192. the MARRIAGE PLOT

Jeffrey Eugenides 2011

The Book Jacket Blurb:

    It's the early 1980's -- the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafe of College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.
    As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead -- charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy --  suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus -- who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange -- resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.
    Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology laboratory in Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.
   Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding and understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it read like the intimate journal of our own lives.

What Hooked Me:

I finished reading this book a few days ago, and equally pondered as many days on what rating I would give it. I knew I liked it a lot. I was not sure I loved it. Having just posted Middlemarch a few weeks ago, a book which impressed me exactly as a book that explored the various facets of marriage, I found the depiction of the contemporary marriages in this book much more difficult and sad. And marriage as a plot seemed secondary to the three major characters' search for themselves and their paths shortly after graduating from college. In the end, the book won me over for its marvelous writing and not its plot. I continue to love the way the author gently forces me to take my time and read each word, just so I don't get lost when he mentions and expounds on it a few chapters later.  I also love that this book has encouraged me to put the book, A Lover's Discourse, on my TBR.
   
The Quotes:

'To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters.'(opening lines)

'She's become an English major for the purest and dullest reasons: because she loved to read. The University's British and American Literature Course Catalog" was, for Madeleine, what its Bergdorf equivalent was for her roommates. A course listing like "English 274: Lyly's Euphues" excited Madeleine the way a pair of Fiorucci cowboy boots did Abby. "English 405A: Hawthorne and James" filled Madeleine with an expectation of sinful hours in bed not unlike what Olivia got from wearing Lycra skirt and leather blazer to Danceteria. ... And yet sometimes she worried about what those musty old books were doing to her.'(20-21)

'Books aren't about 'real life.' Books are about other books.'(28)

'My theory is that the problem Handke was trying to solve here, from a literary standpoint, was how do you write about something, even something real and painful -- like suicide -- when all of the writing that's been done on that subject has robbed you of any originality of expression?'(28)

'Whereas Madeleine was perfectly happy with the idea of genius. She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.'(42)

'And it was during this period that Madeleine fully understood how the lover's discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, that most solitary of places.'(65)

'A Lover's Discourse was the perfect cure for lovesickness. It was a repair manual for the heart, it's one tool the brain. If you used your head, if you become aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being "in love" was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from it's tyranny.'(79)

'People don't save other people. People save themselves.'(124)

"It's a funny thing. You're born in America. You grow up and what do they tell you? They tell you that you have a right to the pursuit of happiness. And that the way to be happy is to get a lot of nice stuff, right? I did all that. Had a house, a job, a boyfriend. But I wasn't happy. I wasn't happy because all I did was think about myself. I thought that the world revolved around me. But guess what? It doesn't."(215)

'That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.'(254)

'As he answered the doctor's questions, Leonard felt as though he were being interrogated for a crime. He tried, when he could, to tell the truth, but when the truth didn't serve his cause he embellished it, interpreting it as either favorable or unfavorable, and shifting his next response accordingly. Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this has been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet's back.'(255)

'One thing I learned, between addiction and depression? Depression a lot worse. Depression ain't something you just get off of. You can't get clean from depression. Depression be like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It always be there, though.'(259-260)

'The worst part was that, as the years passed, these memories became, in the way you kept them in a secret box in your head, taking them out every so often to turn them over and over, something like dear possessions. They were the key to your unhappiness. They were the evidence that life wasn't fair. If you weren't a lucky child, you didn't know you weren't lucky until you got older. And then it was all you ever thought about.'(283)

'When you talked about marriage (I mean in the abstract) you had a theory that people got married in one of three stages. Stage One are the traditional people who marry their college sweethearts, usually the summer after graduation. People in Stage Two get married around 28. And then there are the people in Stage Three who get married in a final wave, with a sense of desperation, around 36, 37, or even 39.'(324-325)

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, First Edition
406 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge

185. the LOVER'S DICTIONARY

David Levithan 2011

I read this in between two giant, wordy books. Because of this, I was amazed that such a short novel, consisting of seemingly-random definition of words, could contain such a poignant love story.


aberrant, adj.
"I don't normally do this kind of thing," you said.
"Neither do I," I assured you. ...
Measure the hope of that moment, that feeling.
Everything else will be measured against it.(opening word)

abstraction, n.
Love is a kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn't you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren't yours. It's not as if I can conjure you there completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead.(5)

abyss, n.
There are times when I doubt everything. When I regret everything you've taken from me, everything I've given you, and the waste of all the time I've spent on us.(6)

autonomy, n.
I want my books to have their own shelves," you said, and that's how I knew it would be okay to live together.(22)

awhile, adv.
I love the vagueness of words that involve time. ...
It is easy for me to say it took me awhile to know. That is about as accurate as I can get. There were sneak previews of knowing, for sure. Instances that made me feel, oh, this could be right. But the moment I shifted from a hope that needed to be proven to a certainty that would be continually challenged? There's no pinpointing that.
Perhaps it never happened. Perhaps it happened while I was asleep. Most likely, there's no single event. There's just the steady accumulation of awhile.(24)

basis, n.
There has to be a moment at the beginning when you wonder whether you're in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself.
If the moment doesn't pass, that's it -- you're done.
And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it's even there when you thought you were searching for something else, like an escape route, or your lover's face.(28)

corrode, v.
I spent all this time building a relationship. Then one night I left the window open, and it started to rust.(64)

daunting, adj.
Really, we should use this more as a verb. You daunted me, and I daunted you. Or would it be that I was daunted by you, and you were daunted by me? That sounds better. ... The key is to never recognize these imbalances. To not let the dautingness daunt us.(67)

