I love this novel! Amy Tan had me completely enraptured from the "note to the reader" before the book even started. And it turned out completely different than I expected. I highly recommend that everyone/anyone read Saving Fish from Drowning.
And I didn't keep a single quote! I think that's because I was too busy reading.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Monday, May 5, 2014
The Best American Short Stories 2011
Geraldine Brooks (who is my MIL's favorite author) edited the 2011 edition of The Best American Short Stories series. I did love her book, People of the Book. What an interesting collection. I didn't collect quotes from every story and although I enjoyed them all, the number of quotes doesn't indicate how much I liked the story. I noticed that several of the stories with no quotes at all were some of my favorites, such as Out of Body, Free Fruit for Young Widows and Escape from Spiderhead.
Cieling by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Page 5: Her worldview was a set of conventional options that she mulled over while he did not even consider any of those option; the questions he asked of life were entirely different from hers.
Housewifely Arts by Megan Mayhew Bergman
Page 16: You can just see the innocence falling off a child's face -- every day.
Page 19: It's hard being a single mom, but it's easier than being a miserable wife.
A Bridge Under Water by Tom Bissell
Page 35: Two once-unimaginable objects, the first incubating in her stomach and the second closed around her ring finger, made her, she realized, unable to remember what being nineteen or twenty had felt like.
Page 49: It was uncanny: every paragraph was filled with information vague enough to be uninteresting and precise enough to be soporific.
Out of Body by Jennifer Egan
Free Fruit for Young Widows by Nathan Englander
La Vita Nuova by Allegra Goodman
Gurov in Manhattan by Ehud Havazelet
Page 101: Sokolov, old world conqueror, who had held the gae of every woman in his novels class, who had wooed dozens just by a line from Herzen or a pose struck thoughtfully looking out a window, who had slept with half the humanities faculty at Lehman, knew all at once age, irrelevance, invisibility.
Page 102: And since, he had returned daily to verify the sensation, rage, and concede and quietly wonder at the many ways we pass into insubstantiality. An old fool in love.
The Sleep by Caitlin Horrocks
Soldier of Fortune by Bret Anthony Johnston
Foster by Claire Keegan
Page 137: I am used to it, this way men have of not talking: they like to kick a divot out of the grass with a boot heel, to slap the roof of a car before it takes off, to sit with their legs wide apart, as though they do not care.
Page 142-3: Neither of of us talks, the way people sometimes don't, when they are happy. As soon as I have this thought, I realize that the opposite is also true.
Page 143: I want to say that I am afraid but am too afraid to say so.
Page 154: "Many's the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing."
The Dungeon Master by Sam Lipstyle
Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart by Rebecca Makkai
Page 192: Or maybe he'd slouched all the way down Adams, his parka blurring him into the frozen crowd, the crowd sweeping him onto the train, the train shooting him up north and off the face of my earth.
Property by Elizabeth McKracken
Page 196: The weight of the bag was like the stones in a suicide's pocket.
Phantoms by Steven Milhauser
Dog Bites by Ricardo Nuila
ID by Joyce Carol Oates
To the Measures Fall by Richard Powers
Page 270: You still read for pleasure: all kinds of things. The hunger remains, but, as with sex, the costumes must grow ever more elaborate to produce the same transport.
Page 273: Overnight, the World Wide Web weaves tightly around you. A novelty at first, then invaluable, then life support, then heroin.
The Call for Blood by Jess Row
Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders
The Hare's Mask by Mark Slouka
Page 325: Who knows what somber ancestor had passed on to me this talent, this precocious ear for loss? For a while, because of it, I misheard almost everything.
Cieling by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Page 5: Her worldview was a set of conventional options that she mulled over while he did not even consider any of those option; the questions he asked of life were entirely different from hers.
Housewifely Arts by Megan Mayhew Bergman
Page 16: You can just see the innocence falling off a child's face -- every day.
Page 19: It's hard being a single mom, but it's easier than being a miserable wife.
A Bridge Under Water by Tom Bissell
Page 35: Two once-unimaginable objects, the first incubating in her stomach and the second closed around her ring finger, made her, she realized, unable to remember what being nineteen or twenty had felt like.
Page 49: It was uncanny: every paragraph was filled with information vague enough to be uninteresting and precise enough to be soporific.
Out of Body by Jennifer Egan
Free Fruit for Young Widows by Nathan Englander
La Vita Nuova by Allegra Goodman
Gurov in Manhattan by Ehud Havazelet
Page 101: Sokolov, old world conqueror, who had held the gae of every woman in his novels class, who had wooed dozens just by a line from Herzen or a pose struck thoughtfully looking out a window, who had slept with half the humanities faculty at Lehman, knew all at once age, irrelevance, invisibility.
