Reading Journal

I have got to start spending more time reading!

I need to finish reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles in 2 months and I have about 200 pages left. I also need to finish Coming of Age in Mississppi or a True in order to start my annual holiday re-read of O! Pioneers.

Old: Tess
New: Wimpy Kid (finished in less than 2 days)
Random: Mississippi
True: Something short
Old: O! Pioneers

If I can't find something short and true on my shelves, I'll hit up Half Price. Which I can do since I recently purged my shelves of books with language or themes I wouldn't be comfortable discussing with the prophet Thomas S. Monson. I only had problems with one: Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried." I read it twice in college and I think once after. It has some pretty amazing quotes in it, and it really goes in depth about soldier's experiences in and after Vietnam. So of course there's vulgarity and lewdness. So I skimmed it and wrote down some of my most favorite quotes.

I'll share some of those here.

p. 20 "They were afraid of dying, but they were even more afraid to show it....They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die....They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to."

p. 23 "You couldn't burn the blame."

p. 32 "...as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening."

p. 34 "You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present."

p. 36 "What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end."

p. 38 "Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes, remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."

p. 157 "Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, lie clearing the throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication, it was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me, how I'd allowed myself to get dragged into a wrong war, all the mistakes I'd made, all the terrible things I'd seen and done."
p. 158 "By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. you make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened...and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain."

p. 179, the definition of metafiction, "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."

p. 180 "What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again."

p. 192 "When you're afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends."

p. 225 "But this too is true: stories can save us....in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world."