selected book pics, 2014-2019
Hey you,
I have like hundreds of book pics on my phone. Also I have photos on my phone dating back to the year 2014. (#doublebrag!!!) Below you’ll find a selection, chosen more or less at random, with the main criteria being “can I remember what book this text is from?” The other criteria was “how many of these pics can I include before my agéd laptop is overwhelmed and forced to depart from this earth?” Please enjoy this, another thoughtful, creative, definitely not lazy, end-of-the-(half-)decade roundup from me,
Your friend,
Smalls
Paper Collage by Georges Perros, trans. John Taylor
What we are is what we think unwittingly and what guides us at the moment when we thought we were lost. Bird thoughts.
I like it when I’ve drunk a little. I espouse the earth more easily. I spin a little. As for the earth, I seem sober. This state of half-drunkenness delights me. Just the right amount of coma. The one I that I vainly sought with human beings, that I no longer hope to find except with myself, a day of rare special music, an accompanying music that will adopt me as the theme.
Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison
Absolutely no phone calls from anyone. I may as well be dead. I’m going to have an early night.
I haven’t heard from my so-called mates for days. Well, since this morning, anyway. I don’t need to practice. I AM lonely and friendless.
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
I started to walk around the room, dazed with pain. I had no idea what to do with myself. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to dispose of my body in space and time, every minute of every day, for the rest of my life.
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
I’m not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I’m not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.
What do I want? I want him to have a job, and be living in your house. I want us to stop selling heaven as the home we don’t get here. I want an afterlife for my anger; I want levitation, perfection, and white wings for it, and I want an afterlife for my question, which is an answer.
But for now the question just hangs in the middle of the air, halfway up the blue sky, the long unbroken mosquito whine of a why, and the only thing that answers is the voice of my father, saying what he always said, saying the same thing your father always said: “Life isn’t fair, nobody ever said it was going to be, who told you that.”
Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison
I take the corner booth at IHOP, where perhaps I can last until two. Thinking about my lean and suntanned son. Weeping into a napkin. Ignoring a short stack and a side of links that, anyway, would be tastier if I ate their depiction on the menu.
I have long thought pharmaceutical drugs were the solution and I was right about that and that’s correct. Still, you have to consider, with even the best prescription drugs, who it is who’s taking them.
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
At some preconscious level she must know what’s coming, because she already feels like she’s been punched in the stomach: there is no air in her lungs, she does not seem able to breathe new air in. Now now, she thinks, not now! But the next thing he is babbling about Robert Graves and Hallowe’en, ‘Wild Horses’ and global warming, a substitute geography teacher who drinks Cosmopolitans—it descends on Halley in a rain, and before she can unpick the sense of it the blood has drained from her face, her fingers buzz with lightness…
And a part of her is thinking of feminism! A part of her is thinking of all the women who fought for their rights, and feeling ashamed for letting them down, because as the story of his infidelity unspools, she feels only an agonizing crumbling, a horrible literal disintegration, as though she’s turned into slush and cascaded all over the floor; he tells her how he doesn’t know how he feels, he doesn’t know what he wants—and all she wants is for him to mop her up and gather her together as she was; she wants to plead and beg and cry so that he’ll unsay what he’s just said, hold her in his arms, tell her that nothing has changed, that everything is all right. But of course that is not what happens.
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
What was helpful: words of a woman I knew years ago, when we happened to be working at the same magazine. Out of the blue, when they were young and newly wed, her husband had made her a widow. One day we were planning our future, she said, the next day he was gone. At first I thought I owed it to him to do everything possible to try to understand. But I came to believe this was wrong. He had chosen silence. His death was a mystery. In the end I decided I should leave him his silence. His mystery.
Bough Down by Karen Green
What to do, what to do.
Unwrap him like the worst Christmas present ever. Wash hands. Hey, I have a spider bite on my fuck-you finger. Is he really with god?
None of this breaks his heart anymore; he no longer cares that he doesn’t care. Oh the dead do fight dirty and for a while I am sick with fear, but then I get bored. The doctor says this is nonlinear, inelegant progress.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half-awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.
It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence… “Seem like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.”
Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
Would you rather fear death or not fear it? That sounds an easy one. But how about this: what if you never gave death another thought, lived your life as if there were no tomorrow (there isn’t, by the way), took your pleasure, did your work, loved your family, and then, as you were finally obliged to admit your own mortality, discovered that this new awareness of the full stop at the end of the sentence meant that the whole preceding story now made no sense at all? That if you’d fully realized to begin with that you were going to die, and what that meant, you would have lived according to quite different principles?
August by Romina Paula, trans. Jennifer Croft
It’s strange, since I’ve been here I almost haven’t thought about the past at all, it’s super weird. I mean the distant past, my distant past. Ours, here, before. It probably has to do with the fact that absolutely everything here is so before that it would just be redundant. Or not, actually maybe not, since most people aren’t actually here anymore, and those who are aren’t recognizable, can’t be identified with themselves, I mean, with what I remember of them. Maybe I didn’t want to think about before because I wouldn’t have been able to handle it: going to scatter your ashes from a bridge just into nothingness, into a landscape, thinking that was you, what you were. I guess a certain distance was necessary in order to go through with that and not completely fall apart, fall in with you. I don’t know… all this silence brings you back, materializes your presence, or your absence, or the fact that you’re not here, your never being here again, so clear, so definitive. Then I think about the afternoons at the Percy or here in your room or in the living/dining room and I kind of waver, I get weak. I realize, I think I realize that I want to leave, but I also know I want to take you with me, and it’s impossible because you’re here, very here, I just now fully understood that. From there, from Buenos Aires, I can miss you very contemplatively, look at you, at us, as though through a glass in a shopwindow, our common/shared past, behind glass, get into a funk about it but at a safe remove, removed by that window pane. There, on the shelf, there’s a weak light that calms things down even further, and gives it a halo of unreality, of something that happened far away and a long time ago, something one can stop back from to observe, observe from afar, something one attends, as though it were something else, far away, removed from the body. But here it isn’t like that, I get here and you’re everywhere.