flux, n.
The natural state. Our moods change. Our lives change. Our feeling for each other change. Our bearings change. The song changes. The air changes. The temperature of the shower changes.
Accept this. We must accept this.(98)

ineffable, adj.
These words will ultimately end up being the barest of reflections, devoid of the sensations words cannot convey. Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.(120)

juxtaposition, n.
It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It's simply a matter of is and is no longer.(128)

posterity, n.
I try not to think about us growing old together, mostly because I try not to think about growing old at all. Both things -- the years passing, the years together -- are too enormous to contemplate. But one morning, I gave in. You were asleep, and I imagined you older and older. Your hair graying, your skin folded and creased, your breath catching. And I found myself thinking: If this continues, if this goes on, then when I die, your memories of me will be my greatest accomplishment. Your memories will be my most lasting impression.(161)

punctuate, v.
Cue the imaginary interviewer:
Q: So when all is said and done, what have you learned here?
A: The key to a successful relationship isn't just in the words, it's the choice of punctuation. When you're in love with someone, a well-placed question mark can be the difference between bliss and disaster, and a deeply respected period or a cleverly inserted ellipsis can prevent all kinds of exclamations.(162)

First Edition, 2011
211 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
Book idea from Rummanah @ Books in the Spotlight. Thanks!  I should have read it sooner than I did.  Her convincing review is HERE

180. A KIND of INTIMACY

Jenn Ashworth 2009

From the very beginning of this book, one feels that all is not right with Annie Fairhurst, the 28 year old narrator of this psychological thriller. Guided by her self-help books and armed with a highly embellished past, she moves into a new neighborhood and quickly makes new friends with next-door neighbors Lucy and Neil, and the Neighborhood watch leader Sangita and her husband Barry Choudry. But all is not well with Annie.  So when she fools herself into thinking that Neil is in love with her, she obsesses about destroying his relationship with his girlfriend, Lucy. And the little shred of goodwill she may have  managed to instill in the reader is quickly ruined by the slow unraveling of her sordid self.

'After the van had been loaded and sent on its way I took off all my clothes and kicked the sofa I was about to abandon. Not just a little kick either. I really belted it.'(opening lines)

'I was angry, to tell you the truth. To have to stand there in the sanctuary of my own garden, doing nothing more sinister than enjoying a warm evening, and then suffer the verbal assault of a woman I'd never even met, well, it was more than I could take.'(Chap.2, Loc.270)

'Although I was nervous, I smiled as I waited, flitting about the house making sure everything was straight and wishing my old neighbours could see me. I wasn't that traumatized naked woman hysterically kicking a sofa anymore: I was the hostess of a housewarming party, wearing a fancy party dress and patiently waiting her guests.'(Chap.3, Loc.398)

'The new books I'd been reading said that asking questions of people at parties made them think you were interesting but that didn't really make sense, and the book also said not to make the questions too personal, but they didn't tell what too personal was.'(Chap.3, Loc.440)

'The thing about Lucy, really, was the way she looked. It revealed a lot about who she was on the inside, to my mind. All that female flapping and concern didn't wash with me. She really did have the most feline features: wide square nails polished like claws, that stretched skin over her face, and no, I'm not embellishing, curious, clever eyes so green it didn't matter that they weren't almond-shaped at all. Her irises were contracted small in the bright light from the fluorescent strip on the ceiling and she blinked once before pouncing. I like cats, I do, but I know what they're capable of and I wasn't about to let Lucy paw me about like an injured bird while she was a guest in my house.'(Chap.5, Loc.772)

'I can only explain my behaviour as an adolescent outpouring of exuberance; a long postponed eruption of youthful enthusiasm that had been cut short by my early marriage. When it was over, I awoke from it dazed and exhausted, nauseous and somewhat shamefaced. At twenty-eight, most people would expect me to have grown out of such things, but, as I said, most people were not aware of the special circumstances attached to my case.'(Chap.7, Loc.1104)

'You're exactly right,' I said, 'there's no point making yourself unhappy for the sake of someone else. You've got to go out and make it happen, there's no point staying where you are and hoping that things will change when they won't.'(Chap.8, Loc.1257)

'It was very important to me that this house, which represented a new life and a new start, did not become associated with the problems of my past. As I lay there I realised, with an increasing sense of irritation, that my previous life was still trailing its influence over my current one. The house-warming party, which had seemed like such a good idea at the time, had actually been the occasion when these people had started to embed themselves in my life and I had allowed them to become unnecessarily embroiled in my history.'(Chap.10, Loc.1690)

'Loving Yourself: Tips for the Single Woman had contained a whole chapter about the effects personal grooming and fashion could have on a person's self-esteem, and had suggested that a woman who makes the effort to present herself in the best possible light would exude confidence and therefore become more attractive to others.'(Chap.11, Loc.1803)

'They say that falling in love is the same as being scared,' I said simply, 'the men on the rope bridge were scared, and they mistook it for falling in love. Most people have it all tangled up in their heads.'...'Some people get it all mixed up.'(Chap.12, Loc.2368)

'He looked uncertain, and didn't meet my eye. A sure sign he was shy too. And that was good: it showed that he thought of me and cared about the impression he was making so much it was making him self-conscious. I was worth being shy around, as far as Neil was concerned.'(Chap.15, Loc.2987)

'I rechecked the periwinkle on my eyelids, fixed a smudge and was ready to go when I heard the knock at the door. I wasn't surprised at the interruption, fate has a way of making us work hard for the things that we want, and I've come to realise it is so we value our dreams all the more dearly when they finally come to fruition.'(Chap.19, Loc.3597)

'The thing is, I'd decided already that Neil needed help, that I was the person to help him, and for his own good all traces of the woman had to be removed from his home. How else would he have the room to think? How else would he have room for me?'(Chap.20, Loc.3855)

Kindle Edition, 2011
4421 Locations
Book owned 
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
Book idea from Diane @ Bibliophile by the Sea. I had to read the book she mentioned as her best read so far in 2011. Her very convincing review is HERE.

