READING AWAY

in EGYPT and the RIVER NILE
October 27 - November 9, 2010

Pictures from ANCIENT EGYPT book by Lorna Oakes and Lucia Gahlin, Barnes and Noble Edition 2006

PLANNED BOOKS TO READ:

Be back soon!!!

117. MY NAME is MARY SUTTER

Robin Oliveira 2010

Against the backdrop of the Civil War, this powerful historical fiction effectively focuses on a young woman's innermost desire to heal against all hardships. This woman is Mary Sutter, a midwife who dreams of becoming a surgeon, an almost impossible feat for a woman at that time. Having been denied acceptance to medical school, mentorship by their town's surgeon James Blevens, and love of Thomas who later marries her twin sister Jenny, she decides to leave for Washington DC to help care for injured soldiers. She meets surgeon William Stipp, who hesitantly becomes the mentor she seeks. With heavy hearts, very limited resources, lacking in medical and surgical experiences and surrounded by stench, filth, devastation, sickness and death, they tackle an almost insurmountable and overwhelming task. A worthwhile debut novel.

'"Are you Mary Sutter?" Hours had passed since James Blevens had called for the midwife. All manner of shouts and tumult drifted in from the street, and so he had answered the door to his surgery rooms with some caution, but the young woman before him made an arresting sight: taller and wider than was generally considered handsome, with an unflattering hat pinned to an unruly curls, though an enticing brightness about the eyes compensated.'(opening lines)

"You have already seen me turn a child. I am just as skilled with a previa, or twins. But I want more. I want to study. I want to know more about anatomy, physiology. The something I cannot see."(7)

'At times it seems to Mary that the world over was rent with the cries of women giving birth. But when at last the baby emerged, slippery, fighting, squalling, the woman's thighs trembling and then collapsing, and Mary was given charge to kneel beside the mother and wipe-- gently-- the writhing baby dry on her stomach, the battle of labor proved a war worth fighting. What did Mary remember most? Not the mother's bulging flesh, the bullet-shaped head of the infant, the gasp of love when at last the mother encircled the infant in her arms, but Amelia's stillness. Her grand remove. Competence incarnate.'(24)

'No one has ever told her that grief was a leveling of all emotion, that life would stretch before you, colorless and endless, devoid of any hope.'(31)

'She believed her father had loved her best, not knowing it was the clever parent's trick to convince every child they were the most beloved.'(44)

"In all the world, there is not medicine enough to heal what ails the Union army, mopping or no."(129)

'It was his first but not his last amputation. One by one, he would grow adept with a knife, skilled, quick, efficient, in conditions much worse than these. In time, he would wield that blade as an extension of himself, grow to love its heft, its curves, the way the blade caressed and then sliced a portion of a man away. And he would grow to love himself: how he would know just what to do and how to do it, could do it, would be forced to do it for days on end, his knees buckling with fatigue, his heart numb to all but necessity.'(151)

'In the womb, she and Jenny had shared everything, their arms and legs entwined in a seeming eternal embrace, a grasp she feared now had spawned more competition than cooperation. But what was fair when selfishness collided with heartbreak? Mary buried her head in her hands. What was required of a sister?'(223)

'For a moment, Mary could not act. Time, her enemy all day, now betrayed her again by slowing further. A maddening sluggishness seized her. She could not move, could not think fast enough to understand what she was seeing.'(242)

'For all the things we say to our children for their own good, very little good ever comes of it.'(249)

'Come home. I need you. Mary looked up. If only, if only. Time the terrible trick. Find your way through the black shadow of the past.'(285)

"Listen to me Mary. You see all those men? Most of them will die. If not here, then back in Washington. On the Peninsula, no one shot in the belly or chest or head survived, not one, no matter how fast we got to them. Do you understand? We have to save the most men. If we let one on the train who will die anyway, it will doom two."(299)

'You want to be a surgeon? To be a surgeon is to look a man in the eye and tell him the truth. If you can't do that, then get out of here. Go home." He was shouting now, his fury echoing the thunder rising in the distance. Stipp had taken her by the scaffolding of her shoulders as if he no longer trusted her, but now he pulled her into an embrace and whispered, "It is all butchery. Every bit of it. You cannot help them with just whiskey, Mary."(300)