Page 102: And since, he had returned daily to verify the sensation, rage, and concede and quietly wonder at the many ways we pass into insubstantiality. An old fool in love.
The Sleep by Caitlin Horrocks
Soldier of Fortune by Bret Anthony Johnston
Foster by Claire Keegan
Page 137: I am used to it, this way men have of not talking: they like to kick a divot out of the grass with a boot heel, to slap the roof of a car before it takes off, to sit with their legs wide apart, as though they do not care.
Page 142-3: Neither of of us talks, the way people sometimes don't, when they are happy. As soon as I have this thought, I realize that the opposite is also true.
Page 143: I want to say that I am afraid but am too afraid to say so.
Page 154: "Many's the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing."
The Dungeon Master by Sam Lipstyle
Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart by Rebecca Makkai
Page 192: Or maybe he'd slouched all the way down Adams, his parka blurring him into the frozen crowd, the crowd sweeping him onto the train, the train shooting him up north and off the face of my earth.
Property by Elizabeth McKracken
Page 196: The weight of the bag was like the stones in a suicide's pocket.
Phantoms by Steven Milhauser
Dog Bites by Ricardo Nuila
ID by Joyce Carol Oates
To the Measures Fall by Richard Powers
Page 270: You still read for pleasure: all kinds of things. The hunger remains, but, as with sex, the costumes must grow ever more elaborate to produce the same transport.
Page 273: Overnight, the World Wide Web weaves tightly around you. A novelty at first, then invaluable, then life support, then heroin.
The Call for Blood by Jess Row
Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders
The Hare's Mask by Mark Slouka
Page 325: Who knows what somber ancestor had passed on to me this talent, this precocious ear for loss? For a while, because of it, I misheard almost everything.
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
The Cupcake Queen
My daughter told me to read this one. My expectations were not too high for The Cupcake Queen by Heather Hepler, but I found it to be a surprisingly well crafted, well written and entertaining young adult novel.
Page 28: I kept speeding up and then slowing down during the walk to school. I didn't want to be late, but I really didn't want to be too early, standing around and staring at my shoes while everyone else talks to one another and pretends not to see the new girl staring at her shoes.
Page 28: I kept speeding up and then slowing down during the walk to school. I didn't want to be late, but I really didn't want to be too early, standing around and staring at my shoes while everyone else talks to one another and pretends not to see the new girl staring at her shoes.
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Wicked Autumn
Wicked Autumn is a quiet mystery story by G. M. Malliet.
Page 44: Thea, poised for her usual rapturous leap at the sight of the visitor, remembered her training just in time: she sat hard, tail wagging so thunderously that its hip-shaking momentum threatened to topple her over.
Page 112: They suddenly became to him what they were -- fallible, ordinary people all carrying stories to tell that they dared not tell anyone.
Page 191: He saw that she had missed a button on her cardigan, or perhaps a button was missing altogether. In anyone else, this would be a sign of mild forgetfulness. In the fastidious Miss Pitchford, it was a clear measure of her distress, bordering on incipient madness.
Page 237: Wanda's sense of her place in the village was her prize psychological possession.
Entertaining, though not overly captivating.
Page 44: Thea, poised for her usual rapturous leap at the sight of the visitor, remembered her training just in time: she sat hard, tail wagging so thunderously that its hip-shaking momentum threatened to topple her over.
Page 112: They suddenly became to him what they were -- fallible, ordinary people all carrying stories to tell that they dared not tell anyone.
Page 191: He saw that she had missed a button on her cardigan, or perhaps a button was missing altogether. In anyone else, this would be a sign of mild forgetfulness. In the fastidious Miss Pitchford, it was a clear measure of her distress, bordering on incipient madness.
Page 237: Wanda's sense of her place in the village was her prize psychological possession.
Entertaining, though not overly captivating.
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant
Each book in Veronica Roth's series, Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant, is spellbinding. I read all three in five days. I enjoyed the complexity of the social and political systems - also the complexity of the characters. No one was pure good-guy or fully bad-guy.
Reading so fast, I only managed one quote on page 100 in Allegiant:
Take a person's memories, and you change who they are.
There were lots of interesting treatments on so many real world and complex issues. I wonder if my attention on memories is due somewhat to the last book I read.
