Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid, r. Feb. 2024

 Location 277 “That’s like saying Achilles was a great warrior simply because he lived during wartime. Achilles was a great warrior because it was his destiny to be one.”

Location 309 I suspected the problem was that I was always the winner. But I could not for the life of me understand why that made people want to play with me less instead of more.

Location 840 It was okay to win as long as I acted surprised when I did and attributed it to luck. I should never let on how much I wanted to win or, worse, that I believed I deserved to win. And I should never, under any circumstances, admit that I did not believe all of my opponents were just as worthy as I was. The bulk of the commentators…they wanted a woman whose eyes would tear up with gratitude, as if she owed them her victory, as if she owed them everything she had.

Location 1312 It sends a tiny thrill through me, like I’m a teenager again, staring up at a mountain I have yet to scale, each match a step toward the top. It has been so long since I have felt the perfect ache of climbing.

Location 1411 It is maddening, working just as hard for a less impressive result. Playing with this body is like trying to cut a steak with a dull blade.

Location 3726 You could not pay me enough money to go back to being seventeen. When I was seventeen, my talent was all potential and no proof. The world was a giant set of unknowns, barely any past to pull from. I am so grateful, right now, for every match and every win and every loss and every lesson that I have behind me. It feels so good, right now, to be thirty-seven years old. To have figured at least some things out. To know the ground underneath my feet.

Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp, r. Jan. 2024

Page 5 I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved its special power of deflection, its ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings.

Page 41 Over the years I’ve come to think of memories as tiny living things, microorganisms that swim through the brain until they’ve found the right compartment in which to settle down and rest. If the compartment isn’t available, if there’s no proper label for the memory, it takes up residence somewhere else, gets lodged in a corner and gnaws at you periodically, cropping up at odd times, or in dreams.

Page 58 The knowledge that some people can have enough while you never can is the single most compelling piece of evidence for a drinker to suggest that alcoholism is, in fact, a disease, that it has powerful physiological roots, that the alcoholic’s body simply responds differently to liquor than a nonalcoholic’s.

Page 65 Many of us drink in order to take that flight, in order to pour ourselves, literally, into new personalities: uncap the bottle, pop the cork, slide into someone else’s skin. A liquid makeover, from the inside out.

Page 93 I smiled demurely at all the right moments, maintained the right amount of eye contact, cultivated that particular ego-stroking blend of vulnerability, reverence, and detachment.

Page 106 Recovering alcoholics often talk about drinking “the way they wanted to” when they were alone, drinking without the feeling of social restraint they might have had at a party or in a restaurant. There’s something almost childlike about the need, and about the language we use to describe it: wanting our bottles, wanting to crawl into that dark room in our minds and curl up and be alone with our object of security.

Page 115 The rituals, the little routines, that alcoholics use to break the drinking into segments and minimize its visibility are very preoccupying. You buy, you edge home with your large brown bag, you lock the door behind you, and only then can you relax. All that planning takes energy.

Page 240 “Insight,” he said, “is almost always a rearrangement of fact.”

Page 255 I wanted that wine so badly I could taste it, and the only thing that kept me from rushing out to the liquor store to buy a bottle was the understanding that as soon as I drank the first glass, I’d be obsessing about the next one, and the next and the next and the next. I would not drink one glass; I would drink—and obsess about—one bottle, possibly more. That’s the only option at times like that, to think past the first glass, to think it through. You’ve never had “just one drink” in your life.

Page 271 When you question your alcoholism, you say to yourself: If I am an alcoholic, I shouldn’t drink and if I’m not an alcoholic, I don’t need to. That’s a nice piece of logic. You say: People who aren’t alcoholics do not lie in bed at two-thirty in the morning wondering if they’re alcoholics. A good reality check. 

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen, r. Feb. 2023

 Page 68 The group then formed a circle of crosshatched bodies, everyone’s head resting on their neighbor’s belly. There was no obvious point to the exercise except to start laughing as a group and feel your head bouncing on a laughing belly and another head bouncing on yours, but to Becky, positioned between two boys she’d never spoken to, it seemed strange that she’d spent her life surrounded by bellies, all of them as familiar to their owners as her own belly was to her, all of them potentially touchable, and yet they were almost never touched. Strange that a possibility constantly present was so seldom acted on. She was sorry when the exercise ended.