'Lincoln simply could not understand a man who could not see his own fallibility. Irony lost in the blind pursuit of cacophonous righteousness. I wish to be free, but you may not be free. What he hated most was that they could not see the inherent cruelty in their economy. Their slaves' skin might be black, but it was not as black as the souls who might enslave them.'(315)

'By the thousands, the wounded lay on the ground and thought, This thirst is not thirst. This pain is not pain. This world is not being rent in two... That howling is only a whisper. That screech is just a murmur. That explosion is nothing but a sigh. That musket fire is but a rustle... I am not here. We are not here. Armies are not here. The country is not depending on this moment... Battles are conversations. An exchange. A dialogue... None of this is true.'(332)

'It was strange that redemption, when it finally came, felt like a discipline. Mary's movements were certain, her thinking methodical, stemming no longer from fear or love-- the same emotion, when love is unrequited-- but instead from determination. She was not even bartering with death anymore. She was defying it.'(343)

Viking Penguin, First Edition

364 pages

Book borrowed from the Library

I read the book because of Jennifer's review @ Crazy-for-books.com. Her review is here.

116. the BIG SLEEP

Raymond Chandler 1939

In this classic detective fiction, the author creates Philip Marlowe, one that epitomizes the private detective of by-gone days, working for the love of the skill . He is a smart-talking, quick-thinking, cynical but idealistic, sensitive but brutally honest detective who is seemingly incorruptible and always focused on the task at hand. When wealthy but ailing General Sternwood hires him to deal with blackmailer Geiger, what looks like a simple problem becomes a mere fraction of a complicated plot that also involves the General's two unruly daughters, Carmen and Vivian Regan. This book is a primary example of a book I quote because of the descriptive and ever-interesting play of words.

'It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.'(opening lines)

"Vivian went to good schools of the snob type and to college. Carmen went to half a dozen schools of greater and greater liberality, and ended up where she started. I presume they both had, and still have, all the usual vices. If I sound a little sinister as a parent, Mr. Marlowe, it is because my hold on life is too slight to include any Victorian hypocrisy... I need not add that a man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets.'(13)

'I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs. Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble... Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full.'(17)

"I didn't ask to see you. You sent for me. I don't mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me."(19)

'She had a beautiful body, small, lithe, compact, firm, rounded. Her skin in the lamplight had the shimmering luster of pearl. Her legs didn't quite have the raffish grace of Mrs. Regan's legs, but they were very nice. I looked her over without either embarrassment or ruttishness. As a naked girl she was not there in that room at all. She was just a dope. To me she was always just a dope.'(36)

"Keep quiet or you'll get the same and more of it. Just lie quiet and hold your breath. Hold it until you can't hold it any longer and then tell yourself that you have to breathe, that you're black in the face, that your eyeballs are popping out, and that you're going to breathe right now, but that you're sitting strapped in the chair in the clean little gas chamber up in San Quentin and when you take that breath you're fighting with all your soul not to take it, it won't be air you'll get, it will be cyanide fumes. And that's what they call humane execution in our state now."(101)

'It's goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can't be sure... "That's one of the qualifications for good hotel help," I said.'(122)

'He pushed a shiny print across the desk and I looked at an Irish face that was more sad than merry and more reserved than brash. Not the face of a tough guy and not the face of a man who could be pushed around much by anybody. Straight dark brows with strong bone under them. A forehead wide rather than high, a mat of dark clustering hair, a thin short nose, a wide mouth. a chin that had strong lines but was small for the mouth. A face that looked a little taut, the face of a man who would move fast and play for keeps. I passed the print back. I would know that face, if I saw it.'(123)

"Men have been shot for practically nothing. The first time we met I told you I was a detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at it, lady. I don't play at it."(151)

'I was as empty of life as a scarecrow's pockets. I went out to the kitchenette and drank two cups of black coffee. You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick.'(159)

