could learn a new word every day, yet never know the right ones to tell my family how I felt?'(207)

'According the the article I'd read in Peterson's Magazine, if you wish to attract a man, you need to be "attentive and receptive to his every word, put his own interests before yours, and use the eloquent, unspoken language of the female body to let him know that he is the very center of you universe, the primary reason for your existence." The first two bits of advise were clear to me. I had trouble with the third one, though.'(222)

'Just then, I saw what Weaver would be, too. I saw him in a courtroom, thundering at the jury, commanding their eyes and ears, their hearts and souls and minds-- on fire with the strength of his convictions, the passion of his words.'(280)

'If you harness two horses together and one is stronger, the weaker horse gets buffeted and bruised. That's what being friends with Weaver was like. A farmer can put an evener on his team's yoke to compensate for the weaker horse by shifting some of the load to the stronger one. But you can't put an evener on two people's hearts or their souls. I wished I could just up and go to New York City. I wished I was as strong as Weaver was. I wished I was as fearless. But I was not.'(313)

'Voice, according to Miss Wilcox, is not just the sound that comes from your throat but the feeling that comes from your words.'(361)
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First Edition
380 pages
Book borrowed from the library
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Personal note: Thanks Booksnob for the Michael L. Printz awards list.

67. ILUSTRADO

Miguel Syjuco 2010

It begins with the death in New York of a famous Filipino author Crispin Salvador. His student Miguel Syjuco goes home to the Philippines in search of a missing manuscript he believes will solve the mysterious death. What follows is a modern novel full of snippets of other short stories, jokes, blogs, text messages, interviews and subplots inside two main themes: a search of the author's own identity and the frustrating political history of his country. At once lyrical and edgy, philosophical and crude, a complex literary book until the end.

'When the author's life of literature and exile reaches its unscheduled terminus that anonymous February morning, he was close to completing the controversial book we'd all been waiting for.'(first line)

'Missing was the twenty years of work-- a glacial accretion on research and writing--unknotting and unraveling the generations-long ties of the Filipino elite to cronyism, illegal logging, gambling, kidnapping, corruption, along with their related component sins.'(5)

'I eavesdrop on my countrymen, on their tentative English spoken to the cabin crew, never quite perfected despite years in the West: f's still often traded for p's, vowels rounded, tenses mixed, syllables clipped...Like those phrases, we're a collection of cliches, handy types worn as uniforms over our naked individuality...Our industriousness, our inexpensiveness, two sides of our great national image. That image the tangible form of our communal desire for a better life.'(25)

'I can hear Madison now: "Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves."'(32)

'Modern Manila. She who once was the Pearl of the Orient is now a worn dowager, complete with the hump, the bunions, the memories of the Charleston stepped to the imported and flawlessly initiated melodies of King Oliver, the caked on makeup and the lipstick smeared in thick stripes beyond the thin, pursed lips...Manila has changed much since. It's changed so little. If you know where to look, this is the most exciting city in the world.(44)

'But he was one of those teachers who, by a kind of osmosis, helped you discover the quantity of areas in your life in which you are still so ignorant as not to have even considered forming a wrong opinion.'(48)

'Maybe because I was younger and post-postcolonial, I knew that even if it rotated askew, it was still one world. When a butterfly flapped its wings in Chile, a child soldier killed for the first time in Chad, a sale was made on Amazon.com, and a book arrived in two days to divulge the urgencies outside our lives.'(53)

'We the young are necessarily impatient with our elders' patience. How are they so serene when they have so much less time than we do?'(55)

'You can see in his face he is searching, hoping to dispel those things that nettle and diminish him, finding purpose in the conceit of himself as a modern-day member of the ilustrados-a potentiality owned by every expatriate today, a precedent granted by those Enlightened Ones of the late nineteenth century. Those young Filipino bodhisattvas had returned home from abroad to dedicate their perfumed bodies, mellifluous rhetoric, Latinate ideas, and tailored educations to the ultimate cause. Revolution. '(56)

'"Changing the world," he said, "is good work if you can get it. But isn't having a child a gesture of optimism in that world?'(121)

'problem with our country is we can't stand to see people succeed. there's perpetually some fault to find in others. it's quite sad. it's not just jealousy either. it's more like a way of explaining to ourselves why we're having such difficulty whilst others are attaining success. how petty is that rubbish?(125)

'Maybe maturity- he thinks- is merely accepting the tally of all the disappearing options in life.'(127)

'You can't trust a whiner. You can hear in their voices their hidden motives.'(147)

'I only buy books because they're a justifiable expense-- you know, acceptable retail therapy, like classical music CDs. Other girls buy shoes, I buy books. ... I don't even get to read all of them. They're more like the best interior decoration. And I love knowing they're there. Like infinite possibilities, you know?'(170)

'Good writing makes anything interesting.'(178)

'Both Madison and I were brought up as Roman Catholics. Our atheism was something we explored together. We led each other through the stubborn questions. How could there be possibly be no creator? How could our lives just stop when we die? ... We spent many evenings developing our system of belief, and the only times I ever doubted it was when I was wracked with happiness; I simply couldn't accept that there was no higher power to thank for it.'(181)

'We have to change our country by changing its representation. What is Filipino writing? Living on the margins, a bygone era, loss, exile, poor-me angst, postcolonial identity theft... Our heartache for home is so profound we can't get over it, even when we're home and never left. Our imaginations grow moss. So every Filipino novel has a scene about the glory of cooking rice, or the sensuality of tropical fruit.'(208)

