It All Changed in an Instant

I have a lot of catching up to do in regards to posting about the books I’ve read in the last few months, but I’m not going to start from the beginning. Instead, I’m going to start with the latest one!

At least two people I know have attempted the 50 Books in a year since I did, most recently my former roommate and dearly-missed friend, Kristen, who just started a lovely blog called Living Literary. I was reading her newest post last night and thinking about how I had failed to post about my books recently, but also that I seem to fail to provide any criticism, most of the time, of what I read.

Well, that isn’t going to change in this post.

It All Changed in an Instant is the new six word memoir book from Smith Magazine. I read their earlier books, Not Quite What I Was Planning and Six Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak for last year’s 50 books in a year. I really love the format, just as I love websites like onesentence.org. I got an email a while ago saying that one of the six word memoirs I had posted to the Smith Magazine website had been chosen as a finalist for the new book. I hadn’t heard anything since then, but I was still hopeful that maybe it would be in this book.

It wasn’t, but that’s okay. Because my six word memoir, which I wrote last year after reading Not Quite What I Was Planning, was “Happiest pretending to be someone else.” And while that was quite perfect for me at that point in my life, it’s not true anymore. And so, I posted some more over there and hold out hope for the next book.

I truly love the six word memoir books. The people at Smith Magazine set out to do something different - to challenge people to tell their story in only six words, the way Ernest Hemingway had (For sale: baby shoes, never worn.) and in the process proved that you really can tell a powerful story with only six words. Sometimes, I’d say, a great deal better than with 6,000 or 600,000.

I’ll be thinking in six word sentences for a couple of days now.

My favourites?

Writing is easy. Life is hard.
Nearing 60, still on rough draft.
Friendship test: willingness to be inconvenienced.
Only I define who I am.
Why walk when you can fly?
“Give up.” “Never.” “You’ll die.” “Maybe.”
A series of self fulfilling prophecies.
Last chapter hasn’t been written yet.
We’re both someone else’s problem now.
Off in my own little world.
Journalism? Hah! Just make stuff up.
I’m holding on with both hands.
One plane ride can change everything.

Comment in six words. I dare you.

The Secret History

Apparently The Secret History by Donna Tartt is quite a famous book. Apparently, people read it in high school. Not much in North America, as far as I can tell, but often in Britain. Which is odd, because it’s a very American book, in my opinion. It mimics books like Catcher in the Rye and the Great Gatsby. It is full of their themes, of their types of characters. Of their discoveries.

The first part of The Secret History was very good. The plot starts with the narrator joining a small Greek class at an elite arts college, handpicked by a professor who is charismatic, mildly famous and quite the classicist. The parts in the beginning where they talk about classics, either Greek translation or classical plays, were my favourite. I thought surely the plot would follow some sort of classical theme, and I was ready for it. I got all the references they were making, and I loved it.

Then the book suddenly turned into a murder mystery and abandoned the idea of classics all together for most of the novel, save a few brief references. I found the plot intriguing, and wanted to see how it ended, but there was definitely a part in the middle of this very long (629 pages!) book that I was bored and had no idea where they were going with it. Then the ending was good, especially the epilogue.

I had higher hopes for this book than panned out, but it was still a good read.

My favourite lines, mostly from the beginning:

“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

“There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death - those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement - been so brutal or painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.”

“‘After all, what are the scenes in poetry graven on our memories, the ones that we love the most? Precisely these. The murder of Agamemnon and the wrath of Achilles. Dido on a funeral pyre. The daggers of the traitors and Caesar’s blood - remember how Suetonius describes his body being borne away on the litter, with one arm hanging down?’
‘Death is the mother of beauty,’ said Henry.
‘And what is beauty?’
‘Terror.’
‘Well said,’ said Julian. ‘Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.’”

Fragile Things

I love Neil Gaiman. It’s official. I used to only love Stardust, but now that I’ve read his book of short stories, Fragile Things, I can officially say that I love him, too.

I bought Fragile Things in an amazing second-hand bookstore in Alnwick, UK. Alnwick is one of my favourite towns in the UK so far. It’s home to the beautiful Alnwick Castle, where the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland live and where they filmed parts of Harry Potter. It’s also an adorable little town - I’ve been a few times because I was doing some volunteer work for a museum there. My favourite cafe in England (so far) is there too. And this bookstore, Barter Books, which was the original point of this paragraph (I have had FAR too much caffeine today).

