couldreads

Post-Birthday World: Quotes that stuck with me

Some great passages from The Post-Birthday World, which was excellent.

“The feeling was not of being attractive precisely, but rather of not having to entertain. It was breathtaking: to be ensconced in another person’s company, yet to be relieved of the relentless minute-by-minute obligation to redeem one’s existence–for there is some sense in which socially we are all on the Late Show, grinning, throwing off nervous witticisms, and crossing our legs, as a big hook behind the curtains lurks in the wings.”

“It was really rather wretched that you couldn’t will yourself to fall in love, for the very effort can keep falling at bay. Nor could you will yourself to stay that way. Least of all could you will yourself NOT to fall in love, for thus far whatever meager resistance she had put up had only made the compulsion more intense. So you were perpetually tyrannized by a feeling that came and went as it pleased, like a cat with its own pet door. How much more agreeable, if love were something that you stirred up from a reliable recipe, or elected, however perversely, to pour down the drain. Still, there was nothing for it. The popular expression notwithstanding, love was not something you made. Nor could you dispose of the stuff once manifested because it was inconvenient, or even because it was wicked, and ruining your life, and, by the by, someone else’s.”

A f@*k in the road

A few sentences into The Post-Birthday World, I stopped to watch some TV. Sometimes you just know a book is going to suck you in, and I figured it’d be in my best interest to get the DVR to a manageable capacity so it’d be able to withstand a few days without me.

Sure enough, the DVR is now rocking 82% and I’m too emotionally wrecked to deal with it after 500 pages in the mind of Lionel Shriver. The author of We Need to Talk About Kevin—which I LOVED, despite its rather tragic subject matter—has such an on-point grasp of the reality of human existence that I never seem to finish her novels particularly happy or sad, so much as resigned to the fact that all situations in life have good and bad, and few offer definitive answers or conclusions.

The Fault in Our Stars: Favorite quotes

The Fault in Ours Stars was, as a whole, wonderfully written (read my glowing review) but a handful of passages were even more awesome than the rest. Unfortunately some didn’t make the cut here—I am not one to disclose important plot points by way of citation—but here are a few good ones.

“Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)”
“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
“‘How many people do you think have ever died?’
‘I happen to know the answer to that question,’ he said. ‘There are seven billion living people, and about ninety-eight billion dead people.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I’d thought that maybe since the population growth had been so fast, there were more people alive than all the dead combined.
‘There are about fourteen dead people for every living person,’ he said. ‘I did some research on this several years ago. I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?’
‘And there are?’
‘Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we’re disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare, and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about.'”

From 9/11 to kids with cancer

Advance apologies if my syntax and otherwise generally awesome writing skills are off today: I’m in Day 3 of Operation Don’t Be a Fatty, which is the code name I’ve given my 345th attempt to lose weight this year. Whilst daydreaming about bagels and buckets of cream cheese, I’m finding it harder than usual to sound insightful.

What does ODBAF entail, you ask? (Or didn’t ask, but it’s my blog and I do what I want.) Give or take a few other minor changes (like alternating sides of the couch so as to more evenly distribute my butt indent) it primarily involves a) going to the gym more than once a year b) eating less candy and c) not always choosing the gnocchi at Italian restaurants. Just sometimes.

Though this is, as I mentioned, the umpteenth time I’ve gone down this path, it is not without reason that I bring up my renewed interest in health here, on a blog ostensibly about books. After finishing The Fault in Our Stars over the weekend, which focuses primarily on the lives of two teenagers with cancer, I came into Monday feeling particularly shitty about my inability to take care of my perfectly functional 26-year-old body.

Extremely sad & incredibly morose

So I got a lot of reading done this weekend. Like kind of an absurd amount. And even though I could totally space these reviews out over the next few weeks, affording myself some much-needed time to, I don’t know, go outdoors or socialize with other human beings, instead I’m just going to blow it all this week and feel like an idiot come June. Because that’s how I roll.

Up until about last year, I actually had no idea that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ELAIC) was a novel about September 11. Which is fitting since up until last week I had never sat down and watched 9/11 footage, or listened to the recently released audio of air traffic controllers and others who were on the planes. I may be a sick voyeur when it comes to reality shows and celebrity gossip, but plugging in my headphones to hear the dying words of some unsuspecting flight attendant was not my idea of a productive afternoon.

Unfortunately, after reading ELAIC, I felt it was time to bite the bullet. The novel is so wrapped around the tragedy of that day, and the loss of an individual (though fictional) life in it, that it felt weird to not relive the moment in reality, especially since I had never really done so. Naturally, I saw the towers fall in 2001—though I can’t say my 11th-grade self had any real idea of the event’s impact—but afterwards, with the exception of unavoidable news broadcasts and one overblown Oliver Stone movie, I didn’t pursue September 11. There was no need to: Not a week goes by that the tragedy isn’t invoked in some political conversation or happenstance facet of New York City life—bag checks on the subway, liquids refused from air travel, construction delays in lower Manhattan. To spend even a minute proactively pursuing the now decade-old news broadcasts or man-on-the-street footage felt unnecessary, masochistic even.