Swamplandia! (Karen Russell)

Beautifully written, four people descend into their own personal Hells, and eventually find redemption as a family.

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Quotes:

The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

He got this aura of expectancy about him that confused me. It wasn’t dread, not exactly, but you could not call it hope.

Something lunged in me then, receded. A giggle or a sob. A noise. I thought: You look very stupid, Dad.

“Really, it’s unproductive to ruminate on that particular problem of our sister’s,” he’d told Ava on the night before he left home, by which he’d meant “It hurts.”

This is not forever, Kiwi would think as he held his breath and plunged one of the World of Darkness latrines with the clown-nose suction cup. You are still a genius. You are just a temporary worker

I think it’s hard to ever hear your own happiness as an alarm bell.

“Nobody can get to hell without assistance, kid.”

“Hell’s real, all right. We can be there tomorrow, or Wednesday at the latest. So long as you want to go.”

Few mainlanders know that the Seminole Wars lasted longer than any other U.S. conflict, longer than the Vietnam War and the American Revolution.

Faith was a power that arose from inside you, I thought, and doubt was exogenous, a speck in your eye. A black mote from the sad world of adults.

From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the “official, historical” Florida records we found in books. “Prejudice,” as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic—a “damn fool math”—in which some people counted and others did not.

At ten, I couldn’t articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.

“You were lying to me,” I said dully. “There isn’t any such thing as the underworld, is there? This is just the ordinary swamp.” “Aw, kid, don’t say that.”

I believe I met my mother there, in the final instant. Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water. Her courage.

We were a family again, a love that made the roomiest privacy that I have ever occupied.

I’d told the Chief about a dream I’d had on Swamplandia!—a great tree had swallowed him, his knuckles sunk into the tree bark—and he listened with such a frightened, pained expression that I stopped talking. So I didn’t tell my dad about the Bird Man, or Louis Thanksgiving, or the red Seth, or Mama Weeds.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she told me that night. But until we are old ladies—a cypress age, a Sawtooth age—I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.

I don’t believe in ghosts anymore, either. Not the kind from Ossie’s book. I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulable than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in The Spiritist’s Telegraph. Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.

Like me, I think that eventually Ossie simply figured out how to occult her own deep weirdness, to shuffle quietly down the chutes of our school hallways.

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection (Alexander McCall Smith)

Clovis Andersen finally shows up in this episode which i had thought (sadly) to be the final one. I'm glad to hear there is a new one to be released this year. I think Clovis serves as an alter-ego for the male author in this series otherwise dominated by females (J L B Matekoni doesn't talk much, and we don't even know his name).

All in all, a beautiful story of redemption. The best part for me was when Mma Ramotswe started quoting her own aphorism thinking that it had come from Clovis' book!

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Quotes:

“I have come at last, Mma Ramotswe.”

“Yes, Mma. The meaning of a dream about beds is very simple. It means that you are tired. It means that you need more sleep.”

“I think I’m giving him enough food. I believe in demand feeding. I think that is what it’s called. I always leave some food out in the kitchen so that Phuti can pick up a snack if he feels hungry. There are other women who believe that you should only feed your husband at set times, so that he gets used to it. But I am not one of those women, Mma. I leave food out.”

“There are certain cars that are always chosen by dishonest people, just as there are cars that only the honest will drive. When you’re a mechanic for many years, you become able to notice these things.”

“My name is Andersen.”

There was a man in northern Botswana, for instance, who was a known cattle thief; and yet while he was visiting a relative up near Kasane, he had come under the influence of a charismatic preacher and had been baptized in the waters of the Zambezi River. The change in that man had been so remarkable that there was talk of its being attributable to the special qualities of the Zambezi River.

The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon.

Muncie Investigations

This was dry land at the limits of the inhabitable, and fields here, if they could be called fields, grew very little: a few melons and patches of sorghum—not much more than that. Yet the families who tilled them, scratching at the parched soil to coax growth out of what sometimes seemed little more than powdered stone, did so by ancient right. This is where their people had been as far back as anybody could remember, and they maintained this link with the land even after they had moved to towns and villages. Each year the women and children would trek off to their lands for weeks at a time, to plant and tend the crops. It was a ritual that survived growing prosperity, even when there was no real need to harvest these small crops; it was a way of showing children who they were and reminding adults of the same thing.

They went outside. As she left the building, Mma Makutsi ran out into the sun and uttered the traditional ululation of delight that women contribute to any great Botswana occasion.

I NEVER WORRY about my nails,” said Mma Makutsi as they passed the Princess Marina Hospital. “We were taught at the Botswana Secretarial College that long nails were not a good thing if you have to do typing. We were told some very alarming stories.”

