Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art (Christopher Moore)

Whenever Christopher Moore deviates from his usual vampire stories (which are great, by the way), it's worth paying attention, because those are some of his best books. See Lamb, for example. He obsessed over the French impressionist painters for years, even lived in France for a few months. The result is high quality historical fiction, with the Christopher Moore trademarks of well developed characters that are well cared for by the author and readers.

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Quotes:

How do you know, when you think blue—when you say blue—that you are talking about the same blue as anyone else?

“I’ve just been mercilessly flirted with by a strange woman,” said Pissarro.

“Whistler,” Manet called. “How’s your mother?”

Now the ragpicker threw his head back and laughed in the way only a Frenchman with seven teeth and a conscience soaked in wine can laugh, the sound his donkey might make if he were a heavier smoker and had just licked the devil’s ass to chase all taste of goodness from his tongue. The ragpicker wasn’t a scoundrel, but scoundrels envied his laugh.

“Love them all,” said Renoir. “That is the secret, young man. Love them all.” The painter let go of his arm and shrugged. “Then, even if your paintings are shit, you will have loved them all.”

“Nonsense. Syphilis is a myth. It’s Greek, I think—everyone has heard of the myth of syphilis.” “That’s the myth of Sisyphus. He spends his whole life pushing a large stone up a hill.”

“Who—what, what are you?” said Lucien. “I am a muse,” said Juliette. “And you—you? What do you do?” “I amuse,” she said.

“There’s always a price, Lucien,” she said softly, looking down.

“Yes,” she said. “Do you think great art comes at no cost? There’s a price to be paid.”

Once it was determined that Lucien and Henri were, indeed, wretched creatures with ethical compasses that pivoted around a point at their groins, which is to say, men, and that Juliette was also a creature of abstract, if not altogether absent, ethics herself, although with some fealty to beauty, which is to say, a muse, it was further determined, by unanimous consent, that in order to proceed with her revelation, more alcohol would be required, which left only to be decided the matter of where.

“Well, this should be fun,” she said in their language (a language poor in vocabulary yet rich with gesture), which involved the roll of her eyes, a joyful screech, a pelvic thrust, and a finger pointing into the future.

I love you, Lucien, but I am a muse, you are an artist, I am not here to make you comfortable.”

I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING: “WELL THANKS LOADS, CHRIS, now you’ve ruined art for everyone.” You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure.

Caleb's Crossing: A Novel (Geraldine Brooks)

A tearjerker of a historical novel. Life was hard back then! However, a beautifully written book with spiritual overtones; a sympathetic look at the plight of women, Native Americans, and Native American women. I literally could not put this book down.

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Quotes:

I have presumed to give Caleb’s name to my imagined character in the hope of honoring the struggle, sacrifice and achievement of this remarkable young scholar.

God alone ordains the damned and the saved and naught that I set down on these pages can change that.

Caleb’s soul is stretched like the rope in a tug o’ war,

“Bethia, why do you strive so hard to quit the place in which God has set you?” His voice was gentle, not angry. “Your path is not your brother’s, it cannot be. Women are not made like men. You risk addling your brain by thinking on scholarly matters that need not concern you. I care only for your present health and your future happiness. It is not seemly for a wife to know more than her husband . . .”

Over time, I had come to grasp that the chief principle of their grammar is whether a thing to them is possessed of an animating soul. How they determine this is outlandish to our way of thinking, so profligate are they in giving out souls to all manner of things. A canoe paddle is animate, because it causes something else to move. Even a humble onion has, in their view, a soul, since it causes action—pulling tears from the eyes.

Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us?

She believed that each humble thing, if done worthily, might be touched by grace.

“Do not look at me so, Storm Eyes. Did not God create the sun? Mayn’t I make a hymn of gladness upon it? Your father has never taught me that the only one place to pray is in the dim confines of your meeting house. God’s spirit shines out in every goodly thing. Do not wonder that I stretch up my hands and reach out for his grace.”

All morning, as I went about my tasks, I thought about braiding together two beliefs that seemed at first so much at odds, and how so doing might sit with our precisian faith. How easily Caleb had taken the teachings of his youth—the many gods, the animate spirit world—and simply recast them in terms of our teaching. And father, so it seemed, was satisfied.

His sermon that day was gentle in spirit, more like his preaching of old. He talked of the love of Christ and likened the bonds of affection between people with those between God and his faithful. That love, he said, endured, and was no less real and fervent, no matter that the parties did not see each other face-to-face.

How would it be, to have a husband who strove to elicit one’s ideas, with whom one could, over months and years of companionship, hone and refine them? Such a life would be something, indeed.

“Marriage is a heavy choice for an English woman.” “Why do you fashion it thus? Surely for any woman?” “Not so, for ours. A squa does not cease to be a person, in our law, just because she has got herself a husband. In most cases, he will go to live with her family, not she with his, so her daily state changes little. And if, at some later time, she wants to leave him and be married to another one, then that can be settled through parley.”

