troisoiseaux

Re-read The Sentence, which is definitely my favorite book by Louise Erdrich and, really, one of my favorite books, full stop. It's a book about people who love books; about ghosts, Indigenous identity, colonialism, trauma, and the hell year that was 2020 (in Minneapolis, no less); about small joys and how to live through tragedy on a macro and micro scale when you still have to go to work in the morning.

I found myself underlining quotes, this time, which I am very rarely moved to do:

"I suddenly felt—though I was bereft about my tree—overjoyed to be sitting there, in the crown of a 102-year-old elm, drinking not just coffee, but an Ethiopian coffee Penstemon had given to me, claiming its scent was dirt made of flowers."

"It had gotten so I could see through books—the little ruses, the hooks, the setup in the beginning, the looming weight of a tragic ending, the way at the last page the author could whisk out the carpet of sorrow and restore a favorite character. I needed the writing to have a certain mineral density."

"Sometimes I wanted to weep when I detected both talent and abused talent in a writer. The life of the writer cannot help but haunt the narrative. [. . .] Talent abused sometimes beams off the page with generous humility."

"[Short Perfect Novels] are books that knock you sideways in around 200 pages. Between the covers there exists a complete world. The story is unforgettably peopled and nothing is extraneous. Reading one of these books takes only an hour or two but leaves a lifetime imprint."

"I have a dinosaur heart, cold, massive, indestructible, a thick meaty red. And I have a glass heart, tiny and pink, that can be shattered. The glass heart belongs to Pollux. There was a ping. To my surprise, it had developed a minute crack, nearly invisible. But it was there, and it hurt."

...

Reading Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen, a 1931 social history of 1919-1929 in the U.S., which is obviously fascinating. I've read the first four chapters: "Back to Normalcy", on the end of WWI and Wilson's failures vis-a-vis the League of Nations; "The Big Red Scare," on the anti-Bolshevik hysteria of 1919-20 and rise of the KKK; "America Convalescent," on the invention and popularity of radio, tabloids, and sports fandom; and "The Revolution in Manners and Morals," about changes in women's rights, women's fashion, and sexual mores. Oh, and the prologue, which charmingly describes a day in the life of Mr. and Mrs. Smith of "Cleveland or Boston or Seattle or Baltimore—it hardly matters which—" in May 1919, as a way of illustrating the changes that a decade had brought. Next up: the scandals of the Harding administration!

Recently picked back up on The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett, which I started back in May and then accidentally abandoned halfway through. The thing about this book is that absolutely every single character has their own personal agenda and Dunnett is only now tipping her hand about the details of most of them, which contributed to a level of narrative ambiguity that I initially found kind of frustrating but it's ultimately paying off very well.