As you say, Rra, in your own book: always ask the people who know.” Clovis Andersen looked pensive. “I said that, did I? Well, it sounds reasonable enough to me.”

We must think of late people because I believe they’re still with us—in a way. And so a late person can stay with you all your life, until it is your turn to become late too. And the late person doesn’t want you to be miserable. A late person doesn’t want you to think that your work is no use. A late person wants you to get on with life, to do things, to make good use of your time. That is well known, Rra. It is very well known.”

They walked to the far side of her garden. “We have a lot to be grateful for, Rra,” Mma Ramotswe said. She gestured to the small patch of her country that made up her garden. Her gesture took in her fence, and beyond that the road, and beyond that all Botswana and the world. “All that,” she said. “That is what we have to be grateful for.”

Preaching Life (Barbara Brown Taylor)

A Lovely book; a series of meditations on preaching followed by a handful of stunning, perfect little sermons. I read one per Sunday when i was between churches, and they kept me going.

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Quotes:

Barbara Brown Taylor is primarily a worshiper. Whether in the study, in a classroom, in a hospital room, on a mountain trail, or in the pulpit, she is in the sanctuary.

As best I can figure, the Christian era ended during my lifetime.

Every time God declines to meet my expectations, another of my idols is exposed.

When all is said and done, faith may be nothing more than the assignment of holy meaning to events that others call random.

We are born seekers, calling strange names into the darkness from our earliest days because we know we are not meant to be alone, and because we know that we await someone whom we cannot always see.

"Do anything that pleases you," the voice in my head said again, "and belong to me.'

the sacrament of the word calls for a light touch.

Finally I got the message. "Bible" was a code word for "God." People were not hungry for information about the Bible; they were hungry for an experience of God, which the Bible seemed to otter them.

Faith may be an imaginative act, as I have suggested, but the Bible reminds us that we are not free to imagine anything we like.

In short, the Bible turned out not to be a fossil under glass but a thousand dillerent things-a mirror, a scythe, a hammock, a lantern, a pair of binoculars, a high diving hoard, a bridge, a goad-all of them offering themselves to me to be touched and handled and used.

For those rooted in Christian memory and fed by Christian hope, nothing in life is simply what it seems. Equipped with the paradoxical images and stories of our historic faith, we see things differently than we would without them.

Sometimes we kneel, assuming a posture that is all but gone from our world-like troubadours, like lovers, like servants, we kneel before the Lord our maker and our hearts follow suit. 'Ihen we stand to sing and sit to listen, dancing the peculiar ballet of the people of God.

the first thing [the sacraments] teach us is that we do not worship God alone.
'Ihe second thing sacraments teach us is that God uses material things to reach out to us.
'I he third thing sacraments teach its is that God is not delicate. 'The sacraments of the church are not weekend performances in sacred settings; they are portable.

the sermon proves to be a communal act, not the creation of one person but the creation of a body of people for whom and to whom one of them speaks. A congregation can make or break a sermon by the quality of their response to it.

When the door opens in a sermon, it is because God has consented to be present. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't.

This means that I never know ahead of time what I will preach. If I did, then my sermons would be little more than lessons, expositions of things I already know that I think my listeners ought to know too. While there are preachers who do this sort of thing well, I am not one of them.

Human beings do not lose control of their lives. What we lose is the illusion that we were ever in control of our lives in the first place,

MOST OF US KNOW THIS STORY AS THE STORY OF the rich young ruler, although Mark is the only one who suggests he is rich, Matthew is the only one who says he is young, and Luke is the only one who calls him a ruler. The fact that he shows up in all three of these gospels is a pretty good indication that his story is true, although most of us wish that he had never shown up at all. Because of hinl, we have one of the hardest sayings in the whole Bible, one that strikes fear in the hearts of would-he Christians everywhere: "Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then conic, follow nme."

Are we really supposed to admire a poor woman who gave her last cent to a morally bankrupt religious institution?

We are not called to be philanthropists or social workers, but brothers and sisters. We are called into relationship, even when that relationship is unlikely, momentary, or sad.

I imagine Jesus down at the plasma bank on Boulevard, standing in line with the hungover men waiting to sell their blood, or maybe down at the city jail shooting the breeze with the bail bondsmen who cruise the place like vultures. I imagine him at the Majestic Diner on Ponce de Leon with a crack dealer, a car thief, a prostitute with AIDS, buying them all cheese omelettes when I come in with the sixth-grade confirmation class and sit down a couple of booths away.