Page 101 He now saw that his supposed self-discipline, the outstanding study habits his parents and his teachers had always praised, had not been discipline at all. He’d excelled at school because he’d enjoyed learning things, not because he had superior willpower. As soon as Sharon introduced him to more intense forms of pleasure, he discovered how hopelessly undeveloped the muscles of his will really were.

Page 148 A breeze from the east kept the marine layer offshore, and the sun’s downward progress was made tolerable, less alarmingly a reminder of life escaping from her, by the timeless repetition of the waves, their breathlike breaking on the wide, flat beach.

Page 218 When Ambrose finally accepted, and lingered at the table after the kids had been excused, he paid so much attention to Marion that Russ felt uneasy about the scant attention he’d lately given her himself. Marion had never been a flirt, but she seemed enjoyably energized by Ambrose’s intensity. After he left, Russ was surprised to hear she hadn’t liked him. “That glower of his,” she said. “It’s like a mind-control trick he picked up somewhere and fell in love with. It’s a car salesman’s trick—making people afraid they don’t have your approval. They’ll do anything to get it, and they never stop to wonder why they even want it.”

Page 254 “Exactly,” Perry said. “How do I know if I’m really being good or if I’m just pursuing a sinful advantage?” “The answer, I would say, is by listening to your heart. Only your heart can tell you what your true motive is—whether it partakes of Christ. I think my position is similar to Rabbi Meyer’s. The reason we need faith—in our case, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ—is that it gives us a rock-solid basis for evaluating our actions. Only through faith in the perfection of our Savior, only by comparing our actions to his example, only by experiencing his living presence in our hearts, can we hope to be forgiven for the more selfish thoughts we might have. Only faith in Christ redeems us. Without him, we’re lost in a sea of second-guessing our motives.”

Page 258 Outside First Reformed, three Crossroads sophomores were shoveling snow with a zeal that suggested their work was voluntary.

Page 269 The public library was a tall-windowed brick building, built in the twenties and seated on a lawn enclosed by dog-proof hedges. It stayed open until nine on weeknights, but it was desolate at the dinner hour, a single librarian holding down the circulation desk amid the silence of books waiting to be wanted.

Page 325 He knew better than to expect a direct response. Prayer was an inflection of the soul in God’s direction, an inner movement. God’s answer, if it came at all, would seem to him his own idea. The thing to do was wait quietly and make himself receptive to it.

Page 360 Where Frances’s hair, even flattened by the hunting cap, had flattered her, each of the hairstyles that Marion had tried in recent years had been wrong in a different way, too short or too long, each serving to accentuate the redness of her skin, the thickening of her neck, the pinching of her eyes by adipose and insomnia. He knew it was unfair of him to care. It was unfair that his eye should be more painfully affronted by his wife than by the many objectively worse-looking women in New Prospect. It was unfair to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only to now feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty. But he couldn’t help blaming her, too, because her unattractiveness advertised unhappiness. Sometimes, when she looked especially dumpy at a church dinner, he sensed a satisfaction in being unsightly to him, a wish to make him suffer along with her for what he and their marriage had done to her, but most of the time her unhappiness excluded him. Hating her looks was yet another of the jobs she quietly and capably took on for him. Was it any wonder he was lonely in his marriage?

Page 383 Standing at the console, Russ was plunged into the hissing, low-fidelity world from which Robert Johnson was singing. He’d never felt more pierced by the beauty of the blues, the painful sublimity of Johnson’s voice, but also never more damned by it. Wherever Johnson was singing from, Russ could never hope to get there. He was an outsider, a latter-day parasite—a fraud. It came to him that all white people were frauds, a race of parasitic wraith-people, and none more so than he. To have loaned Frances his records, imagining that some particle of authenticity might adhere to him and redeem him, was the pinnacle of fraudulence.

Page 394 “Everything you say is bullshit. You’re only running away because you’re too chicken to face the goodness in your heart, too chicken to take responsibility. I don’t believe that disengaging from the world is going to make you happy. But if that’s the miserable life you want, we don’t need you in the circle.

Page 402 Echoes of Biff Allard’s bongo drums were bouncing off the bank across the street, cigarette smoke and Frisbees in the air, a black dog in a bandanna hurdling guitar cases and hand luggage, kids dashing in and out of the church on missions of adolescent urgency, mothers lingering to embarrass long-haired sons with loving injunctions, the three bus drivers and the swing driver conferring over a road atlas,

Page 449 The shadow wasn’t quite doubt and it wasn’t quite guilt. It was more a sense of what he’d lost in gaining Marion. He no longer belonged in Lesser Hebron, but he was still haunted by it. He found himself missing his mother’s little farm, his grandfather’s shop, the eternity in the sameness of the days there, the rightness of a community radically organized around the Word.

