inferno

October 30, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Featuring Ghosts

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! With Halloween tomorrow, this week is a holiday freebie! I did witches last year, so this year I’m going with books that have ghosts!

Beloved: This book is a masterpiece and the way Morrison uses the ghost character is incredible and if you haven’t read it already you should immediately.

Sing, Unburied, Sing: This felt very much like it was positioning itself as “in the tradition of” Beloved, for me, but without quite the skill or level of success. It’s a good book, and goes into some different places, but a comparison to Morrison’s masterpiece is unlikely to be flattering to anyone.

The Inferno: They’re not quite “ghosts” per se, but Virgil as Dante’s guide and the shades the two encounter in hell are a huge part of this amazing work.

Lincoln in the Bardo: I felt definitely echoes of Dante in this deeply weird but very good book, especially in the contrapasso-esque disfigurements the spirits were saddled with.

The Shining: I’m not big into horror as a genre usually because I am easily frightened and have a vivid imagination but this book managed to keep the scares relatively low-impact (even the very malevolent ghosts) and told a compelling story about addiction to boot.

The Lovely Bones: Susie isn’t really a ghost, but she’s a disembodied spirit and at one point possesses someone so I think that’s close enough.

Stardust: The growing collection of ghostly princes of Stormhold are kind of a side plot in this fantasy adventure, but the way the brothers come up with to murder each other are honestly kind of delightful.

Rebecca: The titular first wife of Maxim deWinter does not literally appear during the story, but the way her influence continues to haunt her widower, his home of Manderly, and his new wife is so pervasive as to be effectively present.

Harry Potter: For something a little more lighthearted, the house ghosts and Peeves the poltergeist and Moaning Myrtle are a vital part of this beloved series.

Spook: And a nonfiction take on ghosties! I love Mary Roach and this exploration of whether there’s any scientific evidence for communication with the afterlife has her trademark curiosity and humor.

March 6, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Book Quotes

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re highlighting our favorite quotes from books. I love highlighting/dog-earing my books to remind me of pieces of writing I found particularly meaningful, so I enjoyed going back through some of my favorites and pulling out words I especially loved to share with y’all!

“Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” (Lolita)

This book is FULL of gorgeous writing. Hands-down the most beautifully written book I’ve ever read. But this part of the intro has always stuck with me.

“Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn’t even had. Mr. Hedlie mentioned that fin-de-sicle Vienna witnessed a similar outbreak of suicides on the part of the young, and put the whole thing down to the misfortune of living in a dying empire. It had to do with the way the mail wasn’t delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil’s night.” (The Virgin Suicides)

I re-read this book, one of my all-time favorites, recently for my book club, and this passage has always struck me as both representative of the quality of writing in this book as a whole as well as capturing something real about the downswing Detroit experienced.

“Midway through the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the true way was lost.” (Inferno)

This line has been translated many different ways, but I’ve always loved the way the copy I studied in college did it.

“All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Anna Karenina)

Obviously this one is a classic. It’s not exactly true, but has the ring and spirit of truth, which counts for as much anyways.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” (1984)

This book was so prescient in so many ways and this is one of the truest things in it.

“‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.'” (The Fellowship of the Ring)

Basically my personal motto when I start feeling like life’s unfair. In many ways, our circumstances are beyond our control and all you can do about it is figure out how to make the best of it.

“Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.” (Breakfast at Tiffany’s)

I’m one of those people who’s never quite been able to let go of that sense of the new school year starting as the real beginning of the year, though my last school year started in 2009.

“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (The Great Gatsby)

This is my literal favorite line in all of literature. The only thing that rivals its perfection as an ending is the end of Six Feet Under (don’t @ me).

“Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win.” (The Shining)

If you’ve only ever seen the movie (which I love), I’d recommend reading the book as well. The latter tells a story not about a haunted hotel, but a haunted man and how his internal demons are played upon until he loses the battle to keep them at bay and it’s really really good.

“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.” (Jitterbug Perfume)

This is one of my favorite books, and while Tom Robbins isn’t always an author that it’s easy to pull a quote from (it’s more about the writing as a whole), I love this one and it’s something I think about when I start feeling down.