174. FIGHT CLUB

Chuck Palahniuk 1996

Yes, this novel is different. Yes, it is a read out of my comfort zone. And yes, it is crude, raw and at times bizarre. After all, it is about an unnamed narrator in search of a meaningful life, whose idea of managing his chronic insomnia is joining support groups for terminal illnesses he does not have. There he meets and falls for Marla, a fellow faker. His best friend is Tyler Durden, inventor of Fight Club (a group of men who beat each other up for fun in the basement of bars) and Project Mayhem (a group of men who commit crimes intentionally to cause havoc). And yet, buried within this chaos is a significant life lesson, the unraveling of which I found to be so original, entertaining, and surprisingly moving. So yes, I like this book very much!

'Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.'(opening lines)

'"You cry," Bob says and inhales and sob, sob, sobs. " Go on now and cry."
The big wet face settles down on top of my head, and I am lost inside. This is when I'd cry. Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.'(17)

'Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I'd ever felt. I wasn't host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around.'(22)

'"No" Marla says. No, she wants it all. The cancers, the parasites. Marla's eyes narrow. She never dreamed she could feel so 'smarvelous. She actually felt alive. Her skin was clearing up. All her life, she never saw a dead person. There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with. Oh, but now there was dying and death and loss and grief. Weeping and shuddering, terror and remorse. Now that she knows where we're all going, Marla feels every moment of her life.'(38)

'The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.'(48)

"The second rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.'(48)

'You don't say anything because fight club exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends.'(48)

'That's the third rule in fight club, when someone say stop, or goes limp, even if he's just faking it, the fight is over... Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club.'(49)

'After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can piss you off. Your word is law, and if other people break that law or question you, even that doesn't piss you off.'(49)

'At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.'(52)

'This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.
If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window.
You had their full attention.
People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.
And when they spoke, they weren't telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.'(107)

'You don't ask questions is the first rule in Project Mayhem... the second rule of Project Mayhem is you don't ask questions... The third rule is no excuses.... The fourth rule is no lies.'(122)

'It's Project Mayhem that's going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.... Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world.'(125)

'You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need.
We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.'(149)

1st Owl Book Edition
208 pages
Book owned
Book idea from JRMD, thanks!
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge

163. the IMPERFECTIONISTS

Tom Rachman 2010

It is 2007 and in Rome, Italy, a small English newspaper company is in trouble and struggling to remain afloat. As such, although written with wit and humor, there is an overlying sense of melancholy as one reads through each chapter dedicated to the story of each employee  (American expats), it's current publisher and one extraordinary reader. The writing is remarkable and  the format so perfect for the plot. What is brilliant about the format, is the way the author smartly inserts the different characters within the different stand-alone short stories, the technique so subtle and yet so startling.  And as a flashback, at the end of each chapter, the history of the company, from its inception in 1953, slowly unfolds. Three absorbing stories are my favorites: Arthur Gopal, the Obituary writer, Ornella de Monterecchi, the Reader and Abbey Pinnola, the Chief Financial Officer.

'Lloyd shoves off the bedcovers and hurries to the front door in white underwear and black socks. He steadies himself on the knob and shuts his eyes. Chill air rushes under the door; he curls his toes. But the hallway is silent.'(opening lines)

'Travel means effort and a night away from home. Bleak. And nothing is worse than obit interviews. He must never disclose to his subjects that he's researching because they tend to become distressed. So, he claims to be working on a "profile." He draws out the moribund interview, confirms the facts he needs, then sits there, pretending to jot notes, stewing in guilt, remarking, "Extraordinary!" and "Did you really?" All the while, he knows how little will make it into print -- decades of a person's life condensed into a few paragraphs, with a final resting place at the bottom of page nine, between Puzzle-Wuzzle and World Weather.'(31)

"What I really fear is time. That's the devil: whipping us on when we'd rather loll, so the present sprints by, impossible to grasp, and all is suddenly past. My past -- it doesn't feel real in the slightest. The person who inhabited it is not me. It's as if the present me is constantly dissolving. There's the line of Heraclitus: 'No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.' That's quite right. We enjoy this illusion of continuity, and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories."(37)

'Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition. Whatever its ills, nothing has created more. Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshipped by man.'(38)

"My feeling is that, at heart, every story is a business story."(63)

'Journalism is a bunch of dorks pretending to be alpha males.'(153)

'But we've got to acknowledge that we're entertainers of a sort. That doesn't mean phony. Doesn't mean vulgar. It means readable in the best way -- so people wake up wanting us before their coffee. If we're so reverent about public service that nobody reads us, we're not doing the public any service at all.'(179)

'How will she explain her contentment of living like a housewife?'(186)

'At newspapers, what was of the utmost importance yesterday is immaterial today.'(193)

'I suspect revenge is one of those things that's better in principle than in practice. I mean, there's no real satisfaction in making someone suffer because you have.... I mean, is the point to get justice -- to balance out something unfair? Nothing does that. ... The way to get over stuff, I think, is by forgetting.'(195)

