Lines in Books

The sun does not break up into pieces. It does not break up into disembodied parts when it falls into trees and things. Each piece of the sun is always a complete little sun. Wainaina died earlier this year which perhaps makes reading his memoir in late 2019 not quite what reading it a year ago would have been. He writes of his early life demonstrating throughout that 'Africa is Not a Country', a theme he often highlighted, and showing that despite it all, there isn't so much that's different about humans regardless of where they're from. He died at 48, almost a decade after this was written.

Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that's why many feel it must be anxiously guarded.  What do you do when you are confronted with a regime you disagree with? Do you act against it? When you are apprehended, do you betray your compatriots? How do you die? Or do you simply let others take your place? And if you are the child of that man who stands up against the regime but does not die, and of the woman who was forced to marry him and goes on to find refuge in alcohol even as she heaps scorn on Scheherazade of the Arabian Nights for wanting to live how do you square friendship and betrayal? When you are loved by your parents, flawed as they are, flawed as you all are, how do you find your own path?

Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. We haven't understood the exact way we are now experiencing time.  A family travels across the United States, the father documenting echoes of the Apache, the mother seeking to document the voices of migrant children, their children cementing their relationship in each other's proximity which the son, aged 10 and twice the age of the daughter, knows will likely not survive the trip; he can see his parents drift apart. The tales of the long dead echo the tales of the living, the tale of the couple's children is entwined with the tale of migrant children: history repeats itself, its variations in each cycle superficial. We are ...

You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Two young people forced to compete against each other by their egotistical mentors find compromise and love together instead of endurance and annihilation individually. The field of their competition, a magical circus in black and white which, instead of destroying in the completion of their duel, they find a way to sustain and, in doing so, also protect all who are associated with it. The roles we are given are not unchangeable. 

It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. What does it mean to be alive? And what is the point of any of it? What do we choose to anchor ourselves ourselves to or should that be: to whom do we choose to anchor ourselves? How do we make the most of life knowing that life ends soon enough for everyone? And that, while we are on Earth, we are constantly judged. Perhaps not on ways that are fair but, still, often in ways that, perhaps because of their unfairness, provide us an escape from the fetters of social etiquette as a man who is tried for senseless murder he has committed finds. Except, that that's not the crime he's really tried for or sentenced to death for: his 'crime' is not having displayed the performative grief expected of a 'good son' upon the death...

There is the mundane, then there is the unthinkable – between the two, a chasm into which our imaginations tumble. Through the narrative device of a dead woman's ghost, the author explains what happens in abusive relationships, what coercive control involves, and why it's so difficult for abused people to walk out. The narrative can feel a bit heavy-handed at times, steering the reader towards the author's beliefs but, still, it's worth reading for anyone who's ever wondered "But why doesn't she leave?" or questioned a woman's credibility: after all, he's so nice! 

I shelf-to-shelfed, extracting book after book, the opening of each a sneezery of dust.   You, the reader, don't know what's real and what's imagined by the utterly unreliable narrator of this tale, an orphaned young girl who, forbidden to learn how to read, teaches herself and develops her own way of speaking. She goes to extraordinary lengths to keep her younger brother by her side and her conduct raises questions about the agency of children and what responsibility they bear for their actions. As in life, there are loose ends aplenty and no clear answers to either the factual or philosophical questions which arise.

She did horror stories on herself, filling in blanks where I refused to supply information. This meant she wrote the entire script herself. A teenager picks up books by long-dead authors and reads as she walks. When a married man in his 40s begins to stalk her, it's her reading-while-walking that's deemed to be the problem by the local community, never one to shy away from gossip about the real or the imagined. That, and her voluntarily being involved with her stalker, as almost everyone assumes she is. He doesn't touch her but does manage to suck the life out of her anyway. Still, she's deemed to be the problem, not him. Set against the backdrop of the Troubles, Burns explores the role of women in everyday life & in resistance to it. 

"This symbol is thousands of years old. It will long outlive a party of fascists. I felt no need to pander to them by not using a good design when I saw it. If I did that, they would have won, wouldn't they? Instead I am reclaiming it for its true meaning. It is not the Nazi Party that gets to decide for me what interpretation to place on the fylfot." The fylfot, Chevalier informs us, is a 'symbol of light and life and good fortune' in this novel which explores how to hide in plain sight, discover meaning in the seemingly ordinary, and pull oneself together. The protagonist, a woman in her late 30s who's lost both a brother and a fiancé in the Great War, ultimately finds herself glad to be alive and learns how to forge her own path, raised eyebrows notwithstanding, sometimes finding support in the most unexpected of places.

Today, as she gazed up at the sky, she wondered why people called the sky a roof. If it was a roof, then why did humans feel so unprotected beneath it? As she fell into a deep sleep without a struggle, she missed the roof of her old home terribly. A young woman finds herself in Pakistan along with her father at Partition. Her father dies and she is forced to find her own way in the new country, her life demonstrating that while history happens to men, and men happen to women. This one woman, however, does manage to carve a path for herself against all the odds. 

