words I liked: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This book had so much beautiful writing to capture. The story itself is touching. There so many themes of love, friendship, life and achievement.

A really interesting way to capture the way and the reasons that we might segment the loves in our lives:

Alice was clever, but she had the kind of cleverness that verged on the unkind … Sadie didn’t want Sam viewed through her sister’s acute and often forgiving lens.

I just love this turn of phrase - she effortlessly made a storm with her eyes:

…she slammed the door, and then once she was alone, she effortlessly made a storm with her eyes.

Loving doesn’t have to mean fixing the problem, always a useful reminder:

Freda simply nodded and took Sadie in her arms. “Oh, my love, this must be a very great loss.” She … canceled her afternoon, and she took Sadie to lunch at her favourite restaurant”

Attention is a form of love:

No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did.

Sometimes all you need to do, is choose to stay:

He was about to leave, but then he didn’t.

… and a reminder of how easy it can be, to be meaningful:

…he made the world a little easier for Sam, and it cost him next to nothing to do so.

There are all kinds of friendship:

They had the rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it.

Don’t forget to check for whether careful handling is required:

“There are people like you and like me. We have bad things happen to us, and we survive them. We are sturdy. But with people like your friend, you must be exceptionally gentle, or they may break.”

…and sometimes flexibility is strength:

Somehow, Sam was able to bend to her criticism in a way that he had never been able to before.

When we are young, we are brave by default. We don’t know any different:

The child’s body moves the way a body can move before it has felt or even encountered the idea of pain.

…but maybe we can choose that same bravery, even once we have learned a little:

These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

After all, why stop playing?

“You can watch if you want. I’m going to play until the end of this life.”

“That’s a good philosophy.”

I can’t quite put the words to what these ones capture, but they belong together:

He wanted Ichigo’s life, a lifetime of endless, immaculate tomorrows, free of mistakes and the evidence of having lived.

“How do you get over a failure?”

“I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private.”

While Sadie experience this period of indecision as stressful, Sam didn’t feel that way at all. The best part of this moment, he thought, is that everything is still possible.

We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.

This one does need a bit of an understanding of the story itself to appreciate. The beauty is that in the same sentence it captures the harrowing absence, yet enduring presence, of a love:

Sadie’s instinct had been to tell Sam, but they weren’t speaking at the time.

A reminder to embrace the doing and the creating:

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

If you have read the story, it’s hard not to love Marx, and Marx knows love:

To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could.

…and:

“I rather like to be consumed.”

…capturing a certain kind of love:

Marx was a prodigious reader, and he felt like Sadie might be the kind of book that one could read many times, and always come away with something new.

There is beauty to be found in the world:

It was only when he was alone and he couldn’t participate in the business of living that he tended to notice how lovely being alive was.

When you look for it, it’s everywhere:

Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know - were persimmons his favourite fruit, or had they just now become his favourite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard?

To embrace the beauty in life, fill your infinite days with something!

“I suppose we drink and we smoke for the same reasons it is done elsewhere. We must fill our infinite days with something.”

writing skills: David Copperfield

I usually title these posts “words I liked” which I am reluctant to use in this case because what I liked about the words I have picked out of David Copperfield was how they invoked a feeling towards a character - feelings of dislike.

The skill or the sentiment was actually captured very well by Owen King, speaking about his father Stephen King and his ability to add “… a touch of sneer to an abrasive character.”

With that in mind I give you these gems, crafted to inspire your disdain for Uriah:

…replied Uriah, with a writhe

…his damp cold hand felt so like a frog in mine…

…and a snaky undulation pervading his frame from his chin to his boots…

He sat, with that carved grin on his face…

…he gasped rather than smiled at me, he writhed and undulated about, in his deferential servility…

…that crawling impersonation of meanness…

Anything to equal the low cunning of his visage, and of his shadowless eyes without the ghost of an eyelash, I never saw.

…he was squeezing my hand with his damp fishey fingers…

…with a writhe of his ungainly person…

His eyes, as he looked at me, seemed to take every shade of color that could make eyes ugly.

…he reminded me of an ugly and rebellious genie watching a good spirit.