'Typewriters disappeared next, replaced by video display terminals. Overnight, the newsroom's distinctive clack-clack-bing went silent. The rumbling basement presses hushed, too, with the work outsourced to modernized printing sites around the globe. No longer did vast rolls of newsprint slam into the backside of the building in the late afternoon, jolting any dozing reporter awake. No longer did delivery trucks clog Corso Vittorio at dawn as workmen loaded the papers, copies still warm.'(201)

'She has read every copy of the paper since 1976, when her husband, Cosimo de Monterecchi, was posted to Jeddah... She had never learned the technique of newspaper reading, so took it in order like a book, down the columns, left to right, page after page. She read every article and refused to move on until she was done, which meant that each edition took several days to complete.... One year into her newspaper reading, she was six months behind. When they returned to Rome in the 1990's, she remained stranded in the late 1970s. When it was the 1990s outside, she was just getting to know President Reagan. When planes struck the Twin Towers, she was watching the Soviet Union collapse. Today, it is February 18, 2007, outside this apartment. Within, the date remains April 23, 1994.'(207)

'Once at the boarding gate, Abbey falls into her customary travel coma, a torpor that infuses her brain like pickling fluid during long trips. In this state, she nibbles any snack in reach, grows mesmerised by strangers' footwear, turns philosophical, ends up weepy. She gazes at the backs of seats around the departure lounge: young couples nestling, old husbands reading books about old wars, lovers sharing headphones, whispered words about duty-free and delays.'(225)

2011 Dial Press Trade Paperback Edition
272 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge

161. SO MUCH for THAT

Lionel Shriver 2010

In this very timely novel that boldly questions the current state of our American Health Care (business) Industry, Shep, the main character forgoes his dream of retiring to a remote Island of Pemba in Africa after his wife Glynis reveals that she has Mesothelioma, a fatal cancer. As they go through the motions of experimental treatments, their life-savings and personal relationships start to dwindle away. Will the illness break or save their marriage? Supported by equally unforgettable strong characters such as Shep's best friend Jackson with his incessant rants, and Jackson's daughter Flicka with her brave candor, the story is riveting and will probably unleash your own personal angst on the issues of health care (among other things), as it did mine. Is it any wonder that I read this book in one sitting?

 'Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Meryll Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
December 01, 2004 - December 31, 2004
Net Portfolio Value: $731,778.56
What do you pack for the rest of your life?'(opening lines)

'Water had a devious willfulness of its own, a sneaky, seeping insistence, an instinct for finding the single seam or joint you've left unsealed. Sooner or later, water will get in it if he wants to, or -- more vitally, in Shep's case -- it will get out.'(6)

'Shep believed fervently that money -- the web of your fiscal relationships to individuals and to the world at large -- was character; that the surest test of any man's mettle was how he wielded his wallet.'(8)

'It was disconcerting to be systematically punished for what might have engendered a modicum of gratitude. He did not require the gratitude, but he could have skipped the resentment, an emotion distinctive for being disagreeable on both its generating and receiving ends. Glynis resented her dependency: she found it humiliating. She resented not being a celebrated metalsmith, and she resented the fact that her status as professional nonentity appeared to everyone, including Glynis, to be all her fault. She resented her two children for diverting her energies when whey they were young; once they were no longer young, she resented them for failing to divert her energies. She resented that her husband and now her thoughtlessly undemanding children had thieved her most  cherished keepsakes: her excuses. A resentment produces the psychic equivalent of acid reflux, she resented the resentment itself. Never having had much of substance to complain about was yet one more reason to feel aggrieve.'(15)

'But even when doctors acted kind, the extent of their capacity to be kind was often out of their hands. However gently put, many a message that physicians were forced to deliver was cruel, and if it did not feel cruel it was a lie and then was even cruder. Personally Shep didn't understand why anyone would want to be one.'(47)

"Here's how it works," Jackson explained benevolently, "We're going on a trip, and it's your car, so I've agreed to pay for gas. We stop at a station, you fill up the tank, tell me the gas was fifty bucks, hold out your hand. With an expression on my face like I'm doing you a big favor, I hand you a twenty. You say, what's this? I say, but that's what a tank of gas should cost -- since that's what it cost when I was twelve. Basically, the insurers live in a fantasy world, and we Mugs are stuck in the real one.'(64)

'You never know what kind of a life someone might still value even if you don't think you'd put up with it yourself. In fact, you might be wrong. You might put up with it. You never know what you'll put up with if the alternative is nothing.'(107)

'Shep kept a hand on her cheek, holding her gaze, careful to keep his own eyes from darting even briefly to the anesthetist as she filled the syringe. And then he told his wife that he loved her. The effect of the injection was almost immediate, and these would be the last words she heard.
He had infused the ritual with as much feeling as three words could bear. Yet he wished that by convention their invocation was rare. Between spouses, the declaration was too often tossed off in hasty, distracted partings, or parlayed lightly to round up banter on the phone. He might have preferred a custom that restricted such a radical avowal to perhaps thrice in a lifetime. Rationing would protect the claim from cheapening  and keep it holy. For were he to have been doled out three I-love-yous like wishes, he would have spent one of them this morning.'(126)

"We pay good money so these kids learn something. Instead they're so coddled that Heather doesn't even get proper grades. What do we get on her report card? 'Does consistently,' 'does usually,' or 'does with assistance.' There's no 'doesn't do,' 'won't do,' or 'does, but it's crap.' And you saw that newsletter: they won't let her teachers use red pen anymore. Red's too 'confrontational' and 'threatening,' so now her tests are marked in a 'soothing' green. They've chucked the bell between classes to make the environment more 'welcoming.' They keep this up, Heather'll grow up and get a job, and the first time her boss says, 'You're late,' or has a tiny bit of a problem paying her to do work she didn't do because she didn't feel like it? She'll jump off the bridge."(171)