These two parables are full of problems, not least of which is that they do not seem to mean what Jesus says they mean. According to his explanations, they are about heaven's joy over one repentant sinner, but the lost sheep does not repent as far as I can tell and the lost coin certainly doesn't. They are both simply found-not because either of them does anything right, but because someone is determined to find them and does. They are restored thanks to God's action, not their own, so where does repentance come in at all?

If God is where we came from and God is where we are going, then we have no permanent address and all our shelters along the way are temporary ones.

It is not the best feeling in the world, but it is not the worst either. It is not a bad thing to know you belong somewhere, even if you are not there yet.

We cling to the illusion that some of us are blessed and some of us are not, and that it is our job as those who are blessed to rescue those who are not.

Belief is something else altogether, although it is not what some would have us believe. It is not a well-fluffed nest, or a well-defended castle high on a hill. It is more like a rope bridge over a scenic gorge, sturdy but swinging hack and forth, with plenty of light and plenty of air but precious little to hang onto except the stories you have heard: that it is the best and only way across, that it is possible, that it will bear your weight.

The best way the writer of Genesis could think of to describe it was to say that paradise was the kind of place where you could walk around naked, where you could skinny-dip to your heart's content. It was that safe-so safe, in fact, that it might never even occur to you that you were naked, at least as long as you stayed away from the fruit of one particular tree.

Adam and Eve decided to live. The days of peace and plenty were gone for good, but they got by. Using all the scraps at hand, they managed to build first in altar and then a home, to bake bread from the wild wheat of the field and to bear five children. Using the pieces of their broken past, they made a future for themselves and for their descendants in the world outside of Eden, a world we continue to live in today. It is a world full of chips and dents and scars. Even where we have glued it back together you can still see the cracks, but in its own way it is lovely, a mosaic of many colors, a mended work of art, a testament to the God who is willing to work with broken pieces and who calls us to do the same.

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (Valente, Catherynne M.)

A worthy continuation to The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, in which the heroine finds space to grow up gracefully. The themes and characters get a little darker, and the book ends with a hint of a sequel to come.

Read with Laura

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Quotes:

For though, as we have said, all children are heartless, this is not precisely true of teenagers. Teenage hearts are raw and new, fast and fierce, and they do not know their own strength

You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.

“So much light, sweet girl, begins in the dark.”

Everything Must Be Paid For, Sooner Or Later.

Nothing could be quite that easy in Fairyland. It could be a Rule: Nothing is easy here. All traffic travels in the direction of most difficulty.

“First Law of Heroics.” The Monaciello grinned up at a confused September. “Someone has to tell you it’s impossible, or the Quest can’t go on.

“A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.

“Well, I use the metric system. It’s the only way to get really exact numbers.”

Forgiveness always takes practice to get right,

RULES OF FAIRYLAND-BELOW
BEWARE OF DOG
ANYTHING IMPORTANT COMES IN THREES AND SIXES
DO NOT STEAL QUEENS
A GIRL IN THE WILD IS WORTH TWO IN CHAINS
NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF TEMPTATION
EVERYTHING MUST BE PAID FOR SOONER OR LATER
WHAT GOES DOWN MUST COME UP

her daughter’s shadow had gone a deep, profound shade of green—just the color of the smoking jacket of a man she’d known long ago, when she was just a small girl.

The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party (Alexander Mccall Smith)

In which Phuti Radiphuti finally gets his act together.

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Quotes:

A chair should be able to support a traditionally built person, and that should apply in particular, she felt, to a traditional chair.

A certain amount of acceptance—which was not the same thing as cowardice, or indifference—was necessary or you would spend your life burning up with annoyance and rage.

Mma Ramotswe had agreed that it would not be a good idea to allow men to do as they pleased, but she felt that there were tactful ways of achieving the desired result. “Rather than telling a man directly what to do,” she said, “a wife should make the man think that he is doing what he wants to do. There are ways of making this happen, Mma—tactful ways.”

One should not forget how to sit on the floor, she thought—never, no matter what happened in one’s life, no matter where one’s life journey took one. A president, she believed, should be able to sit on the floor with as much ease as the humblest herdsman.

Perhaps everybody is lying, she thought. And as she thought this, she remembered a passage from Clovis Andersen. There are some cases where everybody tells lies, he wrote. In these cases you will never know the truth. The more you try to find out what happened, the more lies you uncover. My advice is: do not lose sleep over such matters. Move on, ladies and gentlemen: move on.

The Double Comfort Safari Club (Alexander McCall Smith)

Another perfect Botswana story.