'When I was young, I spent my days and nights trying to impress future generations. I spent them. They're gone. All because I was deathly afraid of being forgotten. And then came the regret. The worst things among all worst things. But from that I gained a small fragment of wisdom. Purpose. Because the past will weigh a lot more once your future becomes shorter. '(209)

'Photography, child, is about the passing of time. Capturing is the goal of literature. Timelesness is the task of music and painting... What separates a snapshot from a masterpiece is that the latter is a metaphor of patience...'(227)

'And don't we spend our lives trying to please our parents, even when we're trying to stick it to them?'(241)

'The plane began its descent. He felt it in his stomach. he thought, too of how we almost always overlook these waypoints, the everyday transformations that occur between milestones, crises, epiphanies, and deaths. It went by so quickly, is what we say our youth, of our loves, of our wedding days, of the childhoods of our children, of our very lives.'(294)

'Our last moment is the string of final moments, the last look you take backward before going forward to the light: that pinprick of dawn, the horizon turning vertical, the sun and the moon in the same sky. The rhythm of a breath we've known always and the terminal sequence of heartbeats. The concave heavens and the convex earth, and in the curve between, the dangling end of a rope, the long cord of life, its loose ends frayed, its individual sinews, moments insignificant on their own, woven together, for strength.'(299)

First edition, 2010
304 pages
Book borrowed from the library

66. the PICTURE of DORIAN GRAY

Oscar Wilde 1891

Would you sell your soul for the promise of everlasting youth and beauty? Enchanted by his stunning portrait, Dorian Gray did. As he descends into the path of ultimate moral degradation, he remained youthful and beautiful... but his soul and his portait did not.

'In the center of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward...'(4)

'The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and grape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor even receive it from alien hands.'(6)

"Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every portrait with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul."(7)

'I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.'(10)

'Dorian Gray is to me simply a motive in art. You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him., He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there. He is a suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner. I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colors. That is all.'(13)

'Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.'(20)

'Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. (23)

'And Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty.'(24)

'If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that--I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!(28)

'When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always end by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.'(56)

'Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.'(82)

'She crouched on the floor like a wounded thing, and Dorian Gray with his beautiful eyes, looked down at her, and his chiseled lips curled in exquisite disdain. There is always something ridiculous about the emotion of people whom one has ceased to love. Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic.'(92)

'But the picture? What was he to day of that? It held the secret of his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look at it again?(95)

'Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a back where they have no account.'(104)

'For these treasure, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne. Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation f his life...'(144)

'When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.'(183)

'Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.'(201)

'You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be. As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.'(224)
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a Barnes and Noble Classic edition
244 pages
Book owned
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Personal note: Thanks to Bethany at Words, Words, Words for her review of the book and the promise of a million quotes.

65. the ROAD of LOST INNOCENCE

Somaly Mam 2008
originally published in French 2005

An awe-inspiring and riveting memoir of Somaly Mam. Born in Cambodia, she was sold to prostitution at twelve years old, suffered abhorrent sexual and physical abuse and torture, endured and fought her way out, and is currently dedicating her life to a relentless fight to end human trafficking and sex slavery in Asia and around the world through the Somaly Mam Foundation.

'My name is Somaly. At least that's the name I have now. Like everyone in Cambodia, I've had several. Names are the result of temporary choices. You change them the way you'd change lives.(opening line)

'...the name Somaly: "The Necklace of Flowers Lost in the Virgin Forest."(1)

'I was very unhappy not to have a mother like everyone else. My only confidants were the trees. I talked to them and told them about my sorrow. They listened, understood, and made discreet signs in my direction. They were my only true friends, along with the moon. When things got unbearable, I confessed my secrets to the waterfalls, because the water couldn't reverse its flow and betray me. Even today, I sometimes talk to trees. Other than that, I almost never spoke as a child. There wouldn't have been much point--nobody would have listened.(5)

'People learned from those years that they couldn't trust anyone--friends, neighbors, not even their own family. The more you let people know about yourself--the more you speak--the more you expose yourself to danger. It was important not to see, not to hear, not to know anything about what was happening. This is a very Cambodian attitude toward life.'(14)

'I learned to shut down all my feelings so that none of it mattered--so that it never even happened. Pain is temporary. It goes away if you let your brain go numb.'(25)

'Ideally in Cambodia a woman walks so quietly you can't hear her footsteps. She smiles without showing her teeth and laughs softly. She never looks directly into the eyes of any man. A woman must not talk back to her husband. She must not turn her back to him in bed. She must bow before she touches his head, and if she walks over his legs she will become ill. In Cambodia, you must respect and care for your parents, and your husband is your master--second only to your father.(28)

'But I wasn't frightened of ghosts. The dead don't scare me. I cried, but it was because I had no parents, because I was helpless, because I had been raped and beaten, and because I was hungry and exhausted. I cried from emotion, not from pain. I cried from frustration, because I couldn't kill them.'(46)

'Some prostitutes are sold to the meebon by their parents or relatives, or by their husbands. The price depends on their freshness and beauty, as well as the cleverness and connections of the seller.(47)

'Nowadays the girls are much younger too. This is because men in Cambodia will pay a thousand dollars to rape a virgin for a week--it's always a week, for a virgin. Sex with a virgin is supposed to give strength, to lengthen a man's life span and even lighten his skin.'(59)

'It's still happening, today, tonight. Imagine how many girls have been raped and hit since you started to read this book. My story doesn't matter, except that it stands for their story too, and their stories are why I don't sleep at night. They haunt me.(61)

