My goal is to read 4 or 5 books a month, roughly one a week, so to borrow a page from Young's playbook, I'm going to keep track of the books I read every month to keep myself accountable and record my impressions. I used to keep a reading log in my sassy Jordi Labanda blank book, but it's labor-intensive to write out all the quotes I like by hand.
x The Sea, John Banville (B+; beautiful/pompous)
I was plagued by coincidences; long-forgotten things were suddenly remembered; objects turned up that for years had been lost. My life seemed to be parsing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of its secrets and its quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand.x Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, Julie Powell (B; a fun read, if a bit self-indulgent)
The reason people despise liver is that to eat it you must submit to it... you've got to give yourself over to everything that's a little repulsive, a little scary, a little just too much about it... you can never get away from the feral fleshiness of it.x The History of Love, Nicole Krauss (A; I wholeheartedly agree with the Washington Post's review--it's "at least as heartbreaking as it is hilarious")
Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. I lived. It wasn't easy. And yet. I found out how little is unbearable.x The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon (B; charming, sort of pointless)
All the other children at my school are stupid... I'm meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in is coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid... none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.Now if I could only muster up the courage to keep myself just as publicly accountable for my fitness goals... ;-)
3 comments:
haha the fitness goals ... erm maybe one step at a time. you've already written stuff on blog, nice start. =) a big ass mindset shift i've had recently has been: goals are just guidelines, setting out to achieve them is the fun part, whether i hit it or not is not how i'm going to judge myself. weirdness?
Fitness/weight loss as a goal is a funny one because when you dig into my motivations, there's the honorable, respectable, Oprah stuff: strengthen my immune system, improve my self-discipline, boost my energy...
But then there's the stuff that calls me out as a shallow, rather vain human being, like "wow, I need to step up the workout schedule if I want to not look like a heifer next to all these tiny little Asian chicks in Cupertino." And that's a phenomenon in its own right, by the way--I've seen these girls scarf down some crazy fried stuff but still manage to squeeze into a 00.
But I digress.
yup, the history of love definitely deserves an A. sometimes you read a book and it changes you -- reading the history of love made me a better person.
love the new blogging topic -- i look forward to reading the next installment :)
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