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Quotes:

NO CAR, thought Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, that great mechanic, and good man. No car … He paused. It was necessary, he felt, to order the mind when one was about to think something profound.
Now, his thoughts having been properly marshalled, the right words came to him in a neat, economical expression: No car is entirely perfect. That was what he wanted to say, and these words were all that was needed to say it. So he said it once more. No car is entirely perfect.

Push, shove, twist: these were no mantras for a good mechanic. Listen, coax, soothe: that should be the motto inscribed above the entrance to every garage; that, or the words which he had once seen printed on the advertisement for a garage in Francistown: Your car is ours.

That was the way the world was; it was composed of a few almost perfect people (ourselves); then there were a good many people who generally did their best but were not all that perfect (our friends and colleagues); and finally, there were a few rather nasty ones (our enemies and opponents). Most people fell into that middle group—those who did their best—and the last group was, thankfully, very small and not much in evidence in places like Botswana, where he was fortunate enough to live.

“Never be put off by rudeness, Mma,” she whispered. “It is the rude person who is rude, not you.”

The realization of our mortality came slowly, in dribs and drabs, until we bleakly acknowledged that everything was on loan to us for a short time—the world, our possessions, the people we knew and loved. But we could not spend our time dwelling on our mortality; we still had to behave as if the worst would not happen, for otherwise we would not do very much, we would be defeated and give up.

She used the expression that the Batswana preferred: to become late. There was human sympathy here; to be dead is to be nothing, to be finished. The expression is far too final, too disruptive of the bonds that bind us to one another, bonds that survive the demise of one person. A late father is still your father, even though he is not there; a dead father sounds as if he has nothing further to do—he is finished.

Light made all the difference. Under this midday sky fear and terror seemed very far away, but at night it was easy to imagine the presence of evil and its attendants, even here.

if you listened to what was said at funerals, you would think that this is a land of saints.”

The boatman looked puzzled. Women, he thought. It was always the same: men were interested in crocodiles and hippos and how they behaved; women were not. It was very difficult to understand. What did women think about? He had never worked out an answer to this, in spite of having had five wives. Perhaps I shall never understand them, he thought.

She and Mma Makutsi were not here to sit about—as if they were members of some double comfort safari club—they were here to find somebody, to talk to him, and then to return to Gaborone.

Unlikely things do happen, said Mma Ramotswe, and she knew, for she had seen many such things happen in her job, and had long since come to the conclusion that the extraordinary was often not quite as extraordinary as people imagined it to be.

Mma Ramotswe glanced at Mma Makutsi, and knew that she had to go. And she wanted to, anyway, as she could hardly miss the spectacle of Mma Potokwane, one of the most formidable women in Botswana, coming face-to-face with one of the country’s nastiest senior aunts. It would be an encounter to remember, and talk about, for a long time. And she was sure who would win.

Mma Potokwane moved forward slowly. It was not really like a person moving, thought Mma Ramotswe; it was more a geological movement, the movement of boulders falling slowly down a slope—unstoppable, remorseless, obeying only the rules of gravity and no other.

Love without freedom is like a fire without air. A fire without air goes out

Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

I re-read this, a few years after the first reading, in order to read it at the same time as my mother. I remember the feeling that something was being held back in the story and the final jarring revelation (or is it?). On this second reading, of course, i knew what was coming, so it wasn't as jarring. A good book in many ways, worthy of reading even if only for the musings on the nature of God, religion and the world we choose to live in.

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Quotes:

From Matheran I mailed the notes of my failed novel. I mailed them to a fictitious address in Siberia, with a return address, equally fictitious, in Bolivia.

"I have a story that will make you believe in God."

I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.

Piscine Molitor Patel.

An animal inhabits its space, whether in a zoo or in the wild, in the same way chess pieces move about a chessboard—significantly.

Short of breath I said, "Father, I would like to be a Christian, please." He smiled. "You already are, Piscine—in your heart. Whoever meets Christ in good faith is a Christian. Here in Munnar you met Christ."

I entered the church, without fear this time, for it was now my house too. I offered prayers to Christ, who is alive. Then I raced down the hill on the left and raced up the hill on the right—to offer thanks to Lord Krishna for having put Jesus of Nazareth, whose humanity I found so compelling, in my way.

I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.

"Bapu Gandhi said, All religions are true.' I just want to love God," I blurted out, and looked down, red in the face.

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.

"I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen."

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease.

I had to tame him. It was at that moment that I realized this necessity. It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat. We would live—or we would die—together.

Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape. For example—I wonder—could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less?

Carnivorous trees? A fish-eating algae that produces fresh water? Tree-dwelling aquatic rodents? These things don't exist." "Only because you've never seen them."

And so it goes with God.

Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.