'There was a creature growing inside me who moved and kicked and soon would need me, but I felt paralyzed by the thought of being a mother to someone. I had never had a mother and I painfully felt that hole in my life. To be a mother myself felt impossible.(123)

'In the beginning of 1996, Pierre, Eric and I finalized our project to create a charity to fund a proper center to help prostitutes. We decided to call it something mild--we knew we had to avoid attracting a stigma to the girls who would be living there. We settled on AFESIP, which translates from French as: Acting for Women in Distressing Situations.'(126)

'In Cambodia we're like frogs in front of the king. When the king orders it, we poke our heads above water and sing. When he signals, we go back into the water. But if we poke our heads out without having been invited to, the king cuts them off with his sword.'(128)

'I've seen everything and lived everything... It's all useless. You want to understand a great many things. It's no use. I fought all my life and for nothing: now I wait for death. The only thing to hope for in this world is the peace you need to look after your own garden.'(128)

'I wanted to show those villagers that even if you have been a prostitute, even if your skin is dark, you can still be a good person. You can be clever, and you can succeed. After the way they had treated me, I had made good life for myself. I was helping others and they could do that too.'(147)

'A seed is like a girl: it can look small and worthless, but if you treat it well then it will grow beautiful.'(147)

'What you have learned, from experience, is worth much more than gold. If you have a house it may burn down. Any kind of possession can be lost, but your experience is yours forever. Keep it and find a way to use it.'(156)

'Writing this book has brought everything back, and I can no longer sleep. It makes me sick. I have nightmares remembering all the horrors. Sometimes I don't know if I can bear to keep living with them. There are times when I'd like to get rid of the burden of memory that weighs me down, the roll call of misery that forces me to have shower after shower, rubbing myself down as hard as possible before covering myself in cream and drowning myself in perfume.'(187)

'People ask me how I can bear to keep doing what I do. I'll tell you. The evil that's been done to me is what propels me on. Is there any other way to exorcise it?'(190)

2009 Spiegel & Grau Trade paperback Edition
190 pages
Borrowed from AH

64. MURDER on the ORIENT EXPRESS

Agatha Christie 1934

A classic detective fiction, Hercule Poirot is a private Belgian detective who boards the Orient Express train en route from Istanbul to England. The surprisingly crowded Stamboul-Callais coach sleeping compartments become the scene of an investigation as a snowstorm halts their journey, an American is found dead, and the brilliant Poirot solves the murder using his brain cells: by pure logic and deduction.

'Hercule Poirot addressed himself to the task of keeping his moustaches out of the soup.'(27)

'It is incredible, Monsieur. All the world elects to travel tonight.'(31)

'The Orient Express had started on its three-days' journey across Europe.'(35)

'And yet - it lends itself to romance, my friend. All around us are people, of all classes, of all nationalities, of all ages. For three days these people, these strangers to one another, are brought together. They sleep and eat under one roof, they cannot get away from each other. At the end of three days they part, they go their several ways, never, perhaps to see each other again.'(38)

'You may well ask that. First this snow - this stoppage. And now -... And now a passenger lies dead in his berth -stabbed.'(61)

"No," said Mr Bouc thoughtfully. "That is the act of a man driven almost crazy with a frenzied hate - it suggests more the Latin temperament. Or else it suggests, as our friend the chef de train insisted, a woman."(78)

'We have here a hypothesis of the First and Second Murderer, as the great Shakespeare would put it. The First Murderer stabbed his victim and left the compartment, turning off the light. The Second Murderer came in the dark, did not see that his or her work had been done and stabbed at least twice at a dead body. '(83)

'See you, my dear doctor, me, I am not one to rely upon the expert procedure. It is the psychology I seek, not the fingerprint or the cigarette ash. But in this case I would welcome a little scientific assistance. This compartment is full of clues, but can I be sure that those clues are really what they seem to be?'(89)

'Ah, I'm coming to that. As I say, these clues, the watch stopped at a quarter-past one, the handkerchief, the pipe cleaner, they may be genuine, or they may be fake. As to that I cannot yet tell.'(90)

'Ratchett, as you suspected, was merely an alias. Ratchett was Casetti, the man who ran the celebrated kidnapping stunts - including the famous affair of little Daisy Armstrong.'(113)

'Mon cher, it is my habit to be neat and orderly. I make here a little table of chronological events.'(145)

'The impossible cannot have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.'(213)

'You are in error. You are inclined to put the cart before the horse. Before I ask myself, "Where did this man vanish to?" I ask myself, " Did such a man really exist?" Because, you see, if the man were an invention-- a fabrication-- how much easier to make him disappear! So I try to establish first that there is really is such a flesh and blood person.'(219)

'Mon ami, if you wish to catch a rabbit you put a ferret into the hole, and if the rabbit is there he runs. That is all I have done.'(248)

"We will go back to the dining-car," said Poirot. "We know now all that we can know. We have the evidence of the passengers, the evidence of their baggage, the evidence of our eyes. We can expect no further help. It must be our part now to use our brains.'(252)

'But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose their head and do the most absurd things. No, no the grease spot and that changed label do not prove guilt...'(284)

'If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, they usually admit it - often our of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect.'(302)

"I like to see an angry Englishman," said Poirot. "They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language."(315)

'As to who killed him --" He paused, looking at his audience. He could not complain of any lack of attention. Every eye was fixed upon him. In the stillness you could have heard a pin drop. He went on slowly:'(337)
______________________________________

An Agatha Christie Signature Edition published 2001
347 pages
Book owned
______________________________________

Personal note: Souvenir book bought in Amsterdam, May, 2010; and thanks to NancyO from 2010:The Year in Books who encouraged me to read the book earlier that I would have.