"Just a plain pine box," I said. "don't bother with bronze or silver handles. And don't scatter my ashes over the blue Pacific. I like the worms better. Did you know that worms are of both sexes and that any worm can love any other worm?"(191)

'The game I play is not spillikins. There's always a large element of bluff connected with it. Whatever I might say to a cop, he would apt to discount it. And to that cop it wouldn't make a difference what I said. When you hire a boy in my line of work it isn't like hiring a window-washer and showing him eight windows and saying: 'Wash those and you're through.' You don't know what I have to go through or over or under to do your job for you. I do it my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favor. The client comes first, unless he's crooked. Even then all I do is hand the job back to him and keep my mouth shut.'(212)

' What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.'(230)

First Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Edition, August 1992

231 pages

Book borrowed from the Classic section/Library

115. I KNOW WHY the CAGED BIRD SINGS

Maya Angelou 1969

This book is truly a poet's autobiography: a memoir written in vivid, luscious and descriptive language that reads like a remarkable work of fiction. The first of a five-series memoir, this particular book recounts her childhood in an extra-ordinary and startling coming of age story. Marguerite (Maya) grew up with her brother Bailey and was raised by her grandmother Momma in the highly segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas, a town where their only dentist's policy is never to touch a black person's mouth. To escape racism, they were later sent like a baggage on a train to their mother in California, only for Maya to suffer a different sort of despicable act . It is hard to fathom the author's inner strength to overcome all these hardships and emerge the inspiring living legend that she is now.

'"What are you looking at me for?
I didn't come to stay.
I hadn't so much forgot as I couldn't bring myself to remember. Other things were more important... Whether I could remember the rest of the poem or not was immaterial. The truth of the statement was like a wadded-up handkerchief, sopping wet in my fists, and the sooner they accepted it the quicker I could let my hands open and the air would cool my palms.'(opening lines)

'If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.'(3)

'What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high-rise? The answer must be the experience shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of the childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in the early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.'(16)

'My mother's beauty literally assailed me. Her red lips... split to show even white teeth and her fresh-butter color looked see-through clean. Her smile widened her mouth beyond her cheeks beyond her ears and seemingly through the walls to the street outside. I was struck dumb.'(49)

'The resignation of its inhabitants encouraged me to relax. They showed me a contentment based on the belief that nothing more was coming to them, although a great deal more was due. Their decision to be satisfied with life's inequities was a lesson for me. Entering Stamps, I had the feeling that I was stepping over the border lines of the map and would fall, without fear, right off the end of the world. Nothing more could happen, for in Stamps, nothing happened... Into this cocoon I crept.'(74)

'As I ate she began the first of what we later called "my lessons in living." She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations.'(83)

'Childhoods' logic never asks to be proved (all conclusions are absolute).(85)

'The sounds of tag beat through the trees while the top branches waved in contrapuntal rhythms. I lay on a moment of green grass and telescoped the children's game to my vision. The girls ran about wild, now here, now there, never here, never was, they seemed to have no more direction than a splattered egg. But it was shared if seldom voiced knowledge that all movements fitted, and worked according to a larger plan.'(115)

'But my head continued to throb with the measured insistence of a bass drum, and how could a toothache pass the calaboose, hear the songs of the prisoners, their blues and laughter, and not be changed? How could one or two or even a mouthful of angry tooth roots meet a wagonload of powhitetrash children, endure their idiotic snobbery and not feel less important?(158)

'My picture of Mother and Momma embracing on the train platform has been darkly retained through the coating of the then embarrassment and the now maturity. Mother was a blithe chick nuzzling around the large, solid dark hen. The sounds they made had a rich inner harmony. Momma's deep, slow voice lay under my mother's rapid peeps and chirps like stones under rushing water.'(171)

'To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.'(231)

a Bantam Book edition, 1993
246 pages
Book owned

114. the VIRGIN SUICIDES

Jeffrey Eugenides 1993

An engrossing book I should have read a long time ago. Set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, it is a compelling read about the story of the Lisbon sisters: Cecilia(13), Lux (14), Bonnie(15), Mary(16), and Therese(17)'s suicides in a unique narration by five males, one of them anonymous, who at the time were mesmerized and obsessed with the girls. They reminisce their teenage encounters with these girls who grew up with 'unusual' parents, recalling the very few times they had contact with them and the many times they have spied on them. With the aid of remembered anecdotes, a collection of photos, letters and bits and pieces of things they later referred to as Exhibits # 1-97, they reconstruct the events following the first suicide by Cecilia to try and explain the mystery behind the tragic acts, in their own attempt for closure, perhaps? A small element of music towards the end was also a special bonus for me.

