"The server brings over two bowls of hot udon. I look at my daughter as she grabs chopsticks and spoons from the box of utensils. She looks tired, or thinner, or older."
-- Kim Hye-jin, _Concerning My Daughter_
It's here! The big book preview for the first half of the year from The Millions.
https://themillions.com/2023/01/most-anticipated-the-great-2023a-book-preview.html
Here's what I'm most excited about that I didn't know about before:
* The Survivalists
* After Sappho
* The Wife of Willesden (does this mean we get _two_ Zadie Smith books this year?)
* Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears
* Ada's Room
* King: A Life
* I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
"He can’t quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man’s deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work."
-- Russell Banks, _Lost Memory of Skin_
#SundaySentence #books #cosobooks
"It was the first time that an oil drum had washed up on the scattered pebbles of the island shore. Other items had arrived over the years--ragged shirts, bits of rope, . . . There had been bodies, too, as there was today. The length of it stretched out beside the drum, one hand reaching forward as though to indicate that they had made the journey together and did not now wish to be parted."
-- Karen Jennings, _An Island_
"I thought Rushdie was trying too hard to convey _hilarity_, Keystone Kops slapstick, the speeded-up fun of the fairground, while simultaneously dealing with weighty matters of Indian history and identity. James Joyce had a word for this quality: 'jocoserious,' the business of being both earnest and strenuously farcical at the same time."
The jogger, the first person to see the peak of the volcano sprouting from the middle of the reservoir in Central Park, in the early hours of June 2, thought the volcano was a breaching humpback whale. . . . She stared at it for a full minute--stretching all the while--before continuing her run. She couldn't afford to stop any longer because she didn't want her heart rate to drop.
-- John Elizabeth Stintzi, _My Volcano_
The last day of 2022 brings us the first major book preview for 2023. September 2023 brings us a new Mary Beard, a new Lauren Groff, a new Zadie Smith, _and_ a new Anne Enright, so I might as well go ahead and put in my PTO requests now.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/31/2023-in-books-highlights-for-the-year-ahead
Kelp was the key to America.
-- Pekka Hamalainen, _Indigenous Continent_
Although Charlotte loathed it, Schiller insisted on always having rotting apples nearby. Somehow the sweetly fermenting aroma stimulated his creativity."
(from Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels)
On a warm and breezy night in August 1834, a group of white men, nearly one hundred strong, gathered on Seventh Street, between Shippen and Fitzwater, in Philadelphia.
-- Kerri Greenidge, _The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family_
Hard Times is not Dickens's best novel, but it might be the most directly relevant to the current world.
https://newrepublic.com/article/169577/sam-bankman-fried-charles-dickens-hard-times
The revolution began quietly, with an awkward note sent between near strangers on June 7, 1897.
-- Isaac Butler, _The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act_
In the middle of The Magic Kingdom, and absolutely delighted that Russell Banks has written the novel I've been wanting to read since I wrote a term paper on the Shakers in college.
But why would I want to revisit a place that I regard as the opening wound in a wounded life?
-- Russell Banks, _The Magic Kingdom_
“Christmas, its generalized, secular pleasures aside, may not be part of my religion, but Dickens certainly is. “
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/08/charles-dickens-a-christmas-carol-joy
LitHub's best books of 2022:
https://lithub.com/our-38-favorite-books-of-2022
I've only read a handful -- most of these weren't even on my radar -- but I also loved The Marriage Portrait, which will certainly be on my top-ten list for the year.
When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl. She was in love, my mother said, like it was an excuse.
-- Stewart O'Nan, _Ocean State_
In _Now Is Not the Time to Panic_ the two main characters have just taken a trip to Memphis and I feel this in my soul:
"And then we were in Memphis. It was kind of run-down, crazy potholes and a lot of litter, but Zeke was so happy. We immediately got a Huey Burger, and it was so good, even more because Zeke kept going, “Mmmm . . . Oh, I missed Huey’s,” like he’d been away in a war or something."
#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday #books #cosobooks
I ANSWERED THE PHONE, AND THERE WAS A WOMAN’S VOICE on the other end, a voice that I didn’t recognize. “Is this Frances Budge?” she asked, and I was certain it was a telemarketer, because nobody called me Frances. In the living room, my seven-year-old daughter had made her own set of drums, including a tin plate for a cymbal, so it was loud as hell in the house, with this ting-bang-ting-ting-bang rhythm she had going on.
Flannery O'Connor's unfinished novel is being published and I don't feel great about this. I get the interest, but maybe if she wasn't ready for the public to see it, it just doesn't need to be seen?
Sophronisba
Joined Oct 2022