63. the DEVIL in the WHITE CITY

Erik Larson 2003

An incredible work of non-fiction about a parallel occurrence at the end of the 19th century, told in alternating format: the struggle of Chicago's architects and planners to show the world an innovative, magical and successful World's Trade Fair and the evils and madness of a serial killer, H. H Holmes, written in a very informative and absorbing way.

'The date was April 14, 1912, a sinister day in maritime history, but of course, the man in suite 63-65, shelter deck C, did not yet know it... The man was Daniel Hudson Burnham, and by now his name was familiar throughout the world. He was an architect and had done his work pretty well in Chicago, New York, Washington, San Francisco, Manila, and many other cities.'(3)


'Millet was never far from Burnham's mind, nor was the event that had brought them together: the great Chicago world's fair of 1893. Millet had been one of Burnham's closest allies in the long, bittersweet struggle to build the fair.'(4)

'A thousand trains a day entered or left Chicago. many of these trains brought single young women who had never ever seen a city but now hoped to make one of the biggest and toughest their home.'(11)

'And in Chicago a young handsome doctor stepped from a train, his surgical valise in hand. He entered a world of clamor, smoke, and steam, refulgent with the scents of murdered cattle and pigs. He found it to his liking.'(12)

'Holmes had been to Chicago before, but only for brief visits. The city impressed him, he said later, which was surprising because as a rule nothing impressed him, nothing moved him. Events and people captured his attention the way moving objects caught notice of an amphibian: first a machinelike registration of proximity, next a calculation of worth, and last a decision to act or to remain motionless. (37)


'He put up a new sign: H.H. Holmes Pharmacy. As word spread that a young, handsome, and apparently unmarried doctor now stood behind the counter, an increasing number of single women in their twenties began to patronize the store. They dressed nicely and brought things they did not need.'(46)

'Ellsworth insisted that what Chicago had in mind was something far grander than even the Paris exposition. He described for Olmsted a vision of a dream city designed by America's greatest architects and covering an expanse at least one-third larger than the Paris fair.'(49)

'He was the smoothest man I ever saw."said C.E.Davis, whom Holmes had hired to manage the drugstore's jewelry counter. Creditors, Davis said, would "come here raging and calling him all the names imanginable, and he would smile and talk to them and set up the cigars and drinks and send them away seemingly his friends for life. I never saw him angry. You couldn't have trouble with him if you tired.'(72)

'He argued that Chicago's fair, unlike any other before it, would be primarily a monument to architecture. It would awaken the nation to the power of architecture to conjure beauty from stone and steel.'(80)

'The furnace man examined the kiln. He saw that it contained an inner chamber of firebrick constructed in a manner that kept flames from reaching the interior, and he noted the clever addition of two openings in the top of the inner box that would allow gases from the box to flow into the surrounding flames, where they would then be consumed. It was an interesting design and seemed likely to work, although he did observe to himself that the shape of the kiln seemed unsuited to the task of bending glass.'(92)

'For the police there were warnings of a different sort-- letters from parents, visits from detectives hired by parents--but these were lost in the chaos. Vanishment seemed a Chicago pastime.'(102)

'How is it possible that this vast amount of construction, greatly exceeding that of the Paris Exhibition of 1889, will be ready in two years.'(119)



'He removed the apron and rolled down his sleeves. The chloroform and his own intense arousal made in him feel light-headed. The sensation, as always, was pleasant and induced in him a warm languor, like the feeling he got after sitting too long in front of a hot stove.'(149)

'But not a tower, he said. Towers were not original. Eiffel had built a tower already. "Mere bigness" wasn't enough either. "Something novel, original, daring and unique must be designed and built if American engineers are to retain their prestige and standing.'(156)

'There would be miracles at the fair--the chocolate Venus de Milo would not melt, the 22,000 pound cheese in the Wisconsin Pavilion would not mold--but the greatest miracle was the transformation of the grounds during the long soggy night that had preceded Cleveland's arrival.'(236)

'The first guests began arriving at Holmes's World's Fair Hotel, though not in the volume he and every other South Side hotelier had expected... His guest rooms began to fill with women, most quite young and apparently unused to living alone. Holmes found them intoxicating.'243)

'Despite its incomplete exhibits, rutted paths, and stretches of unplanted ground, the exposition revealed to its early visitors a vision of what a city could be and ought to be. The Black City to the north lay steeped in smoke and garbage, but here in the White City of the fair visitors found clean public bathrooms, pure water, an ambulance service, electric streetlights, and a sewage-processing system that yielded acres of manure for farmers.(247)


'The shared color, or more accurately the shared absence of color, produced an especially alluring range of effects as the sun traveled the sky. In the early morning, when Burnham conducted his inspections, the building were a pale blue and seemed to float on a ghostly cushion of ground mist. Each evening the sun colored the buildings ochre and lit the motes of dust raised by the breeze until the air itself became a soft orange veil.'(252)

'Ferris had created more than simply an engineering novelty. Like the inventors of the elevator, he had conjured an entirely new physical sensation.'(270)


'The secrets of Holmes's castle eventually did come to light, but only because of the persistence of a lone detective from a far-off city, grieving his own terrible loss.'(336)



First Vintage Books edition, 2004
390 pages
Book borrowed from BSM
Pictures from google images search

AWARDS PAGE

Inspired by Suko at Suko's Notebook : a page where I organize the awards given by very thoughtful and generous bloggers. Thank you so much. Please check out their sites if you haven't already.