'On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide-- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese-- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.'(opening line)

'Cecilia had just gotten her period, on the same day of the month as the other girls, who were all synchronized in their lunar rhythms. Those five days of each month were the worst for Mr. Lisbon, who had to dispense aspirin as though feeding the ducks and comfort crying jags that arose because a dog was killed on TV. He said the girls also displayed a dramatic womanliness during their "monthly time." They were more languorous, descended the stairs in an actressy way, and kept saying with a wink, "Cousin Herbie's come for a visit."'(23)

'We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.'(44)

'I ask you: is dullness a gift? intelligence a curse?'(103)

'Here you have them, as we knew them, as we're still coming to know them: skittish Bonnie, shrinking from the flash; Therese, with her braincase squeezing shut the suspicious slits of her eyes; Mary, proper and posed; and Lux, looking not at the camera but up in the air.'(118)

'Following the homecoming dance, Mrs. Lisbon closed the downstairs shades. All we could see were the girls' incarcerated shadows, which ran riot in our imaginations. Moreover, as fall turned to winter, the trees in the yard drooped and thickened, concealing the house, even though their leaflessness should have revealed it. A cloud always seemed to hover over the Lisbons' roof.(141)

'It was crazy to make love on the roof at any time, but to make love on the roof in winter suggested derangement, desperation, self-destructiveness far in the excess of any pleasure snatched beneath the dripping trees. Though some of us saw Lux as force of nature, impervious to chill, an ice goddess generated by the season itself, the majority knew she was only a girl in danger, or in pursuit, of catching her death of cold.'(150)

'At night the cries of cats making love or fighting , their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.'(159)

'The colors of their eyes were fading, the location of moles, dimples, centipeded scars. It had been so long since the Lisbon girls had smiled we could no longer picture their crowded teeth. "They're just memories now," Chase Buell said sadly. "Time to write them of." But even as he uttered these words, he rebelled against them, as we all did. And rather than consign the girls to oblivion, we gathered their possessions once more, everything we'd gotten hold of during our strange curatorship...'(186)

'The above order, however, does chart the basic progression of our musical conversation. Because Lux had burned her hard rock, the girls' sons were mostly folk music. Stark plaintive voices sought justice and equality. An occasional fiddle evoked the country the country had once been. The singers had bad skin or wore boots. Song after song throbbed from ear to ear, the drumbeats so regular we might have been pressing our ears to the girls' chests.'(197)

'After a long pause, their turntable began grinding again, and we heard the song which even now, in the Muzak of malls makes us stops and stare back into a lost time:

Hey, have you ever tried

Really reaching out for the other side

I maybe climbing on rainbows, But baby, here goes:'(198)

'We were above the street, aloft, at the same height as the Lisbon girls in their crumbling bedrooms, and they were calling to us. We heard wood scrape. Then, for an instant, we saw them-- Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese-- framed in a single window. They looked our way, looked across the void at us. Mary blew us a kiss, or wiped her mouth. The flashlight went off. The window closed. And they were gone.'(205)

'What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.'(248)

Warners Book Edition, 1994

249 pages

Book borrowed from JRMD

113. JUDE the OBSCURE

Thomas Hardy 1896

The author wrote this strikingly relevant passage in 1896 about Jude, the Obscure: "a paltry victim of the spirit of mental and social restlessness that makes so many unhappy in these days." A tragic statement that haunts some of us today. In this book, Jude is a mason, an obscure nobody yearning to make a mark as a scholar, and along the way, these hopes and dreams crumble and fall apart. In this complicated novel, Jude's changing aspirations, impulsive decisions, the influence of society, religion, alcohol, and his unusual relationships with two women, Arabella and his cousin Sue take him to a different and dramatic path. Another magnificent book from Hardy!!

