The best books I read this year & some of my favorite quotes: 2015 edition
*With some spoilers.
New releases
➢ Matthew Salesses / The Hundred Year Flood (2015)
He chose Prague for its resistance. A city where, for thousands of years, private lives had withstood the oppression of empires. Both world wars, countless invasions. In the weeks before he left, Tee imagined hiding from the Secret Police, giving up his home to save his ideals. That was what he had to do: resist, move on, leave the familiar behind. It would be his first trip on his own, as he’d gone to college three miles from where he grew up. His first trip not counting his adoption. Prague might be the perfect place, after all: a city that valued anonymity, the desire to be no one and someone at once.
➢ Richard Siken / War of the Foxes (2015)
“Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede”
I cut off my head and threw it in the sky. It turned
into birds. I called it thinking. The view from above —
untethered scrutiny. It helps to have an anchor
but your head is going somewhere anyway.
➢ Ta-Nehisi Coates / Between the World and Me (2015)
You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance — no matter how improved — as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.
➢ Kevin Ashton / How to Fly a Horse (2015)
Our first creative step is unlikely to be good. Imagination needs iteration. New things do not flow finished into the world. Ideas that seem powerful in the privacy of our head teeter weakly when we set them on our desk. But every beginning is beautiful. The virtue of a first sketch is that it breaks the blank page. It is the spark of life in the swamp. Its quality is not important. The only bad draft is the one we do not write.
➢ Laura Restrepo / Hot Sur (English, 2015)
Memories. In Spanish, recuerdos, re-cordar, from the Latin, cor, cordis, the heart, that is, a return to the heart, so that memories of childhood would have to be pulled from the heart in which they’re kept.
➢ Elvira Prieto / An (Im)possible Life (2015)
“angels”
there are children who suffer
who beg for love and affection from relative strangers
who get used to being left behind and forgotten
who are teased for “smelling funny”
who wear the same soiled clothes multiple days in a row
who walk the streets at all hours
who are brilliant in the face of misery
Contemporary
➢ Misty Copeland / Life In Motion (2014)
But during the actual performance, when the music swells, and the crowd hushes, it’s all up to you — how high you leap, when you breathe. There’s no more time to worry or try to make it better. It either works or it doesn’t. You land with grace or you stumble and fall. That absoluteness, that finality, is freedom. And the stage was the one place where I felt it.
➢ Matthew Salesses / I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying (2012)
The Night I Met Her She Said Once You Go Yellow
The boy I still wasn’t sure was mine stared at the wash of starfish stinking on the sand and said something boyish about the ocean being big and cruel. I tried to tell him the starfish weren’t all dead yet, but he knew enough already to tell the difference. So I lied more. I told him that starfish were even better than lizards, that if you broke off a dead piece of them it grew back alive. His mother, a one-night stand, had told him about lizards. She’d gotten it into his head that this was what he should tell the man he thought was his father — she had a keen sense of metaphor, was all I remembered about her, which was enough. The ocean washed over the starfish and they twinkled their deadness. The boy rushed against the wake and plucked one out of the surf and I noticed his black hair curl at its ends like mine. He brought the starfish back, stiff as a bad joke. He snapped off a leg, and I could see on his half-white face that he’d overestimated both how mean and how hopeful he’d thought he could be. Don’t worry, I thought, those feelings will come.
➢ David Whyte / The Three Marriages (2009)
A work is achieved not by creating a hermetic space sealed off from the world, but nel mezzo, in the middle of everything.
➢ Haruki Murakami / Wind Up Bird Chronicle (1994)
Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go. As our meetings grew more frequent, I felt not so much that I had met someone new as that I had chanced upon a dear old friend.
➢ Lois Lowry / The Giver (1993)
“But sir,” Jonas suggested, “since you have so much power — ” The man corrected him. “Honor,” he said firmly. “I have great honor. So will you. But you will find that that is not the same as power.
Classics
➢ Gabriel García Márquez / One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.
➢ Margaret Atwood / The Circle Game (1966)
“Camera”
you insist
that the clouds stop moving
the wind stop swaying the church
on its boggy foundations
the sun hold still in the skyfor your organized instant.
Camera man
how can I love your glass eye?Wherever you partly are
now, look again
at your souvenir,
your glossy square of paper
before it dissolves completely:
➢ Harper Lee / To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)
Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
➢ Thomas Hardy / Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)
“The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they? — that is, seem as if they had. And the river says, — ‘Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’ And you seem to see numbers of tomorrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!’ … But you, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!”
➢ Walt Whitman / Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition
“Song of Myself”
51Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
➢ Emily Brontë / Wuthering Heights (1847)
He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.
➢ Jane Austen / Pride and Prejudice (1813)
After a silence of several minutes, he came towards her in an agitated manner, and thus began: “In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”
To see more of my reading list on Goodreads, click here.