September 8, 2010: from DizzyC @ Dizzy C's Little Book Blog
September 12, 2010: from Danielle at Every Last Page


June 15, 2010: from Kika at The Book Bluff
July 31, 2010: from Bonnie at The Literary Gato
August 1, 2010: from Jinky @ Jinky is Reading
August 7, 2010: from Booksploring
August 8, 2010: from Zakiya @ Butterfly Feet Walking on Books
August 13, 2010: from Red @ What Red Read

September 30, 2010: from Kathryn @ One, Two, Three... and there were books

October 16, 2010: from Bethany @ Words, Words, Words

November 25, 2010: from meags222 @ Feeling a Little Bookish

April 9, 2010: from Rachel @ Books are a Garden
June 4,2010: from Marce @ Tea Time with Marce


May 1, 2010: from Sarah @ Loving Books
May 2, 2010: from Becki @ Confessions of a Bibliophile
May 31, 2010: from Bibliolatrist@ Bibliolatry
September 16, 2010: from Greyz @ Clandestine Sanctuary

October 4, 2010: from Kelsey @ Kelsey's Book Corner


April 29, 2010: from Bethany @ Words,Words,Words


April 17,2010: from Jillian @ Random Ramblings


April 9,2010: from Rachel @ Books are a Garden

62. the BELL JAR

Sylvia Plath 1971

A sad and thought provoking story about Esther Greenwood's agony with depression in spite of what looked like a privileged and promising successful life. Aware that she is mentally deteriorating, feeling trapped in a bell jar, with her mother pushing her to 'just get better', she goes through the motions of therapy while contemplating various ways of ending her life.

'It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions.'(1)

'The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the building were making noise, and the river was making noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.'(19)

'There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: "I'll go take a hot bath."'(19)

'People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.(56)

'I decided to expect nothing from Buddy Willard. If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.(58)

'I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.'(66)

'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.'(77)

'I was descending, but the white sun rose no higher. It hung over the suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot without which the world would not exist. A small, answering point in my own body flew toward it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery--air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy."'(97)

'I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted to him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, "It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one," and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind.' (107)

'I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.'(123)

'I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.'(128)

'I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million shapes and cul-de-sac of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.(147)

'Lately I had considered going into the Catholic church myself. I knew the Catholics thought killing yourself was an awful sin. But perhaps, if this was so, they might have a good way to persuade me out of it.'(164)

'My mother was the worst. She never scolded me, but kept begging me, with a sorrowful face, to tell her what she had done wrong. She said she was sure the doctors thought she had done something wrong because they asked her a lot of questions about my toilet training.'(202)

'I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I would respect him. Irwin was a full professor at twenty-six and had the pale, hairless skin of a boy genius. I also needed somebody quite experienced to make up for my lack of it...'(238)

'To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.'(237)

'But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday--at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere--the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?'(241)

25th anniversary Edition published 1996
244 pages
Book borrowed from the Library

61. the HOUSE at RIVERTON

Kate Morton 2006

In this brilliant historical fiction, alternating between 1914 through 1924 and 1999, Grace Bradley recounts her life at the House at Riverton during her privileged service to the Hartfords: Hannah, Emmeline, David and Mr. Frederick. A film maker, Ursula has decided to recreate the tragic death of Robbie, an artist and Hannah's lover. This novel ought to be slowly and patiently savored, each foreshadowing meticulously remembered, for in the end, they all are subtle little clues to the final secret revealed. Warning: do NOT read the last page of the book.

'Last November I had a nightmare. It was 1923 and I was at Riverton again.'(3)

'But although I had been met with such memories before, Ursula's letter was different. It was the first time in over seventy years that anyone had associated me with the events, had remembered that a young woman named Grace Reeves had been at Riverton that summer. It made me feel vulnerable somehow, singled out. Guilty.'

'A rising star of the English poetry scene kills himself by a dark lake on the eve of a huge society party. His only witness are two beautiful sisters who never speak to each other again. One his fiancee, the other rumored to be his lover. It's terribly romantic.'(14)

'...there was some part of me that never left that house. Rather, some part of the house that wouldn't leave me. For years after, the smell of Stubbins & Co. beeswax, the crackle of tires after a long day's work, sipping cocoa by the servants' hall fire while Mr. Hamilton orated select passages from the Times (those deemed fit for other impressionable ears), Nancy frowned at some irreverent comment of Alfred's, and Mrs Townsend snored gently in the rocker, her knitting resting on her generous lap...'(15)

'I have been thinking about the day I started Riverton. I can see it clearly. The intervening years concertina and it is June 1914. I am fourteen again: naive, gauche, terrified, following Nancy up flight after flight of scrubbed elm stairs.'(17)

'Never forget... you are fortunate indeed to be invited to serve in a great house such as this. And with good fortune comes responsibility... Your conduct in all matters reflects directly on the family and you must do them justice: keep their secrets and deserve their trust. Remember that the Master always knows best... Serve them silently... eagerly... gracefully. You will know your job is done well when it goes unnoticed, that you have succeeded when you are unnoticed.' (24)

'The Game was old. They'd been playing it for years. No, not playing. That is the wrong verb. Living: they had been living The Game for years. For The Game was more than its name suggested. It was a complex fantasy, an alternate world into which they escaped.'(46)

'Just a children's game and yet... What happened in the end would surely not have come about without it?' (49)