'The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the departing teacher's effects.'(opening lines)

'And so standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.'(61)

'And lastly a gentle-voiced prelate spoke, during whose meek, familiar rhyme, endeared to him from earliest childhood, Jude fell asleep:

Teach me to live, that I may dread

The grave as little as my bed.

Teach me to die...'(88)

'For the present, he said to himself, the one thing necessary was to get ready by accumulating money and knowledge, and await whatever chances were afforded to such an one of becoming a son of the University. "For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence; but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it." His desire absorbed him, and left no part of him to weigh its practicability.'(92)

'Perhaps to know her would be to cure himself of this unexpected and unauthorized passion. A voice whispered that, though he desired to know her, he did not desire to be cured.'(104)

'They stood possessed by the same thought, ugly enough, even as an assumption: that a union between them, had such been possible, would have meant a terrible intensification of unfitness-- two bitters in one dish.'(177)

'Are there many couples, do you think, where one dislikes the other for no definite fault?'(221)

'But sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.'(254)

'People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.'(272)

'The beggarly question of parentage-- what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people's, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.'(288)

"I can't bear that they, and everybody, should think people wicked because they may have chosen to live their own way! It is really these opinions that make the best intentioned people reckless, and actually become immoral!"(318)

"We must sail under sealed orders, that nobody may trace us... We mustn't go to Alfredston, or to Melchester, or to Shaston, or to Christminster. Apart from those we may go anywhere."(324)

"It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man-- that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times-- whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and reshape his course accordingly. I tried to do the later, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays-- I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes. If I had ended by becoming like one of these gentlemen in red and black that we saw dropping in here by now, everybody would have said: 'See how wise that young man was, to follow the bent of his nature!' But having ended not better that I began they say: 'See what a fool that fellow was in following a freak of his fancy!'"(343)

'Then another silence, till she was seized with another uncontrollable fit of grief. "There is something external to us which says, 'You shan't! First it said, 'You shan't learn!' Then it said, 'You shan't labour!' Now it says, 'You shan't love!"(355)

a Bantam Book 1981 edition

431 pages

Book owned

112. TELL NO ONE

Harlan Coben 2001

An easy, entertaining suspense thriller read. A straightforward novel with enough twists and action to keep me turning the page. Dr. David Beck, a pediatrician lost his wife Elizabeth eight years ago from a brutal serial killer. As he tries to go on with his life, still unable to totally cope with this tragedy, he then receives a series of e-mails he cannot tell anyone. As he plunges head on and discovers secrets and cover-ups, he raises to answer the important question: Can Elizabeth still be alive after all?

'There should have been a dark whisper in the wind. Or maybe a deep chill in the bone. An ethereal song only Elizabeth or I could hear. A tightness in the air. Some textbook premonition.'(opening lines)

'We could have gone to the same college, but we discussed it and decided that this would be yet another excellent test for our relationship. Again, we were doing the mature thing. The result? We missed each other like mad. The separation deepened our commitment and gave our love a new distance-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder dimension... Nauseating, I know.'(16)

'For anniversaries or holidays or Elizabeth's birthday, I get so geared up that I usually handle them with no problems. It's the "regular" days that are hard. When I flip with the remote and stumble across a classic episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Cheers. When I walk through a bookstore and see a new title by Alice Hoffman or Anne Tyler. When I listen to the O'Jays or the Four Tops or Nina Simone. Regular stuff.'(18)

'I clicked the little icon and the email came up:

Tomorrow same time plus two hours at Bigfoot.com

A message for you will be left under:

Your user Name: Bat Street

Password:Teenage

Beneath this, clinging to the bottom of the screen, just five more words:

They're watching. Tell no one.'(54)

'Part of being a doctor is patience. I constantly give children tests that have life-altering-- if not life-ending-- implications and tell them and their parents to wait for the results. They have no choice. Perhaps the same could be said for this situation. There were too many variables right now.'(76)

