A lovely story by Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere is an engaging study of just about any mother/child situation you could think up. It sets up opposing forces, such as affluence vs. poverty, order/rules/decorum vs. chaos/free spiritedness/change, to name a few. But it doesn't force one over the other. It allows the complexity of difficult situations in which there is no clear right or wrong. Ng allows the reader to sympathize with all sides of an issue.
Yeah, I liked this book.
Page 7: The firemen said there were little fires everywhere," Lexie said. "Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant. Not an accident."
Page 32: This was how Moody made a decision he would question for the rest of his life. ... If he had kept her to himself, perhaps the future might have been quite different.
Page 79: In the first week of school, after reading T.S. Eliot, she had tacked up signs on all the bulletin boards: I HAVE MEASURED OUT MY LIFE WITH COFFEE SPOONS and DO I DARE TO EAT A PEACH? and DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE?
Page 88: She kept thinking of Mia's smile that day in the kitchen, the capability she saw there to delight in mischief, in breaking the rules.
Page 122: To a parent, your child wasn't just a person; your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.
Page 160: She wondered which was the real world.
Page 161: All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control.
Page 239: Each time, faced with this impossible choice, she came to the same conclusion. I would never have let myself get into that situation, she told herself. I would have made better choices along the way.
Page 269: But the problem with rules, he reflected, was they implied a right and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on.
Page 304: Sex changed things, she realized - not just between you and the other person, but between you and everyone.
Page 306: "I don't want to. But we have to." Mia held out her hand. Pearl, for a moment, imagined herself transforming into a tree. Rooting herself so deeply on that spot that nothing could displace her. ... She took Mia's hand, and Pearl, uprooted, came free and followed her mother back to the car.
Page 310: She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person who she'd carried alongside her.
Monday, April 23, 2018
Friday, March 30, 2018
Born a Crime
I find Trevor Noah to be intelligent and reasonable, but most of all having a decidedly positive attitude. After reading his book Born A Crime and seeing him live in Portland, it's seems clear that his outlook and his joy is a personality trait that is at the core a choice and was modeled by his mother.
Born a Crime was a fresh read that I thoroughly enjoyed. It provided a new perspective that I found very accessible. Instead of writing down quotes, I noted a few page numbers to refer back to. So I'm reconstructing after-the-fact and picking a line or two out, when I would really like to quote the whole page (or three!). You'll have to find the book and read the section for yourself. Better yet, read the whole book.
Page 57: I was eleven years old, and it was like I was seeing my country for the first time. In the townships you don't see segregation, because everyone is black.
Page 75 - Ack, you just have to read the whole page! It gives an example of fundamental lack of logic of racism in general and of apartheid specifically.
Page 222: We live in a world where we don't see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don't live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another's pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place. But read the story of how he came to this conclusion!
On page 271 we see Trevor trying to understand the complexity of domestic violence situations.
Great book.
Born a Crime was a fresh read that I thoroughly enjoyed. It provided a new perspective that I found very accessible. Instead of writing down quotes, I noted a few page numbers to refer back to. So I'm reconstructing after-the-fact and picking a line or two out, when I would really like to quote the whole page (or three!). You'll have to find the book and read the section for yourself. Better yet, read the whole book.
Page 57: I was eleven years old, and it was like I was seeing my country for the first time. In the townships you don't see segregation, because everyone is black.
Page 75 - Ack, you just have to read the whole page! It gives an example of fundamental lack of logic of racism in general and of apartheid specifically.
Page 222: We live in a world where we don't see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don't live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another's pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place. But read the story of how he came to this conclusion!
On page 271 we see Trevor trying to understand the complexity of domestic violence situations.
Great book.
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Milk and Honey
Rupi Kaur wrote this collection of poems, Milk and Honey and my daughter gave me a copy for Christmas. Rupi takes us through a journey split into four sections: the hurting, the loving, the breaking, the healing. There were parts I grappled with, didn't entirely relate to - but her underlying honest emotion I found very relatable, especially towards the end. I read it in a day and didn't keep any quotes, but I skimmed over it and found a few short enough to celebrate here that I really liked (short being a criteria to some degree - for the sake of expedience.) You should check Kaur's work out. Her drawings are wonderful companions to her lovely words.
Page 47:
no it won't be love at first sight when we meet it will be love at first remembrance cause i've seen you in my mother's eyes when she tells me to marry the type of man i'd want to raise my son to be like
Page 151:
accept that you deserve more
than painful love
life is moving
the healthiest thing
for your heart is
to move with it
Page 160:
it takes grace
to remain kind
in cruel situations
Page 186:
how you love yourself is
how you teach others
to love you
Page 47:
no it won't be love at first sight when we meet it will be love at first remembrance cause i've seen you in my mother's eyes when she tells me to marry the type of man i'd want to raise my son to be like
Page 151:
accept that you deserve more
than painful love
life is moving
the healthiest thing
for your heart is
to move with it
Page 160:
it takes grace
to remain kind
in cruel situations
Page 186:
how you love yourself is
how you teach others
to love you
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