'He will return one day, of that I've little doubt, for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.'(80)

'There's nothing dynamic about a room full of old books. It works well this way, the lake being where he killed himself and all. Kind of like the end of the story is in the beginning. It's romantic.'(139)

'I wan unsure how to answer, how to explain. How does one begin to confess that mothering didn't come naturally? That from the first Ruth had seemed a stranger? That the fond feeling of inevitable connectedness of which books are written and myths are fashioned was never mine?'(182)

'He turned to me, but did not speak, and I glimpsed for a moment how I must appear to him. The yawning gulf between his experience and mine. And I knew then that there would be no telling me what he saw. I understood somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost.'(229)

'Teddy shrugged away a birch leaf that had fallen onto his shoulder...I seek a wealth of a different sort. A wealth of new experiences. The century is young and so am I. There are too many things to see and do to become bogged down in business.'(246)

'I have been trying to fix the turning points in Hannah and Teddy's story; all thoughts, these days, lead to Hannah. Looking back, it seems clear: there were certain events in the first year of their marriage that laid the foundation of what was to come. I couldn't see them at the time. In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.'(271)

'It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future:moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past: should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.'(301)

'There is only one person whom I wish to hear my story. One person for whom I set it down on tape. I only hope it will be worth it. That Ursula is right: that Marcus will listen and understand. That my own guilt and the story of its acquisition will somehow set him free.'(303)

'And I kept my word. For better or for worse.'(326)

'And then he spoke to her. Poem after poem. About knowing and unknowing, truth and suffering, love and lust. She closed her eyes and with every word she felt the darkness disappearing.'(388)

'Testing. One. Two. Three. Tape for Marcus. Number four. This is the last tape I will make. I am almost at the end and there is no going beyond.'(451)

First Atria Books hardcover edition April 2008
468 pages
Book borrowed from the library

60. the GLASS CASTLE

Jeannette Walls 2005

An unbelievable 'fact-is-stranger-than-fiction' memoir, the author who was a former journalist contributor to MSNBC.com, reveals her life growing up practically raised like nomads in the most dysfunctional family I have ever come across.

'I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster... To the people walking by, she probably looked like any of the thousands of homeless people in New York City.'(3)

'I was on fire. It's my earliest memory. I was three years old, and we were living in a trailer park in a southern Arizona town whose name I never knew. I was standing on a chair in front of the stove, wearing a pink dress my grandmother had bought for me...I was wearing the dress to cook hot dogs, watching them swell and bob in the boiling water...'(9)

'We were always doing the skedaddle, usually in the middle of the night. I sometimes heard Mom and Dad discussing the people who were after us. Dad called them henchmen, bloodsuckers, and the gestapo.'(19)

'By the time I was four, I was pretty good with Dad's pistol, a big black six-shot revolver, and could hit five our of six beer bottles at thirty paces.'(21)

'When Dad wasn't telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like building the Glass Castle. All of Dad's engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to build for us in the desert.'(25)

'Mom didn't like cooking much--"Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour," she'd ask us, "when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?"--so once a week or so, she'd fix a big cast-iron vat of something like fish and rice or, usually, beans.'(56)

'...Mom was assigned to teach Lori's class. Her students really liked her. She had the same philosophy about educating children that she had about rearing them. She thought rules and discipline held people back and felt that the best way to let children fulfill their potential was by providing them freedom.'(73)

'She added that you should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. "Everyone has something good about them," she said. "You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that." (144)

'We called the kitchen the loose-juice room, because on the rare occasions that we had paid the electricity bill and had power, we'd get wicked electric shock if we touched any damp or metallic surface in the room... We quickly learned that whenever we ventured into the kitchen, we needed to wrap our hands in the driest socks or rags we could find.'(131)

'I loved The Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, and especially A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. I thought Francie Nolan and I were practically identical, except that she had lived fifty years earlier in Brooklyn and her mother always kept the house clean. Francie Nolan's father sure reminded me of Dad. If Francie saw the good in her father, even though most people considered him a shitless drunk, maybe I wasn't a complete fool for believing in mine. Or trying to believe in him. It was getting harder.'(168)

'The road back to Welch was dark and empty. The wind whistled through the broken window on my side of the Plymouth. Dad lit a cigarette. "It was like that time I threw you into the sulfur spring to teach you to swim." he said. "You might have been convinced you were going to drown, but I knew you'd do just fine."'(213)

'I didn't know what to do. Part of me wanted to do whatever I could to take care of Mom and Dad, and part of me just wanted to wash my hands of them.'(256)

'I think that maybe sometimes people get the lives they want.' (236)

'By the following summer, Mom and Dad were heading into their third year on the streets. They'd figured out how to make it work for them, and I gradually came around to accepting the notion that whether I like it or not, this was how it was going to be. "It's sort of the city's fault." Mom told me. "They make it too easy to be homeless. If it was really unbearable, we'd do something different."'(264)

Also, most people in Welch had a pretty good idea how bad off the Walls family was, but the truth was, they all had their problems, too-- they were just better than we were at covering them up. I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.'(270)

First Scribner trade paperback edition 2006
288 pages
Book borrowed from the Library

59. the GUERNSEY LITERARY and POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY

Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows 2008

In this sweet and sentimental book, in the format of letters, Juliet Ashton, an author in 1946 after the Second World War seeks an inspiration for a second book. She finds much more through a lost book found and a book club, the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