'It's an amazing thing really, when you think about it, we learn life's most important lessons from TV.'(90)

'Still, death is a great teacher. It's just too harsh... I wish I could tell you that through the tragedy I mined some undiscovered, life-altering absolute that I could pass on to you. I didn't. The cliches apply-- people are what count, life is precious, materialism is overrated, the little things matter, live in the moment-- and I can repeat them to you ad nauseam. You might listen, but you won't internalize. Tragedy hammers it home. Tragedy etched it onto your soul. You might not be happier. But you will be better.'(103)

'Hope, that caged bird that just won't die, broke free. I leaned back. Tears flooded my eyes, but for the first time in a long while, I let loose a real smile... Elizabeth. She was still the smartest person I knew.'(150)

'You might argue that I'm nesting myself on an awfully slippery slope. I would agree with you, though I might counter that most of my life is lived out there. The problem was, there were repercussions when you lived in the grays-- not just theoretical ones that taint your soul, but the brick-and-mortar ones, the unforeseeable destruction that such choices leave behind.'(300)

A Dell Book

370 pages

Book borrowed from the library, the 'Classic' section(?). See related post here.

111. A LONG FATAL CHASE

Louisa May Alcott 1995

This rare book originally found as a handwritten manuscript written by the author in 1866 laid safely out of site until 1993, and was eventually published in 1995. It is a mystery thriller in which the title explains the plot. A long fatal love chase. Rosamond is a lovely, spirited but naive and trusting young woman who was looking for adventure when she meets Philip Tempest. She falls in love, marries and sails away with him on his yacht only to discover his past and his dark, horrid and true character. She tries to repeatedly escape from him, traveling with the aid of various resourceful friends through Italy, France and Germany. Sadly, somehow, Mr. Tempest successfully lurks behind and manages to find her every time, until that one final moment.

"I tell you I cannot bear it! I shall do something desperate if this life is not changed soon. It gets worse and worse, and I often feel as if I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom."(opening lines)

'In the fitful light of the dusky hall the newcomer's face suddenly appeared fiery-eyed and menacing, and, glancing at a portrait of Mephistopheles, Rosamond exclaimed, "Why, you are the very image of Meph--"(5)

"No, I never wish that. I don't intend to die till I've enjoyed my life. Everyone has a right to happiness and sooner or later I will have it. Youth, health and freedom were meant to be enjoyed and I want to try every pleasure before I am too old to enjoy them."(7)

"Even at the cost of what is called honor and honesty? That is comfortable philosophy, and having preached and practiced it all my days I've no right to condemn it. But the saints would call it sinful and dangerous and tell you that life should be one long penance full of sorrow, sacrifice and psalm-singing."(8)

'For an hour Rosamond paced up and down the deck reveling in the breezy motion of the boat, the delicious sense of freedom which possessed her, the atmosphere of romance which surrounded her. Tempest lounged beside her, watching her beautiful face, listening to her happy voice, and enjoying her innocent companionship with the relish of a man eager for novelty and skillful in the art of playing on that delicate instrument, a woman's heart.'(36)

"I was thinking what a curious thing love is; only a sentiment, and yet it has power to make fools of men and slaves of women."(61)

"Suppose I broke away and left you, or made it impossible for you to stay. That I was base and false; in every way unworthy of your love, and it was clearly right for you to go, what would you do then?"(62)

"I mean that it is more natural for me to be wicked than virtuous, when I do a bad act, and I've done many, I never feel wither shame, remorse or fear, I sometimes wish it was not necessary as I don't like the trouble, but as for any moral sense of principle, I haven't a particle. Many people are like me as actions prove, but they are not so frank in owning it and insist on keeping up the humbug of virtue. You'll find that is true, Rose, when you know the world better."(87)

'Not another day or hour would she remain, no help was possible, no atonement could retrieve the past, no love or pity, pardon or excuse should soften the sharp pang of reparation for the guilty man. To go instantly and forever was her only thought, and this gave her strength to rise and look about her.'(129)