"What would I like to get away from? Complexity. Anxiety. A feeling I've had my whole life that at any given time there's something I'm forgetting, some detail or chore, something that I'm supposed to be doing or should have already done. That nagging sensation -- I get up with it, I go through the day with it, I go to sleep with it."(205)

"You can't take pleasure in your leisure, because it's been forced on you," he said. "And because you feel like shit. So it's the time we have while feeling well that's precious. I'm just not squandering my 'life' on botched Sheetrock jobs in Queens. I'm squandering my healthy life. You of all people should appreciate how raw the deal is. We slave away during the few years that we're capable of enjoyment. Then what's left are the years we're old and sick. We get sick on our own time. We only get leisure when it weighs on us. When it's useless to us. When it's no longer an opportunity but a burden."(205-206)

'Remembering was a more active experience than she had ... remembered. You could reconstruct the past only with the building blocks of the present. To remember joy, you required joy at hand.'(308)

'"You know them movies... He was groping. "Remember how sometimes, in the middle, a movie seems to drag? I get restless, and take a leak, or go for popcorn. But sometimes, the last part, it heats up, and then right before the credits one of us starts to cry -- well, then you forget about the crummy middle, don't you? You don't care about the fact that it started slow, or had some plot twist while along the way that didn't scan. Because it moved you, because it finally pulled together, you think, when you walk out, that it was a good movie, and you're glad you went. See Gnu?" he promised. "We can still end well."'(404)

First Harper Perennial Edition published 2011
433 pages
Book owned and won from Man  of la Book Blog's giveaway. His awesome review is HERE.
Book qualifies for: 100 + Reading Challenge

146. the LOTUS EATERS

Tatjana Soli 2010

This is the first book I have read about the Vietnam war, a subject that is painful to talk about. This book certainly added to the intensity and poignancy of it. The novel starts and ends in April, 1975, the fall of Saigon, with a flashback in between. In the heart of the story is Helen, a photojournalist, who epitomizes the ambivalence attached to this war. She, too, is torn in so many ways: between the Saigon she has come to love and America, her homeland, between the married lover Darrow and the soft-spoken mysterious Linh, between her sympathy to the innocents, both Vietnamese and American, and all against the equally conflicting imagery, savagely torn but beautiful, green and lush Vietnam.

'The city teetered in a dream state. Helen walked down the deserted street. The quiet was eerie. Time running out. A long-handled barber's razor, cradled in the nest of its strop, lay on the ground, the blade's metal grabbing the sun,'(opening lines)

'She looked at the various poses of the Buddha in his enlightenment. Saigon in utter darkness this last night of the war. A gestating monster. Her letter to Linh had been simple: I love you more than life, but I had to see the end.'(41-42)

'Superstition held that if one traveled too far from one's birthplace, one's soul would fly out and return home, leaving one nothing more than a ghost, but if that were true the whole world would be filled with nothing more than wanderers, empty shades.'(42-43)

'For the first time since Linh had left his village, he felt something move within him, the anesthesia of grief briefly lifted. What he felt was fear for Darrow. To survive this war, one should not be brave.'(67-68)

'Why is it, you suppose, that the people who are supposed to love us the most are precisely the ones who try to stop us doing what we love? "(89)

"Sometimes you have to fulfill a promise in order to deserve the love you're given. Don't you think it's a calling to live in danger just to capture the face of those who are suffering? To show their invisible lives to the world?"(89)

'She did not think it was true that women fell in love all at once, but rather that they fell in love through repetition, just the way someone became brave.'(100)

'... the mystery came in its own language to each person, and you had to decipher it on your own.'(138-139)

'Their lives fell into a rhythm of sunrises and sunsets, of wind whispering through growing rice, of high white morning clouds dissolving to the metallic sheen of noontime heat. Their movements slowed to the speed of the thick, spreading rivers, the water buffalo's heavy footfalls... Their thoughts, too, slowed, filled with the sunlight through palm fronds, heat loosening muscles, tension unwinding from their bodies, until the war was something far outside both of them.'(172)

"We're making bigger and bigger mistakes because we can't admit we made the first one. We can't lose a war to a small Asian country."
The monk giggled and covered his mouth. "But you'll have to fight till every last Vietnam man is gone."(193)

'Still as clear as after they lifted off from that beach -- the photograph wasn't enough. Helped no one. Soldiers still died, civilians suffered, nothing alleviated in the smallest amount by the fact that a shutter had opened and shut, that light had stuck grains on emulsion, that patterns of light and dark would preserve their misery. No defense at all against the evil that had been perpetuated. Out on the beach that day, it had all been failure. Even the best picture would be forgotten, the page flipped.'(241)

""Sometimes one's past makes it harder to understand the present. I love Americans, but I don't know if they are good for the Vietnam people. I want them to stay and to leave at the same time." Linh took a deep breath, then shook his head. How could he make her see? His relationship with her, with all the American, genuine and false.'(309)

'This is what happened when one left one's home -- pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. Pieces of her in Vietnam, some in this place of bone... The smell of Vietnam: a mix of jungle and wetness and spices and rot. A smell she hadn't realized she missed.'(377)

'It is like a medic performing triage. You determine who will die anyway, and you move to those who you can save. You want to stand over the dead and cry, but that helps no one. That's a tourist's sensibility. Day after day I go out with photographer's who are tourists of the war."(328)

St. Martin's Press First Edition
386 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
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123. THIS is WHERE I LEAVE YOU

Jonathan Tropper 2009

The plot of this novel is simple enough, like a few others I have read to date: a recently separated man unsure of what to do next. However, none of them quite made me laugh like this book did. Although the humor and language is at times crude and explicit (some pushes the edge for me), it is still a book I enjoyed a lot. Soon after Judd Foxman catches his wife Jen ( he later finds out she is pregnant) sleeping with his boss (the funniest but raunchiest scene ever), his father dies with a request that the family sits shiva and stay for a whole week at their parents' house. The book is in essence his dysfunctional family's coming together over the next seven days, a roller-coaster ride of one-liners and emotions: sad, raw, hilarious, shocking, outrageous but also mostly tender, honest and moving.