I now saw him with his mask off. The suddenness with which he dropped it, when he perceived that it was useless to him; the malice, insolence, and hatred, he revealed; the leer with which he exulted, even at this moment, in the evil he had done…

He is such an incarnate hypocrite, that whatever object he pursues, he must pursue crookedly. It’s his only compensation for the outward restraints he puts upon himself. Always creeping along the ground to some small end or other, he will always magnify every object in the way; and consequently will hate and suspect every body that comes in, in the most innocent manner, between him and it. So, the crooked courses will become crookeder, at any moment, for the last reason, or for none.

words I liked: Book Lovers by Emily Henry

I really enjoyed reading this, the author posted on Instagram a really good explanation of how she feels and thinks about the romcom genre:

It’s not about a formula, any more than any other genre, though that’s how romances often get oversimplified in discussion. Some people scoff at the concept of a genre with a guaranteed “happy ending,” but the truth is, we all know the characters’ lives go on after the book ends. They’ll suffer other hurts. They’ll struggle. We’re with them for just a moment. But in that moment, there is so much hope.

That’s why this kind of story is so important to me. Sometimes our world is shitty. It’s unpredictable and terrifying and cruel and we constantly have to find ways to hold joy in our hearts even when we’re tired, grieving, or angry. We hang onto and believe in that hope: that no matter how bad things get, there is a force on earth that makes life brilliant, beautiful, and worth living.

Love is what holds us together when everything falls apart. It’s not about one singular happy ending we’re aiming for. It’s about weighing all those moments of sheer joy throughout our lives as heavily as they deserve.

On to the book itself, this about two sisters’ love was nice:

I didn’t know it was possible to miss a person this much while she was sitting right next to you, so badly everything in you aches.

As a slow reader I liked this turn of phrase:

Libby’s not a startlingly fast reader. She absorbs books like they’re bubble baths…

An expression of a more urban, densely populated life:

…the feeling of being one person among millions, as if you’re all nerve endings in one vast organism.

Love and passion in cooking terms!

I feel like I’m sugar under a blowtorch, like he’s caramelizing my blood.

This resonates:

…that’s what made me fall in love with reading: the instant floating sensation, the dissolution of real-world problems…

…and this!

“You’re in books. Of course you don’t have a life. None of us do. There’s always something too good to read.”

…and more:

Some books you don’t read so much as live, and finishing one of those always makes me think of ascending from a scuba dive. Like if I surface too fast I might get the bends.

Being brought tangibly in touch with your past:

That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.

Did I mention that I love words?

I read once that not everyone thinks in words. I was shocked, imagining these other people who don’t use language to make sense of everyone and everything, who don’t automatically organize the world into chapters, pages, sentences.

…and:

Maybe that’s why we as a species love stories so much. All those chances for do-overs, opportunities to live the lives we’ll never have.

Lastly:

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either.

Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt.

words I liked: Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

There was a technique in this book where an ancient and a current timeline were somehow connected. I never quite grasped how it came together, but I did like a lot of the writing.

These ones may be viewed as pessimistic, or as appreciating that the impermanence of things makes appreciating them in their time more important:

Everything crumbles in time, but that which is conceived as a ruin is forever perfect in its ruination.

…and:

…even the mountain would erode, slowly but completely, and someday cease to be.

Related, and an example of how language can aid connections:

‘You know, in Chinese, the word “forget” is wang ji. And how we say the word “remember” is ji de. So the two are linked by a common root, ji. But in English it doesn’t make sense. Forget. Remember. There’s nothing telling you that these to words are related. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you?’

Again on language and memory:

‘…If only there was an authority on the English language! I would write to them and request that they fix “remember” and “forget”. Because to me, the natural opposite of “remember” is “dismember”.’

‘But that’s already a word.’

Yuan sighs. ‘En, I know. That’s what I mean. It’s too messy, the English language! But when a memory eludes me, like the edges of a dream, where no matter what I try I can’t remember the details - only it was important and now I have lost it maybe forever - then I am dismembered. I have lost a part of myself. Violently so. That is actually how I feel. A dismemberment.’

It this about books, or about people?

‘Why didn’t you just buy it from a bookstore?’ I ask.