'Back to him she would never go, but in her lonely life still lived the sweet memory of that happy time when she believed in him and he was all in all to her.'(135)

"The sin is yours, but the shame and sorrow are mine, the past I cannot retrieve, the future is still unspoiled and I will not embitter it by any willful sin. Before I was innocently guilty, now I should be doubly guilty if I went back to the 'gay free life I love.' Atone for the wrong you have done me by ceasing to tempt and trouble me. I will not yield, though you hunt me to death."(143)

'In vain she told herself that he was unworthy any woman's trust and love, still the unconquerable sentiment that once made her happiness now remained to become her torment.'(172)

'Because in spite of this longing, I know that I shall purchase happiness at high price if I return; that new falsehood may betray me, new tyranny oppress me, and above all I feel that with this man I must lose more and more the love of all good things, so strong is his influence, so unprincipled his nature. My only hope is that I may save his soul and yet not lose my own. Can I, dare I do this?'(182)

"I must know where you are, but I will not molest nor betray you till the time arrives. Go where you like, assume what disguise you choose, do what you please, except die or marry. I'll stand off and watch the play, but I must follow. I like the chase, it is exciting, novel and absorbing. I have tried and tried of other amusements, this satisfies me and I am in no haste to end it."(194)

Dell Publishing Edition

354 pages

Book owned

110. FREEDOM

Jonathan Franzen 2010

A highly talked about book: readers either love it or hate it. I really like it. As contemporary a family saga as can be, a book to mark the current trying times we live in, and yet another book to remind us of just what we can look forward to if we don't somehow start changing gears. I find the Berglund family as modern and as real as it gets, albeit dysfunctional, with a not-so-perfect marriage, kids, family, friends and neighbors. An engrossing book full of characters stretching the extent of their personal freedoms irrespective of the consequences. And as seemingly trivial and secondary environmentalist Walter Berglund's causes are: saving one single species of bird, the Cerulean warbler, and tackling overpopulation, the realistic consequences of doing nothing are too big to ignore.

'The news about Walter Berglund wasn't picked up locally-- he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now-- but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times. '(opening line)

'For all queries, Patty Berglund was a resource, a sunny carrier of socio-cultural pollen, an affable bee... She wondered if her "addiction" to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her "never" reading books anymore.'(5)

'Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head.'(55)

'Patty knew in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.'(75)

'At that point, the only thing that could have thrown Walter back into the bad ways he'd felt in college, when he'd been tormented by his sense of losing to the person he loved too much not to care about beating, would have been bizarre pathological sequence of events. Things at home have had to sour very badly. Walter would have had to have terrible conflicts with Joey, and fail to understand him and earn his respect, and generally find himself replicating his relationship with his own dad, and Richard's career would have had to take an unexpected latter-day turn for the better, and Patty would have had to fall violently in love with Richard. What were the chances of all that happening?'(139)

'How she felt: as if a ruthless and well-organized party of resistance fighters had assembled under cover of the darkness of her mind, and so it was imperative not to let the spotlight of her conscience shine anywhere near them, not even for one second. Her love of Walter and her loyalty to him, her wish to be a good person, her understanding of Walter's lifelong competition with Richard, her sober appraisal of Richard's character, and just the all-around shittiness of sleeping with your spouse's best friend: these superior considerations stood really to annihilate the resistance fighters.'(158)

'Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.'(181)

"This was what was keeping me awake at night," Walter said. "This fragmentation. Because it's the same problem everywhere. It's like the internet, or cable TV-- there's never any center, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it's all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli."(218)

'Everything he's done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft and wanted to undo it.'(242)

"That's exactly right," Jenna's father said. "Freedom is a pain in the ass. And that's precisely why it's so imperative that we seize the opportunity that's been presented to us this fall.'To get the nation of free people to let go of their bad logic and sign on with better logic, by whatever means are necessary.'"(268)

'He didn't know what to do, he didn't know how to live. Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.'(318)

'He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain.'(325)

'What he'd never understood about men in his position, in all the books he'd read and movies he'd seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.'(335)

