Reading List

Here are the books I'm currently reading.

[brireadsbooks]

"Lotto looked across to his wife standing in the kitchen. . .She struck him as an artist who'd never found her medium, restlessly testing this and that but unable to find a way to articulate her urgency."

[brireadsbooks]

"When I was driving in the afternoon alone on the Ole Miss campus the wind came up, sudden and violent, and the sky darkened and there was thunder but no rain. I was afraid of a tornado. The suddenness and unpredictability of this shocked me. The weather around here must shape ideas of who and what one is, as it does everywhere."

[brireadsbooks]

"Sunja didn't know what she was supposed to do anymore. It wasn't that she was ungrateful. Mostly, she felt ashamed of her life, her powerlessness. With her sun-browned hands and dirty fingernails, she touched her uncombed hair. She didn't want him to see her this way. It occurred to her that she would never be lovely again."

[brireadsbooks]

"Not once during or following a perilous escapade did it occur to him that the unpredictability of the moment of one's death might provide life with its necessary tension."

[brireadsbooks]

"That's the problem with history, we like to think it's a book--that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you."

[brireadsbooks]

"And maybe that's enough. To have had some love some time. Even if it worked only awhile. It's enough to have had some once and now to live with just pieces of it, and it's all right if you spend what you still have on an old cat or duck, a few friends, your mother. Not everyone is paired on the ark."

[brireadsbooks]

"Sometimes I saw talent everywhere, in everything I read. Other times I thought there was no such thing as a bad idea, just bad execution. This sounds self-serving, but being interested in everything makes you a more effective opportunist--and that's what an editor has to be, a student of unintended consequences."

[brireadsbooks]

"The nurse gave me one of those withering looks that are meant to make you feel as if your thoroughly understandable rage is mere female hysteria."

[brireadsbooks]

"Don't be afraid to answer the questions. You will find endless resources inside yourself. Writing is the act of burning through the fog in your mind. Don't carry the fog out on paper."

[brireadsbooks]

"In her wisdom she kept her secret sealed: no one knew about the change inside of her, the pact she'd made with her heart and the objects around her. She still smiled her beautiful sincere smile, still moved with life and grace, her big dark eyes still shone and smiled upon others."

[brireadsbooks]

"I find many Mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here."

[brireadsbooks]

"I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story."

[brireadsbooks]

"Then he asked me if I wasn't interested in a change of life. I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn't dissatisfied with mine here at all."

[brireadsbooks]

--You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are dead. --How do I find it again? --Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.

[brireadsbooks]

"I told myself, There, now you know, and I felt the calm settling of disappointment as it joined the tide of all the other disappointments, the soft, great ocean of disappointment that comes from living among millions of others who also want things, sometimes the things that you want."

[brireadsbooks]

"What separates me from what I write about is, I suspect, a sense of the absurd that makes it difficult for me to take many things terribly seriously."

[brireadsbooks]

"I'm always mining life for a good story, but all I ever see, I fear, is just my own reflection." I've never been particularly drawn to graphic narratives, but after this one, I'm hooked. Bring me ALL the graphic memoirs!