worth

I picked up the book from the library after reading the Book Riot article , "Why Do You Always Assign Books with Ghost Babies?". I had originally placed the short story books on hold, and checked out Beloved, but pushed the short stories out to "maybe someday" and started in on Beloved.

This is the first Toni Morrison book I have read.

It was a punch in the gut.

It was a punch in the gut in ways that I wasn't expecting. The dominant theme of slavery was the expected punch in the gut. Except my expectations weren't strong enough.

People can be horrible to each other, outright physically and more subtly mentally and emotionally. It is easy in the day-to-day flow of life not to understand the scale of these horrors, both culturally but also individually. That I understood the why of Sethe's actions after her 28th day of freedom was another punch, her story being fiction or not.

With most books, I like to highlight the quotes that are meaningful to me. I quickly realized that I might have to quote 40% of the book if I did it with this one. Which, without the story, seemed... wrong. So, I didn't except for a few that seemed good advice to me in my current state of anxiety.

The book is, of course worth reading. It won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is an incredible book. It is a sad book. It is a punch in the gut book (and if it doesn't punch you in the gut, you're an asshat). I don't recommend reading it when depressed, however. Or when suffering a recent loss. Read it when you're balanced, or surrounded by classmates, or loved ones who will discuss the book with you. Or maybe watch the movie. I'll add it to my movies-to-watch list now.

When I started reading this book, I became very excited at its potential to teach me about the passions for hockey that The Art of Fielding taught me about baseball. The beginning of the book was about the passion for the sport, how it can overwhelm you, how great players are obsessive and can never really leave. The book whispers about strength and weakness of the athletes, about coaches and how their decisions can make or break a player, about how a team is more than the sum of its players.

While the book is heavy-handedly, overwhelmingly full of quotable parts, beautiful commentaries about human nature and becoming a better person, I was all-in, enthusiastically looking forward to recommending this book to everyone.

And then the act of violence that is the narrative conflict of the book happens.

Suddenly, the book becomes difficult to read. I didn't read it more slowly, I did read it less enthusiastically. And that's fine. The book isn't REALLY about hockey, it is about human nature. It is about who we believe, about being a better person, about becoming more than we were by our actions.

It's a good book, worth reading.

“Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”
Page 3

He was the one who saw the makings of a brilliant coach when everyone else saw a failed player.
Page 33

There are two things that are particularly good at reminding us how old we are: children and sports.
Page 37

In the Susan Slack, Kristin asked for dystopian book recommendations. Rob immediately responded, "American War." He responded emphatically, "American War." I added it to my library hold list, not expecting it to drop into my borrowed list until next year. Well, it dropped, and I read it, and wow. This book is good.

The book tells the tale of Serat growing up through the end of the second American Civil War. The war triggered on the ban of gasoline and oil, with the South saying, "Nope." We see, as in most dystopian novels, how people can be awful to each other. What makes this book particularly difficult to read is that we can see our current culture, political environment, and temperament, what we have right now, become this world. We are in the declining years of the American Empire. Other empires will rise after its fail. This book gives the tale of a fictional and completely plausible version.

This book is worth reading, even if you don't really like dystopian fictions. Be in a place where death is bearable, though, it's a rough read.

"Bury me in the same grave because I can’t go on alone. Life’s not worth living alone."
Location 499

This was in the days before — before Julia Templestowe became the rebel South’s first martyr, its first killer, the patron saint of its war.

It is often forgotten: There’s always a before.
Location 579

If you lived in the South during that war, maybe you were never forced from your home at gunpoint, but you knew someone who was. Maybe you didn’t lose a loved one when the Birds came and rained down death with no rhyme or reason, but you knew someone who had.

I like this book. I have no idea where I found this book, but I would guess someone recommended it to me via BookRiot on some new release book list, because I've given up reading the classics for the moment, and going with whatever post-apocalyptic universe some author wants to provide.

And I got it.

The crazy part of this book was its setting in Edinburgh. I was in Edinburgh last month! I really like Edinburgh, and I keep hoping to find Troggie, three years later.

Anyway, it's lots of fun to be able to imagine the exact place where parts of the book are happening, even the part where "Yes, there were three strip clubs on the corner" and I stayed in a hotel all of 40 meters from that corner.

The story, oh boy, the story is great. The transformation of Ed, the main character, from the soft, modern man to the self-sufficient one at the end is the epitome of the hero's journey.

I enjoyed the book. I recommend it, it is worth reading if you like post-apocalyptic survival tales.

The line between any two points in your life is liable to be strange and unfathomable, a tangle of chance and tedium. But some points seem to have clearer connections, even ones that are far from each other, as if they have a direct line that bypasses the normal run of time.
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I believe what I believe to make life less terrifying. That’s all beliefs are: stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid. Beliefs have very little to do with the truth.
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