175. 84, CHARING CROSS ROAD

Helene Hanff 1970

Such a gem!! What started as a casual correspondence to inquire about a rare book slowly became a friendship spanning twenty years. Even in pure epistolary form, we are able to grasp the heart-warming relationship that developed soon after the initial business transaction that transpired between the author (working as a writer in New York City) and the staff (notably Frank Doel) of Marks and Company, a small bookshop located at 84 Charing Cross Road in London . So endearing!

'Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase "antiquarian booksellers" scare me somewhat, as I equate "antique" with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions, or in Barnes & Noble's grimy marked-up schoolboy copies.'(1)

'Please write and tell me about London, I live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel its dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square and down Wimpole Street and stand in St. Paul's where John Donne preached and sit on the step Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the Tower, and like that. A newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they go looking for. I told him I'd go looking for the England of English literature, and he said: "Then it's there."'(13)

'The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I'm just beginning to recover. I keep it on the table with me all day, every now and then I stop typing and reach over and touch it. Not because it's a first edition; I just never saw a book so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All the gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home; it wants to be read by the fire in a gentleman's leather easy chair -- not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.'(17)

'Yorkshire pudding out of this world, we have nothing like it, I had to describe it to somebody as a high, curved, smooth, empty waffle.'(21)

'I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.'(27)

'It's the loveliest old shop straight out of Dickens, you would go absolutely out of your mind over it.
There are stalls outside and I stopped and leafed through a few things just to establish myself as a browser before wandering in. It's dim inside, you smell the shop before you see it, it's a lovely smell, I can't articulate it easily, but it combines must and dust and age, and walls of wood and floors of wood.'(28)

'you better watch out. i'm coming over there in 54 if ellery is renewed. i'm gonna climb up that victorian book-ladder and disturb the dust on the top of the shelves and everybody's decorum. Or didn't I ever tell you I write arty murders for Ellery Queen on television? All my scripts have artistic backgrounds -- ballet, concert hall, opera -- and all the suspects and corpses are cultured. maybe i'll do one about the rare book business in your honor, you want to be the murderer or the corpse?'(47)

'My friends are peculiar about books. They read all the best sellers, they get through them as fast as possible, I think they skip a lot. And they NEVER read anything a second time so they don't remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in the wastebasket or give it away. The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on the shelf, you never open it again for the rest of your life but YOU DON'T THROW IT OUT! NOT IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT! Why not? I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.'(54)

'There's a building going up across the street, the sign over it says:

One and Two Bedroom Apartments

At Rents That Make Sense

Rents do NOT make sense. And prices do not sit around being reasonable about anything, no matter what it says in the ad -- which isn't an ad any more it's A Commercial.... i go through life watching the english language being raped before me face. like miniver cheevy, i was born too late.... and like miniver cheevy i cough and call it fate and go on drinking.'(69)

'I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English literature, and he nodded and said "It's there."... Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Looking around the rug one thing's for sure: it's here.'(94)

'If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.'(94)

a Penguin books edition

97 pages

Book borrowed from the library

Book qualifies for : 100+ Reading Challenge

159. the YEAR of MAGICAL THINKING

Joan Didion 2006

While her only child Quintana lays unconscious in an ICU at a New York hospital, the author's husband John, suddenly dies from a massive heart attack. In this unforgettable memoir, the author writes so honestly (and perfectly) about the difficult first year after the tragic event. She missses him. She grieves. She mourns. She wants him back. I cannot even begin to fathom how heavy her heart must feel (and still feels) everyday.

'Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.'(opening lines)

'As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.  The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is the case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.'(7-8)

'Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.... What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. '(26-27)

'Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.'(27)

'... but I needed that first night to be alone.
I needed to be alone so that he could come back.
This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.'(33)

'Why do you always have to be right.
Why do you always have to have the last word.
For once in your life just let it go.'(141)

'Did mothers always try to press on their daughters the itineraries of which they themselves had dreamed?
Did I?'(179)

'Why didn't I listen when he said we weren't having any fun?
Why didn't I move to change our life?'(186)

'Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.'(188)

'Nor can we know ahead of the the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.'(189)

'Marriage is memory, marriage is time.'(197)

'We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we no longer are. As we will one day not be at all.'(198)

'Time is the school in which we learn.'(198)

First Vintage International Edition 1997
227 pages
Book Owned
Book qualifies for: 100+Reading Challenge

135. a WALK in the WOODS

Bill Bryson 1998

A highly informative book about the author's fond, hilarious, and totally entertaining experience while walking the Appalachian Trail. As he and his fellow unlikely hiker and traveling companion Stephen Katz walk the trails and commune with nature, in a funny, descriptive but sometimes satirical way, he also gives tidbits of information regarding some of his thoughts on America and the environment.

'Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town.'(opening lines)

'Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, "Bear!" before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness.'(5)

'The path they built had no historical basis. It didn't follow any Indian trails or colonial post roads. It didn't even seek out the best views, highest hills, or most notable landmarks. In the end, it went nowhere near Mount Mitchell, though it did take in Mount Washington and then carried on another 350 miles to Mount Katahdin in Maine.'(29)

'It was hell. First days on hiking trips always are. I was hopelessly out of shape -- hopelessly. The pack weighed way too much. Way too much. I have never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared. Every step was a struggle.'(35)

'Finally with a weary puff, you roll over, unhook yourself from your pack, struggle to your feet, and realize -- again in a remote, light-headed, curiously not-there way -- that the view is sensational: a homeless vista of wooded mountains, unmarked by human hand, marching off in every direction. This really could be heaven. It's splendid, no question, but the thought you cannot escape is that you have to walk this view, and this is the barest fraction of what you will traverse before you've finished.'(36)

'There is no point in hurrying because you are not going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It's where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.'(72)

'At the time of our hike, the Appalachian Trail was fifty-nine years old. That is, by American standards, incredibly venerable. The Oregon and Santa Fe Trails didn't last long. Route 66 didn't last long. The old coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway, a road that brought transforming wealth and life to hundreds of little towns, so important and familiar that it became known as "America's Main Street," didn't last long. Nothing in America does. If a product or enterprise doesn't constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, alas, nearly always uglier. And then there is the good old AT, still quietly ticking along after six decades, unassuming, splendid, faithful to its founding principles, sweetly unaware that the world has quite moved on. It's a miracle really.'(104)

'I don't mean to suggest that hiking the AT drives you potty, just that it takes a certain kind of person to do it.'(114)

'That was the trouble with the AT -- it was all one immensely long place, and there was more of it, infinitely more of it, than I could ever conquer. It wasn't that I wanted to quit. Quite the contrary. I was happy to walk, keen to walk. I just wanted to know what I was doing out here.'(177)

'In America, alas, beauty has become something you strive to, and nature an either/or proposition -- either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you defy it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit -- that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn't all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and tilled fields.'(200)

'I still had my wits about me. Or at least I felt as if I did. Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me -- and here was an arresting notion -- unless persuading yourself that you are  not confused is merely a cruel, early symptom of confusion. Or even an advanced symptom. Who could tell? For all I knew I could be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state characterized by the fear on the part of the sufferer that he may be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state. That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.'(225)

"Well, has it occurred to you what a ranger would say if he found you setting off the Hundred Mile Wilderness with a newspaper delivery bag? Do you know they have the power to detain anyone they think is not mentally or physically fit?" This was actually a lie, but it brought a promising hint of frown to his brow. "Also, has it occurred to you that maybe the reason paperboys don't get hernias is that they only carry the bag for an hour or so a day -- that maybe it might not be so comfortable lugging it for ten hours at a stretch over mountains -- that maybe it would bang endlessly against your legs and rub your shoulders raw?"(237)

