There are books I bought, because they looked interesting in passing, or at writers festival, or while traveling. Those are on my list. And some meant-to-reads that kept getting bumped off the top of the list by ones that fell into my lap physically.
Maybe I’ll expand what I did before and put a one-line sample excerpt from each as value-added.
- Pollyanna Grows Up by Eleanor H Porter (1915)
“I’m afraid you’re getting into pretty deep water. You’ll be a rabid little socialist before you know it.” “A – what?” questioned the little girl, dubiously. “I– I don’t know what a socialist is. But I know what being SOCIABLE s — and I like folks that are that.” - Two Dutch Poets, translated
“shall we keep doing what we’re doing? formulating arguments
shall we look for support in lines within our sight “ - Legends of Vancouver by Pauline E Johnson (1911)
“he plunged directly into the tradition, with no preface save a comprehensive sweep of his wonderful hands towards my wide window, against which the rains were beating […] the sea crept silently up. The level lands were the first to float in seas water, then to disappear.” - Gusts, no. 17, Spring/Summer 2013
“dying trees
with nametags
in the least
we will know
who they were”
~ LeRoy Gorman - Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau (1849)
“Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It os only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail” - The Diary of Ma Yan: The struggles and hopes of a Chinese Schoolgirl, translated from French by Lisa Appignanesi, (Collins, 2004). [amazing story that led to this] [Walking the 4 hours to school, not having the dime to hitch a ride on a tractor, as a school child she was harassed with stones or stole bags, money and lunches by teen thugs in the canyons.]
“When I looked at the shepherds more closely I could see they were adults. I calmed down. My palms were damp as if I’d just come out of the water.” - Walking by Henry David Thoreau (1862)
Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill […] a sudden loud WHOA! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried the “Whoa!” to mankind? […]
“I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — it is commonly more than that– sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields […] shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too[…] deserve some credit for not all having committed suicide long ago.” - Notebook of Roses by Nicole Brossard translated by Robert Majzels and Erin Moure (Coach House, 2007) [Gorgeous hand-object and immediately began rereading it on finished and could get the satisfaction again.]
on the bent back of light
nothing’s banal
life starts again
the wind has broad shoulders
electrifies thoughts skin” - Fancy Clapping by Mark D. Dunn (Scrivener Press, 2012)
Volts and wages escalated into industrial crises:
the crisis of municipalities and rail lines,
cobbled roads and pine-choked districts
stripped of pine - Sestets by Charles Wright (Farrar, Straus and Gireaux, 2009) [Tried to read slowly and to a degree succeeded but gives an appetite for reading. That is the benefit of working poetry for a few decades. The plain articulacy, nuance, and grace. Finished and immediately began rereading it]
There are some things that can’t be conveyed –
description for instance,
The sundown light on that dog-hair lodgepole pine” - Boating for Beginners by Jeanette Winterson (Minerva, 1985) [um, utterly delightful. I have seen quotes by her floating around and finally a book and it makes me laugh with the absurd nonchalance as it moves though, sometimes turning reality another notch, sometimes cranking into a satire that gives me an ab workout.]
“If all went well, [she’d trade it in] for an understanding of the world which was both fluent and fluid. Continuous Prose.
“I see,” said Marlene. “So your mother is in a genuinely poetic state in which she cannot distinguish between herself and nature, and you were in a quasi-poetic state in which you had no distinguising powers, but no poetic powers either.”
[…]”No, I’d rather play battleships, but we haven’t any graph paper, have we?
They hadn’t, and so they were forced to talk about the Space-Time Continuum.
There’s all kinds of ideas of which books should be our mass cultural inheritance to carry forward. Among BBC’s 100, almost all were novels.
The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is there, which I have wanted to get around to reading. At the library there are 7 copies and a waiting list of 6 even 16 years after it was published. That’s good staying and resonance power. I got to page 119 and there isn’t enough money to pay me to finish it. Despite flavourful sentences scattered thru like “heads twisted around like bottlecaps”, it an unrelenting tiring slog.
But in at the same time, to give up on one thing makes room for that which resonates far better. At some point resonance or lack of as different as more than a dialect, more than a language even because if someone speaks to you in another language, you can still get something of personality and intention. With a lack of resonance, it’s just a recording of another language read by machine text.
Leave a comment