“It is—what did we just now learn that the Greeks say of it? Hubris?—to think we can know God’s will. The better question—the one question, in this matter—is, what do you, Bethia, want?”

Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage? I

In this fallen world, such is our condition. Every happiness is a bright ray between shadows, every gaiety bracketed by grief. There is no birth that does not recall a death, no victory but brings to mind a defeat.

Well, I thought. You have done it, my friend. It has cost you your home, and your health, and estrangement from your closest kinsman. But after today, no man may say the Indian mind is primitive and ineducable. Here, in this hall, you stand, the incontestible argument, the negat respondens.

He sang out his death song, and died like a hero going home.

I am not a hero. Life has not required it of me.

The Mysterious Benedict Society

Read with Laura. Smart and exciting. Loved it! Orphans, smart kids against the world, a secret mission against impossible odds, evil twins, obvious and subtle puns and puzzles, wow!

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Quotes:

Are you a gifted child looking for special opportunities?

After a few more pages of questions, all of which Reynie felt confiden he had answered correctly, he arrived at the test's final question: "Are you brave?" Just reading the words quickened Reynie's heart. Was he brave? Braver had never been required of him, so hoe could he tell? Finally he gave up trying to decide and simply wrote, "I hope so."

‘It’s important to protect yourself because it’s impossible to protect yourself’?

A Thread of Grace (Mary Doria Russell)

Beautiful and brutal. I liked the beginning and middle, but didn't like the end.

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Quotes:

How could anyone live with so much fear?

“Like Papa used t’say, ‘Christ’ll take what nobody else wants.’ ” “And so there is hope, even for pigs like you,” the nun replies.

Schramm pushed himself up from the table and stood there, slump-shouldered and swaying, far away. “You must learn not to be kind,” he told Renzo finally. “Be as blind and as deaf as you have to be. Feel nothing. Only the heartless will survive.”

The last kilometer is as steep as a ladder against a wall: a challenge for the strong, the experienced, the well-equipped. For the desperate, it’s simply necessary.

Broad back against the mountainside, he takes a deep breath of thin air to power a heartfelt oration concerning the height of mountains, the weight of other people’s luggage, the unreasonable ambition of Germans, and the direct involvement of pigs and whores in the parentage of Dwight David Eisenhower,

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he says when he can speak again. “I have murdered 91,867 people.”

Stop seeing real Jews, and it’s easy for people to believe lies.

“Shall I tell you why young men love war?” Schramm offers dreamily. “In peace, there are a hundred questions with a thousand answers! In war, there is only one big question with one right answer.” He pours them each another shot, emptying the bottle. “War smashes all our petty problems and sweeps the shards into one huge, patriotic pile. Going to war makes you a man. It is emotionally exciting and morally restful.”

“Jews are simply members of the human race.” After a thoughtful pause, Renzo adds, “I can think of no worse insult.” “There are plenty of people who can,” Schramm warns. “They never saw you. They don’t know your name. They don’t know anything about you, but they hate you.

“I never understood the logic. You’re Communists to a man, but you own all the banks. You’re subhuman, but you’re running the world.”

Bombs do not drop from God’s hand. Triggers are not pulled by God’s finger. Each of us chooses, one by one, and God’s eye does not turn from those who suffer or from those who inflict suffering. Our choices are weighed. And, thus, the nations are judged.”

Ten percent of any group of human beings are shitheads. Catholics, Jews. Germans, Italians. Pilots, priests. Teachers, doctors, shopkeepers. Ten percent are shitheads. Another ten percent—salt of the earth! Saints! Give you the shirts off their backs. Most people are in the middle, just trying to get by.”

“You are a very dangerous man, Padre. You are an ordinary, decent fellow who aspires to saintliness.”

“I’m paying a debt to a surgeon who was killed in Abyssinia. He can’t collect.”

Slowly devotion to family and community condensed to stubborn determination.

God save us from idealists!” Renzo cries softly. “They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won’t they commit to get it?” Rubbing at his knee with both hands, he mutters, “I swear to God, Mirella, I’d settle for a world with good manners.”

“I’ve sworn off ethics,” Renzo explains to the faint and fading pink puddles. “What’s the point?” he asks. “Too much for me,” he admits, face to the rain. “You sort it out.”

“There’s a saying in Hebrew,” he tells her. “ ‘No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there’s always a thread of grace.’

Claudia Kaplan is yet another casualty of a war that began long before it started, and has not ended yet. Immense, intractable, incomprehensible, that conflict remains the pivot point of two centuries, the event that defines before and after. Hundreds of millions killed, wounded, maimed, displaced. The last survivors are dying now. Their children and grandchildren are fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that the dry bones shall live again, but the poison still seeps down, contaminating generations.