I said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not interested,” and started to hang up, but the woman, understanding that I was done with her, tried her best to pull me in. “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers,” she said, her voice rising in pitch, and I froze. I nearly dropped the phone. And together, in harmony, we both completed the phrase, “We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.”
-- Kevin Wilson, _Now Is Not the Time to Panic_
#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?
What a great reason to kill one's wife: "In May 1536 Henry had only been without a living ex-wife for five months and he was in no mood to provide himself with another one, regardless of how much he wanted to marry Jane."
Reading a biography of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's third wife, and growing a little tired of the pains the biographer is taking to assure me that poor doomed Jane was not a great beauty. She was fine! Stop picking on her, she's going to be dead in a hundred pages or so anyway.
even if you spend your whole life believing yourself to be deeply in touch with the ebb and flow, the cycle, the ecosystem as it actually is, you will still have trouble picturing an untouched world. You will still struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around.
-- Becky Chambers, _A Prayer for the Wild-Built_
Even if you fully know that you live in a natural world that existed before you and will continue long after, even if you know that the wilderness is the default state of things, and that nature is not something that only happens in carefully curated enclaves between towns, something that pops up in empty spaces if you ignore them for a while, . . .
A little girl takes her father’s hand and the two of them wander away as her brother begs them to bring him an ice cream cone. Today that sort of beginning feels ominous: what’s going to happen?
https://sophronisba.com/2022/11/26/reading-alice-munro-walker-brothers-cowboy/
Reading a biography of Alice Prin (better known as Kiki) and I am already exhausted by her boyfriend: "Man Ray subscribed to the idea that a romantic relationship was a kind of war, and the winner was whoever revealed less of himself to the other."
This reminds me that as much as I love reading about 1920s Paris, I would have lasted about five minutes in a conversation with the ilk of Man Ray and Ernest Hemingway before I lost all patience with their macho nonsense.
If you ask six different monks the question of which godly domain robot consciousness belongs to, you’ll get seven different answers.
-- Becky Chambers, _A Psalm for the Wild-Built_
The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
-- Barbara Kingsolver, _Demon Copperhead_
I have read ten, and I am outraged on behalf of Maggie O'Farrell and Ian McEwan that neither The Marriage Portrait nor Lessons is on the list. But I'm overjoyed to see Olga Dies Dreaming and I really hope that makes it to the tournament proper.
It's that most wonderful time of the year -- we have the longlist for the Tournament of Books.
"It was said, or so he had been told: Fatima, beloved daughter of the Prophet, had not felt the heat of the fire as she stirred a pot of simmering halva with her hand. She didn't feel the burning sugar climbing her arm, darkening to the color of her skin, such was her grief."
-- Aamina Ahmad, _The Return of Faraz Ali_
@Beerdini I don't think anyone really treated this woman well, except for her partner (whom she didn't treat very well).
@Beerdini Yes, and no. She definitely moved toward the anti-choice side because they seemed more likely to provide for her (both financially and emotionally) but she also seemed to have some genuine misgivings about the lawsuit that made her famous. And she was just a very broken person, and many of the people who seemed to be friends or protectors really just wanted to use her as a sort of mascot.
Reading The Family Roe (which is excellent) and I cannot get over how sad the life of Norma McCorvey ("Jane Roe") was -- she was used by pro-choice feminists and she was used by Operation Rescue and I'm not sure she knew herself how she felt about abortion rights by the end.
"Two decades and change into her beef, Carlotta Mercedes braced herself for audition number five with the New York State Board of Parole."
-- James Hannaham, _Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta_
The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense
-- Ian McEwan, _Lessons_
You can tell my husband is really taking turning 55 well, because he just mixed tequila, absinthe, and pomegranate liqueur.
Sophronisba
Joined Oct 2022