'I no longer want to write this book--my head and my heart just aren't in it. Dear as Izzy Bickerstaff is--and was--to me, I don't want to write anything else under that name. I don't want to be considered a light-hearted journalist anymore. '(3)

'Am I too particular? I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.'(8)

'My name is Dawsey Adams, and I live on my farm in St. Martin's Parish on Guernsey, I know of you because I have an old book that once belonged to you--the Selected Essays of Elia, by an author whose name in real life was Charles Lamb. Your name and address were written inside the front cover.'(9)

'That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive--all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.'(12)

'I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers--booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one--the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it--along with first dibs on the new books.'(15)

'It was amazing to me then, and still is, that so many people who wander into bookshops don't really know what they're after--they only want to look around and hope to see a book that will strike their fancy. And then, being bright enough not to trust the publisher's blurb, they will ask the book clerk the three questions: (1) What is it about? (2) Have you read it? (3) Was it any good?'(16)

'We begun to meet--for the sake of the Commandant at first, and then for our own pleasure. None of us had experience with literary societies, so we made our own rules: we took turns speaking about the books we'd read. At the start, we tried to be calm and objective, but that soon fell away, and the purpose of the speakers was to goad the listeners into wanting to read the book themselves.'(51)

'Since there was scant butter, less flour, and no sugar to spare on Guernsey then, Will concocted a potato peel pie: mashed potatoes for filling, strained beets for sweetness, and potato peelings for crust. Will's recipes are usually dubious, but this one became a favorite.'(51)

'Quite apart from my interest in their interest in reading, I have fallen in love with two men: Eben Ramsey and Dawsey Adams. Clovis Fossey and John Booker, I like. I want Amelia Maugery to adopt me; and me, I want to adopt Isola Pribby. I will leave you to discern my feelings for Adelaide Addison (Miss) by reading her letters. The truth is, I am living more in Guernsey than I am in London at the moment...'(93)

'My greatest pleasure has been in resuming my evening walks along the cliff tops. The Channel is no longer in rolls of barbed wire, the view is unbroken by huge VERBOTEN signs. The mines are gone from our beaches, and I can walk when, where, and for as long as I like.'(105)

'Have you ever noticed that when your mind is awakened or drawn to someone new, that person's name suddenly pops up everywhere you go? My friend Sophie calls it coincidence, and Mr. Simpless, my parson friend, calls it Grace. He thinks that if one cares deeply about someone or something new one throws a kind of energy out into the world, and "fruitfulness" is drawn in.'(116)

'My guides are as various as the sights. Isola tells me about cursed pirated chests bound with bleached bones washing up on the beaches... Eben describes how things used to look... Dawsey says the least, but he takes me to see wonders...Then he stands back and lets me enjoy them as long as I want. He's the most un-hurrying person I've ever met.'(165)

'You really have to be Kit's height to see this world properly. She's grand at pointing out certain things I would otherwise miss--butterflies, spiders, flowers growing tiny and low to the ground--they're hard to see when you are faced with a blazing wall of fuchsias and bougainvillea.'(168)

'Didn't you ever notice how everyone you interviewed sooner or later talked about Elizabeth? Lord, Juliet, who painted Booker's portrait and saved his life and danced down the street with him? Who thought up the lie about the Literary Society--and then made it happen?'(201)

'Every biography should be written within a generation of it's subject's life, while he or she is still in living memory. Think of what I could have done for Anne Bronte if I'd been able to speak to her neighbors. Perhaps she really wasn't meek and melancholy--perhaps she had a screaming temper and dashed the crockery to the floor regularly once a week.'(228)

a Dial Press Book/August 2008
274 pages
Book borrowed from the Library

58. ANNE FRANK: the DIARY of a YOUNG GIRL

Anne Frank, 1952
Translated from the Dutch by B.M Mooyaart-Doubleday

A poignant and thoughtful diary written by Anne from the age of twelve to fifteen, amidst the threat of German capture at any second, hiding at the "Secret Annexe" at her father Otto Frank's office with seven other people and 'journaling' like any teenager would: the normal mother-daughter conflicts she faced everyday, her longing to be a daddy's girl, her relationship with her sister Margot, the excitementof her first kiss with Peter and all the anguish and anxiety of this horrible time in Amsterdam.

'On Friday, June 12th, I woke up at six o'clock and no wonder, it was my birthday. But of course. I was not allowed to get up at that hour, so I had to control my curiosity until a quarter to seven.' (1)

'Yes, there is no doubt that paper is patient and as I don't intend to show this cardboard-covered notebook, bearing the proud name of "diary," to anyone, unless I find a real friend, boy or girl, probably nobody cares. And now I come to the root of the matter, the reason for my starting a diary: it is that I have no such real friend.'(2)

'I don't think I shall ever feel really at home in this house, but that does not mean that I loathe it here, it is more like being on vacation in a very peculiar boarding house. Rather a mad idea, perhaps, but that is how it strikes me. The "Secret Annexe" is the ideal hiding place.'(20)

'Margot and Mummy's natures are completely strange to me. I can understand my friends better than my own mother--too bad!' (30)

'Anyhow, I've learned one thing now. You only really get to know people when you've had a jolly good row with them. Then and then only can you judge their true characters!'(35)

'Mummy and her feelings are something I find harder to bear than anything else...We are exact opposites in everything; so naturally we are bound to run up against each other. I don't pronounce judgement on Mummy's character, for that is something i can't judge. '(45)