"Dad's dead," Wendy says offhandedly, like it's happened before, like it happens every day. It can be grating, this act of hers, to be utterly unfazed at all times, even in the face of tragedy. "He died two hours ago."(opening lines)

'My marriage ended the way these things do: with paramedics and cheesecake.'(15)

'Mom is a shrink, obviously. But she's more than that. Twenty-five years ago she wrote a book called Cradle and all: A Mother's Guide to Enlightened Parenting. The book was a national phenomenon and turned my mother into something of a celebrity expert on parenting. Predictably, my siblings and I were screwed up beyond repair.'(35)

"Be quiet!" Paul hisses at us. Phillip winks at me. And here we stand at our father's grave, the three Foxman men, all roughed from the same template but put through different finishing process. We each have our father's dark curly hair and square, dimpled chin, but there would be no mistaking us for twins. Paul looks like me, only bigger, broader, and angrier; me on steroids. Phillip looks like me, only slimmer and much better-looking, his features rendered more gracefully, his smile wide and effortlessly seductive.'(37)

'If you've ever been in a failed marriage, and statistically speaking, it's a safe bet that you have, or if not, that you soon will be, then you'll know that the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started.'(51)

'I'm supposed to be decades away from this, supposed to be just starting my own family, but there's been a setback, a calamitous detour, and you wouldn't think you could get any more depressed while sitting shiva for your father, but you'd be wrong. Suddenly, I can't stop seeing the footprints of time on everyone in the room. The liver spots, the multiple chins, the sagging neck, the jowls, the flaps of skin over eyes, the spotted scalps, the frown lines etched into permanence, the stooped shoulders, the sagging man breasts, the bowed legs. When does it all happen? In increments, so you can't watch out for it, you can't fix it. One day you just wake up and discover that you got old while you were sleeping.'(66)

'I am going to be a father, just when I've lost my own. There are some who would see a certain divine balance in that, one soul departing to make room for another, but I'm not that guy. I don't believe in God when I'm in trouble, the way so many people do. But at times like this, when the irony seems too cruel and well crafted to be a coincidence, I can see God in the details. Due to some mental hiccup I can't explain, when I think of God, I picture Hugh Hefner: a thin, angular man with a prominent chin in a maroon smoking jacket.'(141)

'You never know when it will be the last time you'll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.'(156)

'... the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don't know anything about them at all.'(188)

'It's a sad moment when you come to understand how truly replaceable you are.'(215)

'There are tricks to paying a shiva call. You don't want to come during off-peak hours, or you risk being the only one there, face-to-face with five surly mourners who, but for your presence, would be off their low chairs, stretching their legs and their compressed spines, taking a bathroom break, or having a snack. Evenings are your safest bet, after seven, when everyone's eaten and the room is full. Weekday afternoons are a dead zone. Sunday is a crapshoot. Do a drive-by and count the park cars before you stop. If you're lucky, there will always be a conversation going on when you come in, so you won't have to sit there trying to start one of your own. It's hard to talk to the bereft. You never know what's off limits.'(234)

'Sometimes, contentment is a matter of will. You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.'(255)

'You can do everything right and still end up alone, watching time run off the clock.'(301)

___________________

Dutton First Edition

339 pages

Book owned

___________________

Personal Note: I read this book while waiting to be called for jury duty, trying not to laugh too loud in the waiting room of the court house. This book reminded me of Larry David's (creator of Seinfeld) sense of humor. If you are familiar with his show 'Curb your Enthusiasm' and you like it, you will probably enjoy this book!!

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

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.

105. EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE

Jonathan Safran Foer 2005

I reread this book, and this time around, my boots feel heavier. If you have read the book, and you loved it, you know what I mean. A tender, melancholic and very visual story of Oskar Schell, a nine year old boy who lost his father Thomas during the September 11 tragedy. A series of phone messages left by his father before he died haunts his heart as he goes through mourning even as his mother and paternal grandmother tries hard to help him cope. One night, as he explores his parent's room, he finds a key and decides to find the lock it opens. As he explores Manhattan and meets new people, the mystery of the key and the heart-tugging story of his paternal grandparents also unravel.

'What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad's voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of "Yellow Submarine," which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d'etre, which is a French expression that I know.'(opening lines)

'I loved having a Dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.'(12)

'The average person falls asleep in seven minutes, but I couldn't sleep, not after hours, and it made my boots lighter to be around his things, and to touch stuff that he had touched...'(36)

'I couldn't explain to her that I missed him more, more than she or anyone else missed him, because I couldn't tell her about what happened with the phone. That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.'(71)

'I sit on the side with a coffee and write in my daybook, I examine the flight schedules that I've already memorized, I observe, I write, I try not to remember, being here fills my heart with so much joy, even if the joy isn't mine, and at the end of the day I fill the suitcase with old news.'(109)

'I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? (145)

"So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!"(153)

'He said, "This is my biographical index!" "Your what?" "I started it when I was just beginning to write! I'd create a card for everyone I though I might need to reference one day! There's a card for everyone I ever wrote about! And cards for people I talked to in the course of writing my pieces! And cards for people I read books about! And cards for people in the footnotes of those books!"'(157)

"Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells!" "His memory is there." His memory is here," I said, pointing at my head. "Dad had a spirit," she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, "He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!"(169)

'You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself form happiness.'(180)

'It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.'(208)

"Once upon a time, New York City had a sixth borough." "What's a borough?" "That's what I call an interruption." "I know, but the story won't make any sense to me if I don't know what a borough is." "It's like a neighborhood. Or a collection of neighborhoods."(217)

'When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.'(232)

'... I tried to learn about him as he tried to learn about you, he was trying to find you, just as you'd tried to find me, it broke my heart into pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time? '(279)

'It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning.'(305)

A signed First Edition
326 pages
Book owned by JRMD

101. NEXT

James Hynes 2010

This noteworthy novel, the events of which happen all in eight hours, finds Kevin, a fifty year old, in mid-life crisis seeking a change. He flies to Austin, Texas from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in a job interview kept secret from his current younger live-in girlfriend Stella. He arrives early and is told to come back and kill time at a Starbucks. The next ensuing few hours shows him in minor nuances and, in a stream of consciousness format, we learn about his past life: his childhood, his family, past loves, entanglements, commitment issues and sexual exploits. At once sarcastic and sentimental, this novel and Kevin's character certainly is one that 'grows on you'. When he returns for his interview, when the next thing happens, and in a stunning ending, you can't help but feel for him.

'As the ground rushes up to meet him, Kevin thinks about missiles again.'(opening line)

'A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not as loud. The midwesterner's credo: keep it to yourself.'(29)

'I can't believe,, he almost says aloud, I can't believe that I still let this get to me after twenty-five years. It's not like he still loves her-- he's seen her a couple, three times since then, he even went to her wedding with no ill effect-- but he still experiences that one moment, when she told him what she told him, as if it happened ten minutes ago. Love fades, but rage and humiliation endures forever.'(82)

'That's right, the sign's s telling Kevin, I'm talking to you, Mr. Royal Oak, Mr. Bachelor of General Studies, Mr. Non-Tenured Staffer, Mr. Maybe You'd Be Happier at Sam's Club. It's the same thing Kevin hears in his head every time he parks his five-year old Accord among the Volvos and Subarus at the Gaia in Ann Arbor out on Wastenaw, where there used to be cheap motels and discounts carpet emporia and the Ponderosa Steak House where his mother always took him to dinner when she came to visit him in college. It's the voice that's telling him that he's an underachiever in every way he can imagine, professionally, personally, financially.'(98)

'Of course, even if you were one of them, Ann Arbor's righteousness could be a pain in the ass.'(99)

'And because the brainy Chomsky readers who run the co-ops have a political analysis, they know exactly what's happening to them: it's the last reenactment of the Battle of Bertrand Russell-- first time as farce, second time as tragedy-- as the gentle vegans and pacifists who thought they could wear down corporate hegemony like water on a rock find instead that corporate hegemony has opened wide and is eating them alive, and they get to watch their own death, kicking and screaming like Robert Shaw in Jaws.'(101)

'He knew that look, and even now, when it shouldn't matter anymore what she thought of him, he hated it and feared it. It was the look she gave him when she was measuring him against some private standard in her head. It was a look that already held the expectation that he would disappoint her. The problem was that he never knew what the standard was, and she wouldn't tell him. It was a look that still made him angry-- not the implied judgment itself, but the fact that he still let it get to him.'(109)

'Now he knows why his father sang melancholy Sinatra in the shower, and the memory of his father's bass-baritone-- too low for Sinatra, he strained to the high notes-- unexpectedly tightens his throat. It kills Kevin to think he never put it together, the difference between what his father sang when he was alone and thought no once could hear, and what he sang when he was harmonizing with his SPEBSQA buddies two Saturdays a month, one hideous old chestnut after another:'(130)

'Kevin knows he's falling, but at the same time he knows there's nothing he can do about it. Events seem to slow and to become more inevitable all at once. It's a moment of a perfect, blissful contradiction: it feels like it could last forever, as if Kevin falling is something that has always happened and always will, but he also knows it's only an instant, and will be over almost before it started.'(137)

"Where I come from, or maybe I should say, where my father comes from, a man has to be, well tough is what people usually say, but a better word is, decisive... You have to judge how things really are, how people really are, take their measure very quickly, and then act accordingly. A man like that, once he decides what you are, and what you can and cannot do, he doesn't change his mind very easily."(185)

'What's going on with me today, he wonders-- is it the change of scene, or the slightly exotic, subtropical women he's met here, or is it just the heat? Or, now that he's fifty-two stories up, is it the altitude? Or is it because he's actually contemplating going back to Ann Arbor as if this whole episode in Austin never happened? Is it because he's thinking he might actually go back and be a father to Stella's child? Is this death of the old Kevin or the birth pangs of the new, and how can he tell the difference?'(250)

Reagan Arthur Books, First Edition: March 2010
308 pages
Book borrowed from the library

96. ONE DAY

David Nicholls 2009

A single day, July 15 is revisited annually from 1988 to 2007 in this absorbing tale effectively depicting the up and down friendship of Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley. Dexter is a handsome, uppity, girlfriend-hopping, self-centered and materialistic man. Emma seems the opposite: a sweet, charming, smart, conscientious and sentimental woman. After hooking up on the night of graduation, July 15, 1988, they separate and somehow always meet up or connect on the 15th of July every year there after. Through their separate lives, can they remain each other's best friend forever?