You will be pleased to hear that my research gains ever more detail — my collection of slides is prodigious. I continue to write. My thoughts on comparative architecture have grown somewhat although the essence of that piece I sent you years ago remains. You called it 'brilliant'. As always, you supported me. There were times when only you believed in me and in those moments it was your confidence in my ability that convinced me to believe in myself. Today, I no longer have to dig quite so deeply to find that self-belief. And yet, what good is that belief when the landscape is so hostile? The country I live in now is not the one I approached with so much hope all those years ago. Yet having invested this much in it, how can I leave? Since March, we have had a new government our Party at its helm, but I don't know whether it makes any difference any more. Aren't they all the same... The Sri Lankan architect, Minnette de Silva, inspires a novel which explores what it...

Truly? Which of us has not felt betrayed by the words that come out of our mouths, even when they are spoken with utmost sincerity? [....] Misery is the broad river, but there are tributaries of joy and consolation. Writing to you has been one of them, and imagining that you write back another. [....] But I was wrong. You can be changed – tortured, in fact – so that the person other people go on talking to just isn't you. You've gone away. Your body's holding wide the door, but you are in a very different dark chamber. Springboarding off Alan Turing's forced chemical castration, the author explores happenstance, the nature of sexuality, the limits of individual consciousness and shared comprehension, and the possibility of real artificial intelligence existing (the terror of which is contained only by the suggestion that it would not bother to conquer the earth). 

People can't tolerate complexity. Instead, they simplify and distort. [....] I don't plan on living a long life. Or a short life, necessarily. I have no plans at all. The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don't exist, and then your plans are meaningless. [....] Retain the innocence of the most wholesome feeling you ever had in your life. Part of you stays innocent forever. That part of you is worth more than the rest. A woman with a young child, who's left with her mother when she's sentenced to life in jail for killing the man who stalked her, finds what little support she and her son had gone when her mother unexpectedly dies in an accident. The novel shows how impersonal and ruthless the carceral justice system can be, describes what #imprisonment involves, and tells of why the system does not work especially if you're poor. #books

Dad? What, Lanny? Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope? I'm suddenly really annoyed. He's too old for shit like this. Or too young. It's fucking silly. A son attuned to nature, a father who isn't. The son, a  child who is of the village — not just from the village but of the village — becomes entwined with Dead Papa Toothwort who lived there when the Domesday Book was compiled and who, far from dead and gone, has since become part of the community's folklore. Lanny, the child understands that we are of the earth and not merely living off the earth and, when faced with almost certain death after an accident in the woods, he calls on Dead Papa Toothwort who keeps him alive and arranges to return him to his parents and to an artist who has befriended him.  An exploration of what it means to be human in a land that we're damaging. An element of the fantastic in the everyday capturing the spirit of a p...

But what's so great about being rational? If you ask me, being rational isn't always the same as being right. A woman realises that appearances can be deceptive, and that there is goodness in men though not necessarily where she expects to find it... and that the same holds true for evil. And that evil may be supported by what she associates with goodness.

She had, she realized gradually, simply traded one domestic prison for another. Against the backdrop of the setting up of a mobile library in 1930s rural Kentucky, exploited by those who owned mines, is the tale of how changes in women's lives tend to be the substitution of one prison for another, and of how, regardless of how independent a woman thinks she is, society will find a way to shackle her. Still, there exists friends in the midst of despair and people who have one's back. 

At such moments the collapse of their courage, willpower, and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen. Therefore they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always to keep, so to speak, their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. But, naturally enough, this prudence, this habit of feinting with their predicament and refusing to put up a fight, was ill rewarded. For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague. Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to ro...

With only a little subterfuge he can live two entirely separate existences, never confronting the ultimate question of what to do with himself or what kind of person he is. A coming-of-age tale in which a man and a woman, who've been friends since childhood, ultimately found themselves and perhaps each other too despite making mistakes along the way. A reassuring reminder that there's very little non-commodified friendship can't withstand.

It’s cold on the Wall. You look for metaphors. It’s cold as slate, as diamond, as the moon. Cold as charity – that’s a good one. But you soon realise that the thing about the cold is that it isn’t a metaphor.  [....] Time has never passed as slowly as it did that day. Time on the Wall is treacle. Eventually, after you have put in enough hours on the Wall, you learn to cope with time. You train yourself not to look at the time, because it is never, never, ever, as late as you think and hope and long for it to be. You learn to float. You become completely passive; you let the day pass through you, you stop trying to pass through it. But it takes months before you can do that. In what's supposed to be a dystopian novel (although it feels like little more than a variation of what one might expect to soon see in the news), young people are sent to guard a border against 'others'; every time a migrant gets in, a guard is exiled while migrants themselves (once they're caug...

In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes. Appearances can be deceptive as they are in this fantasy YA novel about three sisters in a land where magic is commonplace, and a house with portals designed to give the appearance of a moving castle in which a wicked wizard (who's not really all that bad) lives. As an aside, John Donne's suggestion to go catch a falling star is not always good advice at all.