Page 467 He’d assumed he would find people here, maybe Clyde himself, but there was nothing. No grass, no garden, no animals, only gnarled junipers and dead cottonwoods, their broken limbs barkless and silvery. In his mind, the farmstead had remained unchanged, alive with Keith and his extended family, their chickens and goats. To see what time had done to it was to become aware of how old he was.

Page 480 In the beginning, there was only a speck of dark matter in a universe of light, a floater in the eye of God. It was to floaters that Perry owed his discovery, as a boy, that his vision wasn’t a direct revelation of the world but an artifact of two spherical organs in his head.

Page 513 Daffodils in the yard, Becky steaming up the bathroom, Russ buffing his shoes for a funeral. It was worth it, after all, to have aged thirty years. It was worth it to have taken the arduous steps to arrive in Bradley’s house, because the reward was clarity: God had given her a way of being. God had given her four children, a role she was skilled at playing, a husband who shared her faith. With Bradley, there had really only ever been fucking.

Page 518 She read all the way to Phoenix and then, on a second plane, all the way to Albuquerque. She didn’t quite finish the book, but it didn’t matter. The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

Page 519 Even his sharpness was sweet to her. She and Bradley had never come close to being sharp with each other. It required long years of togetherness.

Page 548 Almost everything in life was vanity—success a vanity, privilege a vanity, Europe a vanity, beauty a vanity. When you stripped away the vanity and stood alone before God, what was left? Only loving your neighbor as yourself. Only worshiping the Lord, Sunday after Sunday. Even if you lived for eighty years, the duration of a life was infinitesimal, your eighty years of Sundays were over in a blink. Life had no length; only in depth was there salvation.

Page 574 Being the nonbeliever among believers was even lonelier than being the gringo in Tres Fuentes. A gringo was different only on the surface and could look for common ground. Science and delusion had no ground in common.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, r. Jan. 2024

 Page 68 There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

Page 73 Marx loved college theater. It wasn’t so much being on stage that he loved, but the productions themselves. He loved the intimacy of being in a tight group of people who had come together, miraculously, for a brief period in time, for the purpose of making art.

Page 75 When Sam had described the relationship between Marx and his father, he had said it was fraught, that Watanabe-san was demanding and sometimes even demeaning to Marx. Sadie saw no evidence of that. She found Marx’s father to be bright, interesting, and engaged. Other people’s parents are often a delight.

Page 87 As far as Sadie knew, Marx was a good-looking rich kid with a wide range of interests and very few skills. At Crossroads, where she’d gone to high school, half of her male classmates had been Marxes.

Page 103 Marx usually enjoyed the experience of making love to an ex, and this evening was no exception. It was interesting to note the way your body had changed and how their body had changed in the time since you’d last been intimate. There was a pleasant Weltschmerz that came over him. It was the nostalgia one experienced when visiting an old school and finding that the desks were so much smaller than in one’s memory.

Page 105 They were tired, but it was an honest tiredness, the kind that comes when you know you have put everything you have into a project.

Page 219 “So, what do I do?” she asked. “You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.”

Page 227 “I loved being a student actor. I was fully devoted to it, and now I’m not. I think if I’d become a professional, I would likely have fallen out of love with it anyway. It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.” “Are you saying I get to quit making games?” “No,” Marx said. “You’re stuck. You’re doing this forever.”

Page 234 Sadie had often reflected that sex and video games had a great deal in common. There were certain objectives that needed to be met. There were certain rules that shouldn’t be broken. There was a correct combination of movements—button mashes, joystick pivots, keystrokes, commands—that made the whole thing work or not work. There was a pleasure to knowing you had played the game correctly and a release that came when you reached the next level. To be good at sex was to be good at the game of sex.

Page 261 “And is the point of everything we do to reach as broad an audience as possible? Is that the only reason to do anything? I’d like to know.” “It is, if we’re going to spend millions of dollars on it. Not to mention, the limited time of our very finite lives.”

Page 286 Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?

Page 300 Video games don’t make people violent, but maybe they falsely give you the idea that you can be a hero.

Page 310 Once, when he was fifteen—just old enough to acknowledge the inner lives of others beyond himself;

Page 344 “I suppose we drink and we smoke for the same reasons it is done elsewhere. We must fill our infinite days with something.”

