“I meant to leave you a reasonably candid testament to my better self, and it seems to me now that what you must see here is just an old man struggling with the difficulty of understanding what it is he’s struggling with.” – Thoughts on Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
“There have been heroes here, and saints and martyrs, and I want you to know that. Because that is the truth, even if no one remembers it. To look at the place, it’s just a cluster of houses strung along a few roads, and a little row of brick buildings with stores in them, and … Continue reading
“I had a feeling that I wasn’t crying over any one sad thing, but rather for many. […] I wished my heart would break and get it over it.” Thoughts on Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow, both by Banana Yoshimoto (translated from Japanese by Megan Backus)
Banana Yoshimoto made me cry on my birthday. She made me think of my past year, and she made me think of you, too. It wasn’t my intention, really, to read Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow on the night of my birthday; in fact, it wasn’t my intention to read Yoshimoto anytime soon at all. I … Continue reading
“The kind that stays with you, a clever line in a movie, a well-written anecdote in a book, a quip in a poem, and finally, finally I had a punch-line, a point, a meaning to the rambling.” – Thoughts on Textual Healing by Eric Smith
I tend to shy away from funny-romantic stories when it comes to books, mainly because the cookie-cutter formulas are getting rusty overtime: boy (or girl) with a crisis meets and falls in love with a girl (or boy) who becomes an inspiration for self-improvement, evil ex (or mother, or boss, or obsessed stalker) comes in … Continue reading
The (wannabe) Literati 