Just finished A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall which I really loved more and more as it went on and these two interviews (this one and this one) with the author are wildly entertaining, intriguing and informational.
Thanks to NPR’s MonkeySee podcast, just started listening to this British rapper Kate Tempest and started reading about her award-winning poetry and her other work and am just blown away.
No idea what made me pick this up in the bookstore the other night but it was actually kinda tough to put down…despite being really nasty and vile and mean and icky. People have been killed, tricked, screwed over and continue to mess with each other throughout the book. But at the very deep down heart of it is a sweet teenage love story gone wrong. And there’s some clever wonderings about theology folded in as well if you’re interested in that.
I’m definitely interested in reading more of Hill’s stuff although I definitely need a palate cleanser before that.
Gift from Dad for christmas in 2007, finally found its way to the top of the list. Heh.
First book finished in 2015 and it’s a doozy–I started it back in November and while admittedly I don’t have designated reading time these days (I’m not on public transit for school), it took me longer than it could have. It’s got numerous, very disparate sections as the characters keep (unbeknownst to themselves) reincarnating and regrouping in different places and times. There were some sections I just looooved (Nsara) and others I had a hard(er) time maintaining focus/interest in.
But throughout he’s not just telling you a story or having characters interact–this is a novel (and novelist) of big, huge, ginormous ideas and just as the characters in this book struggle with them through all different times and places, they are the questions that really inform our entire existence. So exhausting to think about at times! The ideas of how we move through our own histories, and how we arrange our belief systems, and how we choose to negotiate with others… truly fascinating, sometimes disturbing, never boring.
Having JUST finished an entire year of Project Life (scrapbooking, basically), I couldn’t stop grinning at this quote: “What’s hardest to catch is daily life. This is what I think rarely gets written down, or even remembered by those who did it–what you did on the days when you did ordinary things, how it felt doing it, the small variations time and again, until years passed.”
And questions like this one are what keep me up at night, usually worrying for my students’ futures in this messed up world of ours: What causes well-fed and secure people to work for the subjugation and immiseraton of starving insecure people? How many people can the Earth support? Why is there evil? How can we make a decent existence? How can we give to our children and the generations following a world restored to health?”
Because when it comes right down to what’s really important: how can we be decent humans in THIS life…and possibly our next?
As a mystery quietly begins.
Winter never altogether vanishes, even in the warmest summer. You can always find it lingering, if you look.
And a little bit later.
But when you find your soul, you have to go. When you find your true shape, when the wind lifts you up, when you remember who you are, you have to go.
Both from Summer and Bird by Katherine Catmull.
It’s called “Beautiful Wreck” by Larissa Brown and it’s outright heartrendingly wondrous. I’ll tell you more soon.
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I have an ongoing fascination with the way things intersect in our lives — how you do a new thing you’ve never done but Oh! completely unexpectedly it overlaps or intersects or has some deep resonance with something else you just did. I am particularly obsessed with this when it comes to reading (see “Good Things Come in Pairs” on this page) — it always feels like you somehow came to exactly the right thing at the right moment when those resonances happen.
Right now I am reading The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit and yesterday I read this quote that just dug deep down into the heart of me:
The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we’re meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe everyday.
Today I was reading Lizzy House‘s blog and saw this:
Dang, world.
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I feel alone.
I don’t mean i feel lonely; I mean i feel alone, the same way i feel the blanket resting on my body, or the feathers of my pillow under my head, or the tight string of my sleep pants twisted up around my waist. I feel alone as if it were an actual thing, seeping throughout this whole level like mist blanketing a field, reaching into all the hidden corners of my room and finding nothing living but me. It’s a cold sort of feeling, this.
― Beth Revis, A Million Suns
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