Page 378 How to explain to Destiny that the thing that made her work leap forward in 1996 was that she had been a dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity? Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.

Page 381 She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.

Page 382 Sadie knew that she herself had not become a person until recently. It was unreasonable to expect a child to emerge whole cloth. Naomi was a pencil sketch of a person who, at some point, would be a fully 3D character.

Page 392 “You know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking how easy it was to make that first Ichigo. We were like machines then—this, this, this, this. It’s so easy to make a hit when you’re young and you don’t know anything.”

Page 393 This generation doesn’t hide anything from anyone. My class talks a lot about their traumas. And how their traumas inform their games. They, honest to God, think their traumas are the most interesting thing about them.

Sun House by David James Duncan, r. Oct. 2023

p. 30 Risa never connected this tribe to her own amiability, diplomacy, strategic withdrawals, radiant energy, crazy grin, or anything of the sort. She believed she'd just lucked into an unusually cool circle of friends. But though many people spend energy in search of some sort of calm and stable center, a very few people simply are such centers. Without realizing it, Risa had become one of these rare ones, and as a result was encircled by friends in almost every milieu she frequented.

p. 114 Glancing from her poems to his journal, a pleasing thought occurred to Lorilee. She spoke it. "You know, you're a poet yourself, Trey. Your body's your pen. The mountains are your paper. Free-climbing vertical walls, you leave behind the lines your body traveled. And yeah, those lines are invisible once you come down off the wall. But I'll bet they've entered you. I'll bet those lines stay inside your mind and body the way a good mountain song or poem stays in my instruments and me. So who cares if others can't see what you wrote up there? It's in you."

p. 136 Trey looked lost. She tried to coax him. "The reason Snyder says 'The mountains are your mind' is that every mountain's true nature is alive and complete for all eternity, Trey. And so is our true nature. We have always been one with the mountains. But it's not climbing them that makes this so. It's being free of illusions. It's a disappearing of ego...

p. 189 ...which brings me to why I prefer high-mountain backpacking to skiing. In backpacking, the suffering endured as you climb sensitizes you to the gorgeousness when you arrive on high, and your elation lasts and lasts. In skiing, a mechanical lift crammed with party-hardies ratchets you to elevation in minutes, only to turn around and, in seconds, undo all the elevation gain you didn't suffer to achieve, so that way too soon you're DOWN and the only cure for elation deflation is to get back in the party-hardy line, pay the piper, ratchety-ratchet back up, and bouncy-bounce down again, up, down, up, down, wanka wanka wanka.

p. 229 "It also seems you are taught, you priests, to defend your God, but never to blame Him. This is a mistake. When we blame God, two things happen. On, He becomes present. He is now there with the sufferer, taking blame. And two, why not blame God? He's God. He can take all the blame there is! Go ahead! Blame Him! It keeps Him with you!"

p. 280 "Anna often talks of rising acidity in the oceans. But I wonder about our acidity? It's risen too. And how could it not? The rich own everything, including our token democracy, banks, and corporations, we're led by political half-truths and lobbyists, not leaders, and to try to understand our world we watch news-flavored propaganda delivered in meaningless soundbytes. But doesn't our acidity, like the oceans', cause delicate things to die out in us? I feel as if things as fine as coral reefs are vanishing from people. Things like a general kindness. Quiet sensitivity. Sincerity."

p. 308 Risa waited till she was calm enough not to hurl Julian's scathing tone back in his face. "What I experience," she said quietly, "is a feeling of arrogance if I pretend that spiritual giants like the Buddha and Jesus and Krishna don't know more about such matters than I do. Would you contradict Beethoven if he shared secrets about composing symphonies, or diss Martina Navratilova's secrets about crushing top-spin serves, because what they said was beyond your experience? It's common sense to believe it when Buddha, Krishna, and Jesus in the Apocrypha all tell us reincarnation is the way of it. That's not teatime chitchat. My concepts of mind and soul are based on truths that realized beings bequeath humanity to free us from illusion."

p. 340 "You didn't ask for my two cents but here they are: the only way you won't be disappointed with your life is by finding something great to do with it. That's the blessing and curse of being great yourself."

p. 394 On a high peak in the Alps, a climber named Emile Javelle once looked out over the world and was swallowed alive by a vastness that overwhelmed him. Years passed before he could even speak of it. When he did, he said that any philosophy, religion, or science that tells us what the universe is, or what our place and purpose here are, is a blindfold, not a seeing. 'The further the vision of our eye extends,' Javelle said, 'the greater the mystery becomes.'"