"I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference," she said. "You know, actually change something."(opening line)

"So I've given this whole "growing old" thing some thought and I've come to the decision that I'd like to stay exactly as I am right now."(5)

'At twenty three, Dexter Mayhew's vision of his future was no clearer than Emma Morley's. He hoped to be successful, to make his parents proud and to sleep with more than one woman at the same time, but how to make these all compatible?... He wanted to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.'(9)

'The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bits around you. Go out there with your double-first, your passion and your new Smith Corona electric typewriter and work hard at... something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that.'(12)

'You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of Confidence. Either that or a scented candle.'(42)

'I will find you, I've been thinking about you. Dex and Em, Em and Dex-- what was he thinking?(49)

'Rule Number Five. No scrabble. More and more of his friends were playing it now, in a knowing ironic way, triple-word-score-craving freaks, but it seemed to him like a game designed expressly to make him feel stupid and bored. No Scrabble and no Boggle either; he wasn't dead yet.'(74)

"I'm not scared of her, I'm just not going to do it so that we can say that we've done it. And I'm not going to do it if the first thing you say afterwards is "please don't tell anyone" or "let's forget it ever happened". If you have to keep something secret it's because you shouldn't be doing it in the first place!"(100)

'I love him, she thought, I'm just not in love with him and also I don't love him. I've tried, I've strained to love him but I can't. I am building a life with a man I don't love, and I don't know what to do about it.'(187)

"Sympathy for the spinster. I'm perfectly content, thank you. And I refuse to be defined by my boyfriend. Or lack of." She was starting to speak with real zeal now. "Once you decide not to worry about that stuff anymore, dating and relationships and love and all that, it's like you're free to get on with real life."(286)

'Ridiculous at thirty-eight, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. No, everything had evened out and settled down and life was lived against a general background hum of comfort, satisfaction and familiarity. There would be no more of those nerve-jangling highs and lows.'(382)
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Hodder & Stoughton Great Britain edition 2010
435 pages
Book owned
_________________________________________

Personal note: I finally read this souvenir book bought from Amsterdam, May 2010. If you want to see a great review of this book, check out Loving Books.

87. the ART of RACING in the RAIN

Garth Stein 2008

I laughed out loud, I almost cried, and I am not even a dog lover nor a car racing fan. From a totally different point of view, canine Enzo narrates his life and love for his family: Denny, Denny's wife Eve and daughter Zoe. Denny is a talented and undiscovered race car driver who faces his own race against ultimate despair and defeat after Eve is diagnosed and dies of brain cancer. He finds himself suddenly battling for custody of Zoe and wrongly accused of a life-changing crime. Enzo, a television addict, a race-car driver and a human at heart takes us to these stories, and educates us in the Art of Racing, with humor and greatly imaginative charm.

'Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of the melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively.'(opening lines)

'I've always felt almost human. I've always known that there's something about me that's different than other dogs. Sure, I'm stuffed into a dog's body, but that's just the shell. It's what's inside that's important. The soul. And my soul is very human.'(3)

'This is what Denny says. He says racing is doing. It is being part of a moment and being aware of nothing else but that moment. Reflection must come at a later time. The great champion Julian SabellaRosa has said, "When I am racing, my mind and my body are working so quickly and so well together, I must be sure not to think, or else I will definitely make a mistake."'(14)

'I watch too much TV. When Denny goes away in the mornings, he turns it on for me, and it's become a habit. He warned me not to watch all day, but I do. Fortunately, he knows I love cars, so he lets me watch a lot of Speed Channel.'(17)

'My nose-- yes, my little black nose that is leathery and cute-- could smell the disease in Eve's brain long before even she knew it was there.
But I hadn't a facile tongue. So all I could do was watch and feel empty inside; Eve had assigned me to protect Zoe no matter what, but no one had been assigned to protect Eve. And there was nothing I could do to help her.'(37)

'These are things that only dogs and women understand because we tap into pain directly, we connect to pain directly from its source, and so it is at once brilliant and brutal and clear, like white-hot metal spraying out of a fire hose, we can appreciate the aesthetic while taking the worst of it straight in the face. Men, on the other hand, are all filters and deflectors and timed release.'(63)

'Your car goes where your eye go. Simply another way of saying that which manifest is before you.'(83)

'Here's why I will be good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak, so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another's conversations constantly.'(101)

'... how difficult it must be to be a person. To constantly subvert your desires. To worry about doing the right thing, rather than doing what is most expedient. At that moment, honestly, I had grave doubts as to my ability to interact on such a level. I wondered if I could ever become the human I hoped to be.'(122)

'The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles-- preferably of his own making-- in order to triumph. A hero without a flaw is of no interest to an audience or to the universe, which, after all, is based on conflict and opposition, the irresistible force meeting the unmovable object.'(135)

'He relaxed on the wheel at the apex and the car drifted toward the exit and he was full on the gas and we flew-- flew!-- out of that turn and toward the next and the next and the next after that. Fifteen turns at Thunderhill. Fifteen. And I love them all equally. I adore them all. Each one is different, each with its own particular sensation, but each so magnificent! Around the track we went, faster and faster, lap after lap.'(155)

'What could I do? Had I not made myself clear? Had I not communicated my message? What else was there for me to do?
One thing only. I lifted my hind leg and I urinated on the papers.'(267)

'But racing in the rain is also about the mind! It is about owning one's own body. about believing that one's car is merely an extension of one's own body. About believing that the track is an extension of the track, and the sky is an extension of the car, and the rain is an extension of the track, and the sky is an extension of the rain. It is about believing that you are not you. You are everything. and everything is you.'(314)

HarperCollins First edition
321 pages
Book borrowed from the library

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