Anyway. Fragile Things is a collection of “short fictions and wonders” by Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman is truly a wonderful story teller. All of the stories are very different. Some of them I liked better than others. But they were all very engaging. Gaiman has a knack for create a very powerful narrative voice.

He also has a knack for great one liners, which you may or may not have noticed by now are my absolute favourite things in books/songs/movies/life.

“I like things to be story-shaped. Reality, however, is not story-shaped, and the eruptions of the odd into our lives are not story-shaped either.” - The Flints of Memory Lane

“I’ll tell the wind my name, and no one else./ True madness takes or leaves us in the wood/half-way through all our lives. My skin will be my face now.” - Going Wodwo

“In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving.” - Bitter Grounds

“You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrow’s state here.” - Strange Little Girls

“‘And if I could,’ my father wrote to me,/huge as a bear himself, when I was younger, ‘I would dower you with experience, without experience,’/and I, in my turn, would pass that on to you./But we make our own mistakes. We sleep/unwisely./It is our right.” - Locks

“We owe it to each other to tell stories,/as people simply, not as father and daughter.” - Locks

“‘Your turn in the chair next time,’ said October.
‘I know,’ said November. He was pale and thin-lipped. He helped October out of the wooden chair. ‘I like your stories. Mine are always too dark.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said October. ‘It’s just that your nights are longer. And you aren’t as warm.’
‘Put it like that,’ said November, ‘and I feel better. I suppose we can’t help who we are.
‘That’s the spirit,’ said his brother. And they touched hands as they walked away from the fire’s orange embers, taking their stories with them back into the dark.” - October in the Chair

“Within a generation their children would be born already knowing the poem, and sooner rather than later, as these things go, there were no more children born. There was no need for them, not any longer. There was only the poem, which took flesh and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known.” - How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I read this book for a number of reasons. 1) My dad read it ages ago and liked it. And he owned it. 2) Fae read it about a month ago and loved it and 3) The author, Jonathan Safran Foer, is married to Nicole Krauss who wrote History of Love, my favourite book of the year.

The book was beautiful.

I keep reading books that are told from the perspectives of children, and I find them really interesting. These are never regular children - they’re always different, too smart, too imaginative, or something. But using a kid as the narrator allows the author to explore such different thing. A child has far less expectations, far less preconcieved notions and more imagination. Their past is usually an open book, you’re not always waiting for the revelation of a traumatic event, like you often are with adult main characters.

The other thing about this book, similar to Krauss or Winterson, is that it’s all about stories. Telling your story and the story of your family. Personal histories. What can I say, I love stories about stories.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was at times painful. Oskar lost his father in 9/11, and he’s heartbroken. He hurts far too much for a nine year old boy. But at the same time it was inspirational. Because as a nine year old boy, Oskar allows himself to be open to feeling and learning. He trusts people and he forms incredibly close bonds with strangers.

The book is about how everyone is sad, but also how no one is alone. It’s quite beautiful.

“Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and the burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”

“In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Wheneve rpeople cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weather could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened - like a nuclear bomb, or at least a biological weapons attack - an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park to put sandbags around the reservoir.”

“It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?”

“When I heard that your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying, ‘I don’t want to die.’ That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.”

People of the Book

I have been struggling through this book for nearly a month. It’s not long at all, it’s just that I found it less than thrilling. Maybe that’s my fault - I mean, is anything thrilling after a vampire Viking in lycra? No.

Anyway. When I read Geraldine Brook’s Year of Wonders, I found it quite compelling. The characters were sympathetic, the setting was intriguing and the plot was capativating. It was only that the end was pretty odd. So when I saw her new book, People of the Book, at the store, I figured I would enjoy it. It’s about a woman who’s restoring an old Jewish manuscript that’s survived centuries of war and persecution.

It wasn’t as exciting as it sounds. At all. I very rarely give books a bad review, but I really didn’t like this one much. I found the characters very flat and not at all compelling. The book was very well researched, but I found that Brooks tried to continuously show just how well researched it was. She added in facts more as a list than as details important to the plot or setting.

Geraldine Brooks is a journalist writing fiction. To me, she writes like a journalist writing fiction - too much fact based and not nearly enough emotion or literary flare.

This being said, most readers probably wouldn’t notice this - and I didn’t notice it in Year of Wonders. But I’m trained in journalistic style and I know it when I see it.

People of the Book got a lot of really great reviews and it’s acclaimed almost everywhere. But there wasn’t anything in it that spoke to me at all. It was, at best, interesting.