Having the last book alternate in Tris' and Tobias' point of view through me at first, since it was different from the first two books. There had to be a reason. I sure was unhappy about that reason, but it made the author's decision make sense in the end.
I haven't seen the movie yet. How does it compare to the book?
Reading so fast, I only managed one quote on page 100 in Allegiant:
Take a person's memories, and you change who they are.
There were lots of interesting treatments on so many real world and complex issues. I wonder if my attention on memories is due somewhat to the last book I read.
Having the last book alternate in Tris' and Tobias' point of view through me at first, since it was different from the first two books. There had to be a reason. I sure was unhappy about that reason, but it made the author's decision make sense in the end.
I haven't seen the movie yet. How does it compare to the book?
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Memory Wall
When I started reading Memory Wall, by Anthony Doerr, I found myself recoiling a little. It was the content: the first story is about a woman with dementia who keeps notes to herself all over her wall. Too close to home perhaps; I hate it when I can't remember things. But I kept reading and I'm so glad I did! It took some surprising twists and was amazing and thought provoking. Every story in this collection of shorts is different and beautiful. I love the way memory or memories is dealt with in such different ways, often other-worldly.
From "Memory":
Page 2: Alma stands barefoot and wigless in the upstairs bedroom with a flashlight.
Page 42: "To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour." (says Alma)
Page 70: What is memory anyway? How can it be such a frail, perishable thing?
From "Village 113":
Page 151: But perhaps, she thinks, there is no good and bad to it at all. Every memory everone has ever had will eventually be under water. Progress is a storm and the wings of everything are swept up in it.
From "The River Nemunas":
Page 175: I wonder about how the sky can be a huge, blue nothingness and at the same time it can also feel like a shelter.
From "Afterworld":
Page 192: She sits up too quickly and her eyesight flees in long streaks.
From "Memory":
Page 2: Alma stands barefoot and wigless in the upstairs bedroom with a flashlight.
Page 42: "To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour." (says Alma)
Page 70: What is memory anyway? How can it be such a frail, perishable thing?
From "Village 113":
Page 151: But perhaps, she thinks, there is no good and bad to it at all. Every memory everone has ever had will eventually be under water. Progress is a storm and the wings of everything are swept up in it.
From "The River Nemunas":
Page 175: I wonder about how the sky can be a huge, blue nothingness and at the same time it can also feel like a shelter.
From "Afterworld":
Page 192: She sits up too quickly and her eyesight flees in long streaks.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Boy's Life
Another book I picked up from subbing high school English: Robert McCammon's Boy's Life. The story drew me in and carried me along; a quick read in over 600 pages. It's all about keeping the magic. I'm gonna make my kids read it - I don't think it will take much convincing.
Page 2: We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out and combed out.
Page 8: My blue jeans had patches on the knees, like badges of courage marking encounters with barbed wire and gravel.
Page 16-17: Underwater, he fought the lake's muscles. The car fell away beneath him, and as his legs thrashed for a hold in the liquid tomb, more bubbles rushed up and broke him loose and he climbed up their silver staircase toward the attic of air.
Page 23: If his nose had been any larger, he would've made a dandy weathervane.
Page 64: The place looked and felt like a hothouse where exotic hats had bloomed.
Page 177: I swallowed my rage like a bitter seed, not knowing that it would bear fruit.
Page 332: Everything seemed to be gleaming and glinting, and our feet were cushioned by gardens of Oriental weave.
Page 486: It seemed to me, as I walked in the presence of all those stilled voices that would never be heard again, that we were a wasteful breed. We had thrown away the past and our future was impoverished for it.
Ah, yes. You must read this book.
Page 2: We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out and combed out.
Page 8: My blue jeans had patches on the knees, like badges of courage marking encounters with barbed wire and gravel.
Page 16-17: Underwater, he fought the lake's muscles. The car fell away beneath him, and as his legs thrashed for a hold in the liquid tomb, more bubbles rushed up and broke him loose and he climbed up their silver staircase toward the attic of air.
Page 23: If his nose had been any larger, he would've made a dandy weathervane.
Page 64: The place looked and felt like a hothouse where exotic hats had bloomed.
Page 177: I swallowed my rage like a bitter seed, not knowing that it would bear fruit.
Page 332: Everything seemed to be gleaming and glinting, and our feet were cushioned by gardens of Oriental weave.
Page 486: It seemed to me, as I walked in the presence of all those stilled voices that would never be heard again, that we were a wasteful breed. We had thrown away the past and our future was impoverished for it.
Ah, yes. You must read this book.
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