‘I like library books. They have more personality. They never quite belong to you and must leave you eventually. So you race through them to make sure you don’t have to return them unfinished, and savour every minute you have together.’

This one definitely people:

Each day we part, and the next day it is as though we have become strangers all over again and must find some way to know each other once more, to dust off the rusty rhythms, fall back into step.

From the ancient timeline part of the story:

Once, staring into the Moonlit Pagoda, He had come very close to asking for help, though for what exactly He was not quite sure.

How we carry our past:

…for now that he had placed his aches, he could no longer misplace them.

Capturing the magic moment when we are in the throes of drink and good company:

…we spend the next few minutes with arms around each other’s shoulders, squinting at the bottle, scrutinising it, its secrets ever more clear to us with every subsequent swig. We take turns telling each other extremely funny jokes. We feel our brains enlarging by the second, approaching a perfect understanding of everything. Somehow, in the babbling stream, we have rediscovered our vestigial tongues.

Now, nothing is beyond us.

…followed by a succinct capture of the state that may result after that magic moment:

I am not yet properly calibrated to the day.

These two on speaking, and words:

‘Then don’t you see? To profess is to tell the world, but you are a confessor, in this and all things.’

…and:

It is hard to know, anymore, if we are still playing with words, or if we are saying real things.

I felt a little disappointed at the end of this book, but revisiting all the beautiful phrasing has made me appreciate reading it much more.

The grass grows tall and tangles everything into stillness

I just loved this sentence from writer TheBigCat over here.

on being small in the world

Two bits that I’ve always liked, speaking about being small in the world.

I Like Giants, a song by Kimya Dawson:

Rock and roll is fun but if you ever hear someone

Say you are huge look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun

Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky

Say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye

I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye

An extract from On The Vanity of Existence, an essay by Arthur Schopenhauer:

...if we turn from this, and look at life in its small details, as presented, say, in a comedy, how ridiculous it all seems! It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with infusoria; or a speck of cheese full of mites invisible to the naked eye. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly, and struggle with one another in so tiny a space! And whether here, or in the little span of human life this terrible activity produces a comedic effect.

It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.

guilty

Read and liked this extract from The Vanity of Existence by Arthur Schopenhauer:

We are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life, will find that all along they have been living ad interim; they will be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let slip by unenjoyed was just the life in the expectation of which they passed all their time. Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!

words I liked: In Pieces by Sally Field

This book was written by Sally Field about her life. Without giving it away, there was a lot of trauma.

Even if it’s not necessarily nice to read about, there were still some beautiful phrases:’

all of them with wounds that wouldn’t heal because no one acknowledged they were bleeding

A wonderful way to describe a place that’s missing that sense of being home:

a place to stop but not to live

Describing someone in her life:

He had an intuitive sense of anyone’s despair and like a hound dog on the trail of fugitive feelings, he’d root them out, lock his focus on the injury, then comfort and soothe.

On a relationship between two people, but growing as individuals:

how do two people grow up together, build strength in their own legs, when they’re always leaning on each other?

The challenge of sharing:

stuffed to the brim with words that pleaded to be spoken but unable to get the first word out

On assumptions in relationships and conversations:

I pushed away from her, filling in the blanks with my own answers as clearly as if I’d heard the words

Lastly, our past is not our fate:

We’re all locked into the drumbeat of our history, but eventually you have to drown out that tune with your own voice.

beautiful sentences: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Just some sentences that I thought were a beautiful arrangement of words. It’s fair to say I loved reading this book.

There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.

There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a … form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

…thought has seared your head with its lines, and passion branded your lips with fires

Time if jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses

“Ah this morning! You have lived since then.”

Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow.”

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.

…eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose.

The sunset had smitten into scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite. The panes glowed like plates of heated metal. The sky above was like a faded rose.

The moment was lost in vulgar details.

“…if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration”

He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life and to weave them into a pattern.

dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.

“When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.”

It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin.

departures

Will you be OK?

I’m a tree. I’ve done this a thousand times before.

Done what?

Goodbyes.

Really?

Think about it. Leaves.

From Still Life by Sarah Winman, page 117 on the paperback copy I have.

This book was given to me as part of a workplace secret santa! Never has there been a more perfect secret santa gift.