'It is an extraordinary experience to find yourself face-to-face in the woods with a wild animal that is very much larger than you. You know these things are out there, of course, but you never expect any particular moment to encounter one, certainly not up close -- and this one was close enough that I could see the haze of flealike insects floating in circles about its head. We stared at each other for a good minute, neither of us sure what to do. There was a certain obvious and gratifying tang of adventure in this, but also something much more low-key and elemental -- a kind of respectful mutual acknowledgment that comes with sustained eye contact. It was this that was unexpectedly thrilling -- the sense that there was in some small measure a salute in our cautious mutual appraisal. I was smitten.'(241)

'I had come to realize that I didn't have any feelings towards the AT trail that weren't confused and contradictory. I was weary of the trail, but still strangely in its thrall; found the endless slog tedious but irresistible; grew tired of the boundless woods but admired their boundlessness; enjoyed the escape from civilization and ached for its comforts. I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.'(271)

Broadway Books, First Paperback edition 1999
274 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge

130. GIFT from the SEA

Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1955

This short,  uncomplicated but vastly inspiring book was written by the author while taking respite for two weeks alone in a simple cottage on the beach at Captiva island.  She collects five shells: channelled whelk, moon shell, double-sunrise shell, an oyster bed and a paper nautilus, all of which prove symbolic of the different stages in a woman's life. Her thoughts form this beautiful book--- her gift from the sea. Not surprisingly, I find this book so timeless and maybe even more relevant now during our busy days of multi-tasking. The one book I reread in January each year. 


'I began these pages for myself, in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual balance of life, work and human relationships.'(opening line)

'The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach---waiting for a gift from the sea.'(17)

'My shell is not like this, I think. How untidy it has become! Blurred with moss, knobby with barnacles, its shape is hardly recognizable any more. Surely, it had a shape once. It has a shape still in my mind. What is the shape of my life?'(22)

'But I want first of all---in fact, as an end to these other desires---to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can.'(23)

'I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.'(24)

'What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head.'(26)

'The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask.'(32)

'Only when one is connected to one own's core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.'(44)

'Perhaps middle age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of  material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego. Perhaps one can shed at this stage of life as one sheds in beach-living; one's pride, one's false ambition, one's mask, one's armor.'(84-85)

'When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether  or not he is loved in return; when he only knows that he loves and is moving to music---then, and then only, are two people able to dance perfectly in tune to the same rhythm.'(106)

'For relationships, too, must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits---islands, surrounded and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the security of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.'(109)

'The waves echo behind me. Patience---Faith---Openness, is what the sea has to teach. Simplicity---Solitude---Intermittency ... But there are other beaches to explore. There are more shells to find. This is only a beginning.'(Closing lines)

a Pantheon book edition
128 pages
Book owned

128. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

Frank W. Abagnale 1980
with Stan Redding

An intriguing memoir of Frank W Abagnale, outlining his life as the ultimate fake and con man. As I read his life story as a swindler and check forger, posing his way as a pilot, a pediatrician, a lawyer, an author and whatever else he needs to be to amass thousands of dollars, I found myself in a dilemna: hate his guts or admire him? And it doesn't help that I so thoroughly love the movie and Frank's character as played by Leonardo di Caprio, and that in the book, unlike the movie, he did actually pay for his crime in the most horrid inhumane way at a French prison, and that he ultimately turned his life around and is instrumental in revamping bank and secure-document safety by working with the FBI Financial Crimes unit. I am still left with the nagging question:  in this book, in Frank's life, does crime pay?

'A man's alter ego is nothing more than his favorite image of himself. The mirror in my room in the Windsor Hotel in Paris reflected my favorite image of me -- a darkly handsome young airline pilot, smooth-skinned, bull-shouldered and immaculately groomed. Modesty is not one of my virtues. At the time, virtue was not one of my virtues.'(opening lines)

'Someone once said there's no such thing as an honest man. He was probably a con man.'(13)

'The baby had lost his doleful look. No one is really certain if newborn infants have thoughts or are aware of what is going on around them.  No one but me, that is. That kid knew I was a phony. I could see it in his face.'(95)

'The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) did not exist as a police tool during the period. Had I had to contend with the computerized police link, with its vast and awesome reservoir of criminal facts and figures, my career would probably have been shortened by years. And lastly, I was pioneering a scam that was so implausible, so seemingly impossible and so brass-balled blatant that it worked.'(62-63)