'Honestly, you needn't think it's easy to be the "badly brought-up" central figure of a hypercritical family in hiding. When I lie in bed at night and think over the many sins and shortcomings attributed to me, I get so confused by it all that I either laugh or cry: it depends what sort of mood I am in.'(56)

'Mummy got up, paused by my bed for a moment, and walked slowly towards the door. Suddenly she turned around, and with a distorted look on her face said, "I don't want to be cross, love cannot be forced." There were tears in her eyes as she left the room.'(75)

'It annoys me that I am so dependent on the atmosphere here, but I'm certainly not the only one--we all find it the same. If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.'(114)

'I simply can't imagine that the world will ever be normal for us again. I do talk about "after the war," but then it is only a castle in the air, something that will never really happen.'(115)

'I see the eight of us with our "Secret Annexe" as if we were a little piece of blue heaven, surrounded by heavy black rain clouds. The round, clearly defined spot where we stand is still safe, but the clouds gather more closely about us and the circle which separates us from the approaching danger closes more and more tightly.'(115)

'I hid myself within myself, I only considered myself and quietly wrote down all my joys, sorrows, and contempt in my diary. This diary is of great value to me, because it has become a book of memoirs in many places, but on a good many pages I could certainly put "past and done with."'(127)

"I have now reached the stage that I don't care much whether I live or die. The world will still keep turning without me; what is going to happen, will happen, and anyway it's no good trying to resist.'(150)

'I believe that it's spring within me. I feel that spring is awakening, I feel it in my whole body and soul. It is an effort to behave normally, I feel utterly confused, don't know what to read, what to write, what to do, I only know that I am longing...!'(151)

'The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature, and God...And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.'(158)

'Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there's not a penny available for medical services, artists, or for poor people? Why do some people have to starve, while there are surpluses rotting in other parts of the world? Oh why are people so crazy?'(223)

'I hope something will happen soon now, shooting if need be--nothing can crush is more than this restlessness. Let the end come, even if it is hard; then at least we shall know whether we are finally going to win through or go under.'(242)

'How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that: "A quiet conscience makes one strong!"'(256)

'This refrain hummed in my ears: bend the top, pull the skin, remove the string, throw out the pod, etc., etc., they dance before my eyes, green, green, green maggots, strings, rotten pods, green, green, green.'(259)

'I have one outstanding trait in my character, which must strike anyone who knows me for any length of time, and that is my knowledge of myself. I can watch myself and my actions, just like an outsider. The Anne of every day I can face entirely without prejudice, without making excuses for her, and watch what's good and what's bad about her. This "self-consciousness" haunts me, and every time I open my mouth I know as soon as I've spoken whether "they ought to have been different" or "that was right as it was."'(260)

'I didn't want to to hear about "symptoms of your age," or '"other girls," or "it wears off by itself"; I didn't want to be treated as a girl-like-all others, but as Anne-on-her-own-merits. Pim didn't understand that. For that matter, I can't confide in anyone, unless they tell me a lot about themselves...' (261)

Bantam Edition July 1993
283 pages
Book borrowed from the Library

57. MY ANTONIA

Willa Cather 1918

In a wondrous book set in all the glory of the past American Midwest, Jim, the narrator tells of his life in Nebraska and his recollection as he comes of age with a childhood friend, his Antonia, a woman who drew from him a beautiful life-long affection, respect and admiration.

'Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden--Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West.'(3)

'"I didn't arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people Antonia's name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn't any form. It hasn't any title either." He went into the next room, sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the portfolio the word "Antonia." He frowned at this a moment, then prefixed another word, making it "My Antonia." That seemed to satisfy him.'(6)

'I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska.'(9)

'As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.'(16)

'I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes natural as sleep.'(17)

'You is just like big mans; you wait for him to lift his head and then you go for him. Ain't you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show everybody. Nobody ain't seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like you kill.'(33)

'I never came upon this place without emotion, and in all the country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence--the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after the sunset.'(74)

'Whenever I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet managed to say so much when he exclaimed, 'My Antonia!"'(78)

'When Samson was well again, his young mistress led him back to the piano...They found he had an absolute pitch, and a remarkable memory. As a very young child, he could repeat, after a fashion, any composition that was played for him...As piano playing it was perhaps abominable, but as music it was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than his other physical senses--that not only filled his dark mind, but worried his body incessantly.'(115)

'To dance "Home, Sweet Home," with Lena was like coming in with the tide. She danced every dance like a Waltz--the waltz of coming home to something, of inevitable, fated return.'(134)

'When you spun out into the floor with Tony, you didn't return to anything. You set out every time upon a new adventure. I liked to schottische with her; she had so much spring and variety, and was always putting in new steps and slides. She taught me to dance against and around the hard-and-fast beat of the music.'(134)

'His zest in debauchery might wane, but never Mrs. Cutter's belief in it. The reckoning with his wife at the end of an escapade was something he counted on--like the last powerful liqueur after a long dinner. The one excitement he really couldn't do without was quarreling with Mrs. Cutter!'(151)

'When I closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing--the Danish laundry girls and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.'(162)

'She stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as I came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears. Her warm had clasped mine.'(191)

'Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often that of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundred of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.'(192)

'In that singular light every little tree and stock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows int he fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the odd pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.'(192)

'About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant to always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory.'(193)

'In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.'(197)

'Antonia had always been one to leave the images in the mind that did not fade--that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts on one's first primer...She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true.'(211)
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Barnes and Nobles Classics Edition 2003
222 pages
Book owned
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Personal note: In the afternoon after I bought this book I found this review from Ordinary Reader... she liked it, and so did I.