November 2010
32 posts
“Had it not been for books, I doubt whether I should have lived through those dingy years.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Despair
I started a secondary blog →
firstlinelastline.tumblr.com
I’m recording the first and last lines of every book I read.
“Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became.”
—Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
Pronunciation debate
I’m in the middle of a heated argument with a 10-year-old and I need to clear this up: is “penalized” pronounced PEEnalized or PENalized? Or both?
This kid is adamant that he’s right and I’m wrong. He is an extremely smart kid.
But I happen to know that he pronounces Chic-Fil-A “Chic-Fil-UH” because he’s only read it in a book, so this isn’t really his area of expertise.
“Even his first love for her, he thinks, was middle aged.”
—Allegra Goodman, Kaaterskill Falls
the curious case of the dog in the night time....... British authors have such a great sense of humor. I just LOVE that book.
I’m excited to read it! I don’t know anything about it but I’ve seen it everywhere and a coworker recently recommended it to me…
“When the children come up to her to take out their books, Mrs. Schermerhorn examines each selection, and looks each girl in the eye as if to judge whether she is worthy.”
—Allegra Goodman, Kaaterskill Falls
“I had wandered in silence through the gloomy labyrinth that spread out between illusion and truth.”
—
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
This quote kinda sums up the whole book.
“Hatred is like a long, dark shadow. Not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from, in most cases. It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself. The more violently you hack at the other person, the more violently you hack at yourself.”
—Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
My library needs a better search engine
I really don’t understand why my library’s online catalog insists on being absolutely clueless. No matter what title I search for, that title NEVER appears until the second or third page of search results. In fact I can never figure out what the first list of titles has in common with the search term I entered.
Example: I just searched for Oblivion and selected “title” (i.e. not keyword, not author…) — of course if I’d included the author’s name it would have pinpointed the book immediately, but still. You’d think “I want a book CALLED OBLIVION” would be enough information, wouldn’t you?
Here’s the list of search results for Oblivion, in order:
1. The Transformers. The complete first season.
2. Common sense on mutual funds.
3. Genocide and the Bosnian war.
4. Total oblivion, more or less. (Okay, at least this one actually has the word “oblivion” in the title…)
5. Until the last man comes home.
6. Our lot: how real estate came to own us.
7. A slobbering love affair. (This one contains all the LETTERS in oblivion, shuffled around…)
8. Stonehenge.
9. The best American spiritual writing.
10. I shot a man in Reno.
11. Zombie tales.
12. What men still don’t know about women, relationships, and love.
“I started to try to say something optimistic but sensed that I ran the risk of being presumptuous; a man who has no lice on him is not in a very good position to minimize the disagreeableness of lice if he is talking to a man who is crawling with them.”
—Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould’s Secret
Last night instead of reading a million books I watched a billion hours of TV. The apartment is too quiet when it’s just the cat and me! Plus, one of the characters on Parenthood is a kid with Asperger’s, so I can count it as work-related research. And Peter Krause is in it, and his wife reads in bed while guilt-tripping him into having date night.
My boyfriend is out of town
On the agenda:
- Baking something decadent and eating THE WHOLE THING.
- Reading, reading, reading.
- Just generally being a lazy slob.
“I always fear that when I really impose my will on something, the universe is gonna punish me.”
—David Foster Wallace