'And all day long I'd go around feeling like Hippocrates in my hypocrite's mantle.'(83)

'I hadn't even finished high school and had yet to step on college campus, but I was a certified lawyer! However, I regarded my actual lack of academic qualifications merely a technicality, and in my four months of legal cramming I'd learned the law is full of technicalities. Technicalities are what screw up justice.'(105)

'I have since learned something about Harvard men. They're like badgers. They like to stick together in their own barrows. A lone badger is going to find another badger. A Harvard man in a strange area is going to find another Harvard man. And they're going to talk about Harvard.'(108)

'The former police chief of Houston once said of me: "Frank Abagnale could write a check on toilet paper, drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it 'U.R. Hooked' and cash it at any back in town, using a Hong Kong driver's license for identification."(116)

'The transaction also verified a suspicion I had long entertained: it's not how good a check looks but how good the person behind the check looks that influences tellers and cashiers.'(120)

'A con artist's only weapon is his brain.'(129)

'I learned later that I was the first check swindler to use the routing number racket. It drove bankers up the wall. They didn't know what the hell was going on. They do now and they owe me.'(156)

'Four months after taking up residence in Montpellier, I learned a bitter truth: when the hounds have help, there is no safe place for a fox to hide.'(221)

First Broadway Book movie tie-in edition 2002
277 pages
Book owned

118. DOWN the NILE

Rosemary Mahoney 2007

I read this book while cruising down the Nile, a five day adventure in between our land exploration of Cairo. This memoir was as vivid and mesmerizing as the river before me. It is an amazing travel book born from the author's love of rowing and her fascination for the Nile. It renders a captivating account of her quest to row a boat, an American female alone, 120 miles down the Nile from Aswan to Qena, two years after her initial visit as an ordinary tourist. It also provides a historical glimpse of the old Egypt through excerpts from Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert's own travel memoirs, as well as a general view of today's modern Egypt.

'On the day that I hoped to buy a rowboat in Luxor, Egypt, I was awakened, as I had been every morning in Luxor, by a Koranic antiphony drifting from the Islamic boys' school next door to my hotel.'(Opening line)

'Rowing was a peaceful, meditative activity, and the constant movement- the inherent mobility- of the water was enthralling. Land was stationary and always belonged to somebody. Water, on the other hand, was free. It moved and shifted and traveled. It was volatile, and when aroused it could be unforgiving. I found it frightening and a little bit thrilling to think that the water that throws itself against the coast of Kennebunkport in July might feasibly be the same particular water that lays at the crab-covered rocks in Bombay Harbor the following March. And it pleased me to realize that I could sit in a small boat and propel myself across all this hugely moving water with an engine no more powerful than my own two arms.'(9)

'On that first trip to Egypt, whenever I mentioned my Nile rowing idea to Egyptian people they had all said with real disbelief, Impossible! You are a woman! The river is big! Not mentioning any crocodile! And dangerous ships! And the fisherman who can become crazy seeing a woman alone!'(11)

'My search for a boat began in Aswan, the southern-most Egyptian city, the starting point of my rowing trip, and technically the beginning of the Egyptian Nile. I wanted a simple fisherman's rowboat, long and narrow, with room enough to lie down in at night.'(21)

"Egyptians in Aswan sometimes try to be felucca captain to get money, but they has not enough experiences and sometimes is not clever. They don't watching the wind." He waved his arm at the steep dunes on the west bank. "Wind can be changing and changing all the time. Sometime it can come"- he snapped his fingers- "very fast from the desert, and is full of sand and if you don't seeing it, it can put the boat over in three seconds."(86)

'Not Nubian, not Muslim, not Egyptian- these facts conspired to disqualify me entirely from the female category. What mattered for a Muslim woman could never really matter for me. In Egypt, a Western woman would never truly be a woman, nor did she quite approach the status of a man; instead, her identity was like that of a pleasant but irrelevant animal, like say, a peahem or a manatee.'(114)

