the bookshelf: what i'm reading

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

"I made matters worse by being exaggeratedly pleasant to conceal my aversion." (page 3)

"Memory is a sponge. It soaks up material from other times, other places and leaks it all over the moment in question." (page 83)

"The imagined lords it over the actual - no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. Hapiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work. The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist. As individuals or nations we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them. (page 107)

The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez 

"Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described." (page 3)

"For the writer, obsessive rumination is a must. Imagination must follow dark thoughts to dark places, you can't ever just say, Stop, don't go there. And isn't that the job, to imagine the lives of others and what they are going through?" (page 152)

"It was a happy day, it was a sad day, it was a beginning, it was an end, it was a new world beckoning, it was an old world lost to time." (page 194)

Recommender Christine Lehner

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

"All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don't know why, but I do know that the universe never began." (page 3)

"I also know about things because I'm alive. Everyone alive knows, even if they don't know they know." (page 4)

"She thought she'd incur serious punishment and even risk dying if she took too much pleasure in life. So she protected herself from death by living less, consuming so little of her life that she'd never run out." (page 24)

"Actually, even the worst childhood is always enchanted, how awful." (page 26)

Recommender Mariana Alessandri

Company by Samuel Beckett

"Apart from the voice and the faint sound of his breath there is no sound. None at least that he can hear. This he can tell by the faint sound of his breath." (page 8)

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

"Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80, on the way from Des Moines to Lincoln, would live for probably millions of years. Either that or it might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn't matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance." (page 252)

"Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other peopls's ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on th beach." (page 256)

Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears by Pema Chödrön

"Everything is impermanent. Everything is always changing -fluid, unfixed, and open. Nothing is pin-down-able the way we'd like it to be...... We have absolutely no tolerance for uncertainty." (page 18)

"We are encouraged to drop the storyline and simply pause, look out, and breathe. Simply be present for a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours, a whole lifetime, with our own shifting energies and with the unpredictability of life as it unfolds, wholly partaking in all experiences just exactly as they are." (page 33)

Consent by Vanessa Springora translated by Natasha Lehrer 

Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda

"I had a dream last night that I met a woman made of bricks. She took herself apart, brick by brick, and became a pile of bricks." (page 1)

The Orange and other poems by Wendy Cope

excerpt from 'Evidence' "What's the use of poetry? / You ask. Well, here's a start: / It's anecdotal evidence / About the human heart." (page 34)

Professor Andersen's Night by Dag Solstad translated from Norwegian by Agnes Scott Langeland

"He often felt that he had failed to understand [art], indeed, more often then he would admit, it left him in a state of incomprehension, confusion, indifference, even after he had used all his astuteness to understand only a snippet of it. It could make him feel desparate...........But on the other hand, what pleasure he could experience if, after a long struggle with, for instance, a modernist poem, he suddenly understood it! He had, for that matter, felt the greatest joy when he understood intuitively, directly. Why? Because then his own searching and restless and frequently maladjusted soul melded, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, with the greatest minds of his time, he had felt enlightened, and at the very highest level." (page 31)

"It wasn't the first time he had been entangeled in a train of thought that made him feel uncomfortable and which he didn't like." (page 126)

The short instruction manifesto for relationship anarchy by Andie Nordgren translated from Swedish by the author

"Love is abundant, and every relationship is unique."

The Complete Talking Heads by Alan Bennet

"I was perfectly all right on the Monday. I was perfectly all right on the Tuesday. I was perfectly all right on the Wednesday. I was perfectly all right on the Thursday until lunchtime, when I just ate a little poached salmon:  five minutes later, I was rolling about on the floor."

High Conflict: why we get trapped by Amanda Ripley

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes

"They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them and there were the images, also all around them." (page 51)

"They would have liked things to go back to how they were before. Either that or they needed a drastic change. It had all become too samey. Something needed to be rethought. But what?" (page 77) 

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödro¨n

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marganita Laski

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Psychonauts by Mike Jay

How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir by Molly Jong-Fast

These Truths by Jill Lepore

Mutual Aid by Dean Spade

Somebody Should Do Something by Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva and Daniel Kelly

Not Me by Eileen Myles

Playing and Reality by D.W. Winicott

Recommenders Ash Martin & Eri Linsker

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-James

"As we know, however, the most interesting things are always in the shadows, in the invisible." (page 35)

" "Am I going to die?" he asked one of the candles. It did not immediately answer. It's flame flickered, as if unsettled by this question. "Only very small or very large things are immortal," it said cautiously. "Atoms are immortal and galaxies are immortal. That's the whole mystery. The range of death is very specific, like a radio wave." " (page 201)

"Each of us is a potential lunatic, young man. Fantasizing is the norm. Each of us sits astride the border of our own inner world, and the outer one, balancing dangerously. It's a very uncomfortable position, and not many succeed in maintaining their equilibrium." (page 230)

"I urge you to create your own fiction, one that says it's you that's perfect, for instance." (page 270)

"As you can see, I am not just anyone. I am an anomaly." (page 271)