August 30, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Favorite Books I Read In School

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! The kids in Washoe County have already been back in school for nearly a month (we have some weird extended scheduling where there are more breaks in the school year and a shorter summer), but for most people, classes just recently started or will soon. Hence, this week’s theme: back to school! I chose to highlight ten books I read in school (both high school and college) that I loved.

To Kill A Mockingbird: This was one of the books everyone at our school read for 10th grade English, and while I think it could just as easily be read in 9th grade, it’s a good book for young teenagers either way. It’s a beautiful coming-of-age story that (especially in very homogeneously white towns like the one I grew up in) inspires the reader to actually think critically about prejudice and racism. And as a kid that grew up to be a lawyer, Atticus Finch was close to my heart (I haven’t read Go Set A Watchman yet).

The Great Gatsby: This was 11th grade English, and while the prose level is appropriate for high-schoolers, I just don’t think you can really understand this book as a 16 year old. I actually hated it when I read it for school…it wasn’t until I read it again later, in my 20s, that I started to appreciate it. You have to have had a past, to have loved and lost, to really feel this book in the way it should be felt.

The Alchemist: My 11th grade humanities teacher, Mr. Snow, was one of those teachers that kind of had a cult of personality around him. He was young and dynamic and sometimes unpredictable and taught the class as much as art appreciation than anything else. He really liked our class, and so had us read one of his favorite books, a story of love and self-discovery, which I loved.

Cry, The Beloved Country: My AP English class was amazing. The teacher (Mrs. Helppie!) was one of the most incredible teachers I ever had (I give her credit for teaching me how to actually write…to the extent I can, anyways). She gave us two assigned texts at the beginning of the year and then gave us choices on a theme for the other 7 or 8 books we read on our own, in addition to our classroom texts. This was an assigned text that everyone had to read and the lessons about disappointment and mistakes made and the futility of vengeance are so beautifully presented.

The Scarlet Letter: This was a “choice” novel from AP English…I can’t remember what the other option was. I was expecting a dull testament to Puritan social values, but Hester Prynne (and her impish daughter, Pearl) are vivid and interesting characters who undermine the very system of shame-based behavior modification they exemplify. Also, through Arthur Dimmesdale, a much more compelling exploration of guilt than Crime and Punishment.

Snow Falling On Cedars: Another AP English choice novel (the other book I could have read was The Secret History, which I ended up reading anyways), in the category of contemporary fiction. It asks a question that seems ever-more relevant into today’s world: can a community that has been oppressed (in this case, the Japanese population of a small town in the Pacific Northwest after internment) ever really be reconciled to its oppressors? There is no final answer, but it’s thought-provoking with lovely prose.

The Color Purple: The final AP English choice novel for this list (also could have read The Bluest Eye, which I read a few years ago) in the area of Black female experience. I’m glad this is the one I read in high school. Toni Morrison is a powerful and important writer, but Alice Walker’s book is much more ultimately life-affirming and overall hopeful in tone.

The Awakening: I can’t recall if we read this at the end of the year for 11th grade or AP (I think it was AP, but I could be wrong). Now that I’ve read Anna Karenina, it feels like Karenina-lite to me. A woman trapped in a boring marriage has a fling and the social consequences reverberate in life-changing ways. But it’s a good kind of intro to Tolstoy’s work…if you enjoy Chopin’s, you’ll likely enjoy the longer one.

Inferno: I took a whole class in college on The Divine Comedy, and while Purgatorio was only so-so to me and Paradiso bored me to tears, Inferno is fantastic. It’s full of dishy Middle-Ages Italian gossip (there’s a whole backstory about Florentine political conflict that it’s really worth it to look up because Dante totally puts his enemies in terrible places in Hell) and the system of contrapasso (punishments that match the sins of the condemned) he develops is incredible. It’s a masterpiece.

Metamorphoses: It’s a pity that Edith Hamilton’s dull Mythology has become the standard-issue introductory text for ancient myth, because Ovid’s Metamorphoses is so much more interesting. I read this for a Greek Mythology class in college that wasn’t quite everything I’d hoped for, but it did introduce me to this delightful book.

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