p. 456 It will be the task of our generation not to seek great things, but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that it is the only thing we can carry as a prize from the burning building. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer

p. 469 Here in this body is a dwelling place. Within the dwelling place is a small space. What is there in this space that we should seek to perceive?

p. 495 In all but certain rare kinds of light – blue June dusk; golden day in October; midwinter moonlight amid fresh snowfall – the connecting thread won't even be visible.

p. 512 "I like retired traces like this," Lou said as he ratcheted along. "Keep cows an' vehicles off a track a few years, give it a mow now an' again, an' it takes on a gentleness. We'll reach that school feelin' better'n if we drove up. On foot a fella actually arrives."

p. 583 Unlike humans, fish are not ignorant of each other's intentions.

p. 707 The chronological presumption that we're "progressing into a better future" has not just blinded humans to the fullness of the moment, it's put the very survival of life on Earth in doubt.

p. 716 "'Silence is the tribute we pay to holiness,'" Kale whispered, "'We slip off words when we enter a sacred place just as we slip off shoes.'" [– Pico Iyer]

The Fool's Progress by Edward Abbey, r. Jun. 2023

 p. 7 No one has a right to complain about life because no one is compelled to endure it.

p. 31 She bought the uniform: the Nike shoes, the flimsy erotic Adidas track shorts, the heavy-duty reinforced breast sling, the long-billed sunshade, the AM/FM Walkman radio headset, and commenced to laboring up and down the streets with Eric Clapton and James Taylor bawling in her ears, the jogger's look of smug pain and spiritual fortitude on her face. Favoring her sore foot, she gulped the dust and grime and noxious gases of the passing motor traffic.

p. 103 Onward, through the scrubby woods and past a solitary winter-shaggy horse in a huge and lonely field. The field looks lonely, not the horse. Why is that?

p. 150 Nobody paid [his dad] any attention and he knew it and the knowledge made him angry and lonely and sick in his heart. Joe Lightcap was not a philosopher; he took ideas seriously.

p. 181 There's two ways to be rich: (1) sweat and scheme and grovel for money and never get it anyhow; or (2) live the simple life. Sit down.

p. 258 What is the perfect robot anyhow but a properly processed human being? a soundly pussywhipped American male?

p. 301 Very deep is the well of the past. Shall we not call it – bottomless? What is our history but a vivid and continuous dream? We skim over the roadway bearing northeast to Kansas, me and my mortal dog, and the infinite dimensions of the recent past – a mere one century – make the brain giddy, the mind reel, the heart to swoon.

p. 329 Yes, it was a good sweet job. Old Gibbsie was a good superintendent. The United States government was a government. Henry Lightcap had found his niche, his slot, his cranny, his refuge in the vast vermiculate edifice of the American socioeconomy. And he kept it too, off and on, for the next fifteen years, working five, six months a year in various national parks and national forests, through national chaos and international calamity. Brother Will might disapprove, thinking such work unworthy of a full-grown man, little better than welfare, but for Henry Lightcap – a "fool-grown man," as he liked to explain, such a part-time occupation made the ideal vocation. Henry Lightcap needed those half years free. Why? For what? For the sake of freedom itself, he told his inner critic. Liberty like virtue is its own reward, the only reward it's likely to get. And for the sake of simplicity – la vie philosophique.

p. 334 To be sexually attractive is to be perpetually on guard. A pretty girl lives in a state of constant siege. And how we loved it-the tension, the conflict, the promise of delight.

p. 435 ... and what did all that laborious reading gain him? Couldn't say. He remembered best not the development of character or the unraveling of plot or the structure of an argument – philosophy is an art form, not a science – but simply the quality of the author's mind. That part remained and by that standard alone he finally judged his author and either threw the book aside or read it through and searched out more by the same writer. And that drive also, the mania to know and understand, it too waned somewhat with the passing of years, until he found himself again alone...

p. 481 Again Henry gazed out the window. A swirl of little pale birds, like confetti, like a net of lace, exfoliated from the sky and draped themselves upon an Aleppo pine. Water sprinklers jetted in explosive circles, drenching the hospital lawns. Just plain folks walked about. The world continued, bland and blasé, while catastrophe opened beneath the one who cared.

The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher, r. May 2023