Finished

I finished Travels With Charley the other day. Now I'm just sticking with Eat, Pray, Love, though I'll probably finish that this weekend. I might start another one after that, but I have an acting scene I have to memorize so the extra reading might fall by the wayside a little bit. Then again, if it's nice out this weekend, I might make a trek to the library...Maybe find the new Dan Brown book. YEAH!

Anyway, surprisingly, I don't recall really coming across any quotes that really stood out to me in TWC. It seems strange, it was a very beautiful, descriptive book about traveling across the country, but for some reason, there wasn't a lot that I came across and thought, I really need to write that down. There was this one quote I marked, he had just been talking to an actor and said this of the theatre:

"So it went on--a profession older than writing and one that will probably survive when the written word has disappeared. And all the sterile wonders of movies and television and radio will fail to wipe it out--a living man in communication with a living audience."

It was an enjoyable read. I wish I could say more about it than that, but really it was enjoyable. The writing was great, of course, but I can't say I was blown away by it. It was nice.

I'll let you know if anything new comes along this weekend.

Seriously changing gears...

I finished Home yesterday afternoon. I had struggled through it a bit, but I was very pleased with the end. It made the struggle worth it and somehow when it started to wind down, I finally started to gain some deeper understanding of what the book was trying to say.

Here are some quotes I wrote down since last time:

"I am hungry in general. It is the particulars that discourage me." (198)

"How to announce the return of comfort and well being except by cooking something fragrant. That's what her mother always did." (252) - This quote and other parts of the book where food was discussed make me want to cook more and provide that kind of comfort.

"You can hate thoughts. That's interesting. I hate most of my thoughts." (287)

"... the table and sideboard with their leonine legs and belligerently clawed feet, like some ill-considered, doiley-infested species of which they were the last survivors." (299)

"His hair had been brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming." (304)

"If Jack had been here, he'd have felt that terrible shock of joy- no, worse than joy, peace- that floods in like blood pushing into a limb that has been starved of it, like wild rescue, painful and wonderful and humbling- humiliating as she remembered it becasue she had been so helpless against it." (322)

********

The changing gears refers to going from the above book to my next book, which is The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer. When I went to the library the other day, none of the books I was looking for on my list were in and so I started to browse. I recognized this title and then remembered it was a book from the Top 100 list. It is a war novel set in the South Pacific during World War II. Definitely a change of scenery from Home, which is about coming back to a home in Gilead, Iowa.

1986 REPRESENT

Pulitzer Prize in Fiction: Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

Nobel Prize for Literature: Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)

I swear I've read something by Wole Soyinka. I definitely know the name. Maybe I read one of his plays...or at least learned about him in some theatre class somewhere along the way.

Books of note:

• The Old Devils, Kingsley Amis
• The Progress of Love, Alice Munro
  
• A Summer to Memphis, Peter Taylor
  

1963 (Beth)

Note from the Editor: Christie--that photo just cracks me up! I remember (I think)Mammie bought the tee shirt. With U.J.'s influence perhaps??

Now for the entries for 1963. Beth--there will be a quiz.

Nobel Prize for Literature: Georgio Seferis
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: The Reivers by William Faulkner

Other books of note:

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
73 Poems, ee cummings
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
V, Thomas Pynchon
The Centaur, John Updike
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

and last but by no means least: Happiness is a Warm Puppy by Charles M. Schultz

1943 (Guess Who?)

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair

No Nobel Prize for Literature awarded in 1943---the war perhaps?

Popular books published in 1943:

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
Mere Christianity, CS Lewis
These Happy Golden Years (#8 in Little House series), Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Razor's Edge, W. Somerset Maugham

Who's Next?

Yep, a fun idea...

Cool idea, Mom! Here are my book related entries for 1984:

Pulitzer Prize, Fiction: Ironweed by William Kennedy

Nobel Prize for Literature: Jaroslav Seifert (Czechoslovakia)

Books: Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner and Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie

I'm going to add Ironweed and the books of note to my reading list. As for Seifert, I'm going to look up some of his poetry online. Here's something I found already (from "Dance of Girls Chemises"):

Love,

which we inhale and feed on,

disenchanted,

love that our dreams are keyed on,

love,

that dogs our rise and fall:

nothing

yet the sum of all.

An aside: the album of the year, "Thriller," may explain some things...

Thanks for the suggestion Mom! Can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with!

A fun idea....(maybe).....1962

Darnelle sent me this cool e-mail where you click through to find out the history for the year you were born. Included in the information: Who won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Nobel Prize, bestsellers, etc. I thought I would share the ones from the year I was born, 1962:

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O'Connor
Nobel Prize for Literature: John Steinbeck

Books of Note:
Another Country, James Baldwin
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
In the Clearing, Robert Frost
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Gunter Grass
The Colossus and Other Poems, Sylvia Plath
All My Pretty Ones, Anne Sexton

http://www.infoplease.com/year/1962.html

Not a happy year, 1962. I think the books truly reflect the turmoil of the time. If you want to see your books--click through and change the year OR let me know the year you were born and I will post for you. The next challenge? Actually reading the books!

Quotes

This is a neat topic and I'm enjoying the discussion going on here and seeing how others keep track of the words that most inspire them.

If I own the book, I sometimes highlight or underline quotes I like, but most often I just write them in a little notebook that I keep handy, with pen, while I'm reading. When I start a new book, I write in the title so I'll know where the quote comes from and then write the page number next to the quote for future reference.

I also have a blank journal that I keep a lot of my favorite quotes in. I haven't updated it for awhile, but it's a combo of images and favorite quotes I've gathered from all over.

Here are couple of quotes from the book I'm currently reading (Home by Marilynne Robinson):

"She opened the windows to cool the kitchen and air out the dining room a little, and the breezes that came in were mild, earthy, grassy, with a feel of sunlight about them" (105). -- I love that last part about the "feel of sunlight."

"You feel that heart in there? My life became your life, like lighting one candle from another. Isn't that a mystery?" (116)

Collection Quotes Part Deux

Grama/Mom/Barbara says:

I think the neatest books of collected quotes I have seen/read are Father Tim’s 2 books from the Mitford Series. Some of the quotes are scrawled in, some are neat, some are typewritten on scraps of paper and look like they are stuck in.
I myself kind of followed that example and I have 2 or maybe 3 different books of quotes going at the present. I never gave it much thought but I LOVE quotes and they are about anything, anything at all as long as the words touch some deep place in my being. A lot of mine are magazine clippings, some are written out of books, out of cards, off of all kinds of things that catch my eye. I am not a purist, I will lift a good from ANYWHERE I see one.
Be loose, write them in colors, all colors, all size markers and pens , CRAYONS, whatever you have when you read it, but always put them all together in the same place. Date them if you want and watch your life wander through the words across time.

Collecting Quotes

Christie brought up a good question. How do you collect quotes? As I learn more about art journaling, I wish I had kept a collection in a more organized way over the years. I read once that Madeline L'Engle kept a big book of quotes throughout her life. I think she talks about it in the book "Walking on Water, Reflections on Faith and Art." (Good read by the way)

I guess it's like anything else. You need to have the desire and the means. And then the discipline. I love a good quote. Maybe I need a journal JUST for that purpose. (another journal? Egads.)