"People come to this country for either money or freedom. If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can't afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniac and assault rifles.'(361)

"I don't imagine the theory's changed much since we were in school. The theory is that there isn't any theory. Right? Capitalism can't handle talking about limits, because the whole point of capitalism is the restless growth of capital. If you want to be heard in the capitalist media, and communicate in a capitalist culture, overpopulation can't make any sense. It's literally nonsense. And that's your real problem.'(361)

'And it was a strange thing to feel, but he definitely felt it: when he emerged from the bathroom with the ring on his ring finger, and Jenna rushed past him and then reeled out again, squealing and cursing at the stench, he was a different person. '(432)

"It's a perfect world, isn't it? It's a perfect system, because as long as you've got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don't have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there's no more Indonesia!"(483)

'Each year, they arrived to find more of their former homes paved over for parking lots or highways, or logged over for pallet wood, or developed into subdivisions, or stripped bare for oil drilling or coal mining, or fragmented for shopping centers, or plowed under for ethanol production, or miscellaneously denatured for ski runs and bike trails and golf courses. Migrants exhausted by their five-thousand-mile journey competed with earlier arrivals for the remaining scraps of territory;'(485)

'The truth is that nothing between Patty and Richard was ever going to last, because they couldn't help being disappointments to each other, because neither was as lovable to the other as Walter was to both of them.'(509)

'And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they'd ever said or done, every pain they'd inflicted, every joy they'd shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind.'(559)

First Edition

562 pages

Book borrowed from the library

The excellent and extensive review by Sam Tanenhaus from the New York Times is here.

109. BEFORE I FALL

Lauren Oliver 2010

In this Groundhog day-like experience with a twist geared for young adults, Sam Kingston dies but gets seven chances to revisit the last day of her life, cupid day, February 12. As a popular, beautiful, self-absorbed senior in high school she gets that enviable prospect to slowly change the course of her relationship with her family, her childhood friend Kent, best friends Lyndsey, Ally and Elody and possibly correct an injustice towards classmate Juliet. Every day was a new day, at first resisted, until each new day became a possible new beginning, an authentic new chance. This book effectively deals with the everyday routines and stresses of the high-school life teenagers face today. It is engaging, nostalgic, funny, candid and surprisingly realistic.

'They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how it happened for me.'(opening line)

'There's always going to be a person laughing and somebody getting laughed at. It happens every day, in every school, in every town in America-- probably in the world, for all I know. The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.'(5)

'I don't want to sound harsh, but it's such a waste to be a dork and kind of slow on the uptake. What's the point if you can't at least play Beethoven or win state spelling bees or go to Harvard or something?'(24)

'It's like high school holds two different worlds, revolving around each other and never touching: the haves and the have-nots. I guess it's a good thing. High school is supposed to prepare you for the real world, after all.'(65)

'In my dream I know I am falling though there is no up or down, no walls or sides or ceilings, just the sensation of cold, and darkness everywhere. I am so scared I could scream, but when I open my mouth nothing happens, and I wonder if you fall forever and ever and never touch down, is it really still falling?'(82)

'A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.'(107)

'Here's another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you're dead, it's the only thing that keeps you alive.'(137)

'You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That's how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to bust out of orbit, to spin out to a place where no one can touch you. To lose yourself-- to get lost.'(195)

'My point is: maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around in it, let it slide like coins through your fingers. So much time you can waste it...

But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.(268)

'It's weird how much people change... It's kind of sad, if you think about it. Like there's no continuity in people at all. Like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you're no longer a kid but a "young adult," and after that you're a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.'(276)

'It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It's never occurred to me before; I've never been able to see it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, like maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.'(285)

'Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together; and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes... And very, very rarely-- by some miracle of chance and coincidence, butterflies beating their wings just so and all the threads hanging together for a minute-- you get the chance to do the right thing.'(426)

'The rest you have to find out for yourself.'(470)

__________________________

First Edition, Harper Collins Book

470 pages

Book borrowed from the library

Thanks to Jillian at Random Ramblings for the book idea. Her review is here.