I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
~Henry David Thoreau
~Henry David Thoreau
Showing posts with label Author S-Z. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Author S-Z. Show all posts
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
~Virginia Woolf
~Virginia Woolf
In her debut novel, Torch, bestselling author Cheryl Strayed weaves a searing and luminous tale of a family's grief after unexpected loss. Theresa May Wood has fled a bad marriage and rebuilt a life with her children, Claire and Joshua, and their caring stepfather, Bruce. Their love for each other binds them as a family through the daily struggles of making ends meet. But when they receive unexpected news that Theresa, only 38, is dying of cancer, their lives all begin to unravel and drift apart. Strayed's intimate portraits of these fully human characters in a time of crisis show the varying truths of grief, forgiveness, and the beautiful terrors of learning how to keep living.
to wit:
I loved Papa, but the intellect is independent of the heart, and often gives birth to thoughts which offend and are harsh and incomprehensible to the feelings. And it was thoughts of this kind that, for all I strove to put them away, arose at that moment in my mind.
Another time, suddenly bethinking me that death might find me at any hour or any minute, I came to the conclusion that man could only be happy by using the present to the full and taking no thought for the future. Indeed, I wondered how people had never found that out before. Acting under the influence of the new idea, I laid my lesson-books aside for two or three days, and, reposing on my bed, gave myself up to novel-reading and the eating of gingerbread and honey which I had bought with my last remaining coins.
But one cannot always remain the same - one must change a little sometimes.
So delicious was the wondrous scent of birch trees, violets, mushrooms, and thyme, that I could no longer remain in the britchka. Jumping out, I ran to some bushes, and, regardless of the showers of drops discharged upon me, tore off a few sprigs of thyme, and buried my face in them to smell their glorious scent.
Sometimes I would suppose that happiness depends, not upon external causes themselves, but only upon our relation to them, and that, provided a man can accustom himself to bearing suffering, he need never be unhappy.
Even though I made it over half way through Jonathan Evison's The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, I just couldn't finish it. Ugh. It was predictable, for starters, and also just too . . . oh I don't know . . . trying too hard to be tender but 'real'? It was a forced kind of authentic. I'm usually wary of books with long convoluted titles (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, anyone?) so Revised Fundamentals must have snuck in under my reading radar. Isn't there a writing rule somewhere that recommends using fewer words whenever possible? A less-is-more kind of thing? I think that should apply to titles as well. The books themselves might be okay, it's just this one wasn't.
Anyway, moving on.
Before Wild, Cheryl Strayed wrote a novel called Torch, an emotionally heavy book about how cancer can wreak havoc on a family. I loved Wild and knew I would be reading everything else this author writes. So here I am reading Torch and loving it so far.
Anyway, moving on.
Before Wild, Cheryl Strayed wrote a novel called Torch, an emotionally heavy book about how cancer can wreak havoc on a family. I loved Wild and knew I would be reading everything else this author writes. So here I am reading Torch and loving it so far.
I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.