'The sight of an ancient Egyptian monument from a distance is always at first slightly surreal, like a mirage or a photographic image that has strayed out of a book and superimposed itself on real life. On seeing it, you feel at first a little flustered and confused and think not so much of the object itself but of the reproductions you've seen of it and of the thoughts and emotions those reproductions once inspired in your imagination, then gradually you grasp that what you're looking at is real, an object before you that you can walk up to and touch. When Napoleon's soldiers, who had never seen a photograph of any kind, rounded a bend and caught sight of the Temple of Karnak for the first time, they were so moved by the marvelous sight that they burst into spontaneous applause.'(131)

'Across the span of a hundred and fifty years, only one thing has truly remained the same: moonlight still makes the Egyptian sand look like snow.'(159)

'Whenever you were on the Nile, whatever you saw along the banks, the ever-present ridge of the desert loomed beyond the greenery, walling the floodplain on either side, a long chain of hills both east and west, often with pale chutes of sand spilling down them, blown in from the desert beyond.'(161)

'Abu Simbel's night sky was a metropolis of its own, an enormous velvety parabola embracing the earth. Venus shown long on the water in a way that mimicked the moon, and the Big Dipper sat very low on the horizon. The whole place was a deeply swirling mass of stars. I felt short of breath and utterly insignificant looking at its hugeness and depth. This was a night sky you didn't have to raise your eyes to.'(173)

'I rowed with a little bit of fear and a great deal of joy. I was alone, finally, with no one to protect me. I wanted to sing for happiness- a rare, raw, immediate sort of happiness that was directly related to my physical stimulation, to my surroundings, to independence, and to solitude... That was always the best part of rowing- the repetition, the simplicity of the physical task, the slowly and constantly shifting surrounding that inspired free thought. My happiness was a feeling of physical lightness, of weightlessness, like drifting on air.'(218)

'The water, or some small part of it at least, that was passing beneath my boat had traveled slightly downhill for approximately one hundred and fifty days from its source near the equator. It had traveled more than four thousand miles and had been running its modern-day course for over twenty-five thousand years. How many eyes had looked at the same water I was looking at? How many people had drunk from this water, rowed on it, or drowned in it?'(226)

'Anything, really, was possible if you cared enough and had the right tools. I have always resented imposed constraints, hated all the things people said one should and should not do. A woman shouldn't... A man couldn't... People were always conjuring up a wall and telling you to stay on your side of it. More often than not, the wall was false, a cliche, an inherited and unexamined stock response to the world.'(239)
______________________________________

First Back Bay paperback edition, September 2008
268 pages
Book owned
______________________________________

Personal Note: Thanks to all the thoughtful bloggers who bade me good wishes. Although the trip was amazing, I am so glad to be back home! Here are two of my favorite pictures of the River Nile.

An incredible sunset taken aboard a felucca

A glorious morning view from our hotel balcony

115. I KNOW WHY the CAGED BIRD SINGS

Maya Angelou 1969

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a Bantam Book edition, 1993
246 pages
Book owned

65. the ROAD of LOST INNOCENCE

Somaly Mam 2008
originally published in French 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

60. the GLASS CASTLE

Jeannette Walls 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

58. ANNE FRANK: the DIARY of a YOUNG GIRL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bantam Edition July 1993
283 pages
Book borrowed from the Library

39. MAN'S SEARCH for MEANING

Victor E. Frankl 1946

This highly recommended book is the author's personal account of finding meaning (even beauty and love) in his everyday existence and suffering at a Nazi concentration camp. It is a reminder for everyone that: Attitude is everything and most of everything is a choice.

"He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how."

"Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone."

"Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"

"It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself--be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself."

"At that moment I saw the plain truth and did what marked the culminating point of the first phase of my psychological reaction: I struck out my whole former life."

"Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run--in the long run, I say-- success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it."

"Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself."

"In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice."

"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual."

"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

"A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment- he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions."

"I do not forget any good deed done to me and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one."

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized."

"When we are no longer able to change a situation – just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer – we are challenged to change ourselves."

"For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love."