There’s a chapter midway through on the nature of immigration that I’m going to use in my classes. Need to get photograph those pages.
Sarr, Mohamed Mbougar. The Silence of the Choir. Translated by Alison Anderson. New York, NY: Europa Editions, 2024.
Tough book. Hard to read at points. Like Sally Rooney’s books, it makes me glad, so glad, to be old, to have had a childhood without an all-encompassing computer in my pocket.
Quote, which I could build an entire week in seminar around:
Loved this book. Love any book that tries to dig into the roots of current fads and provide genuine depth.
Inspiring concluding paragraph:
Chayka, Kyle. The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.
The main character describing his father:
I felt my love for him gather itself up — as heavy and as solid as a stone — in my chest. The talented historian who managed to remain independent, part of that silent army that exists in every country, made up of individuals who had come to the conclusion that they live among unreasonable compatriots and therefore must, like grownups in a playground, endure the chaos until the bell rings, resigned to the fact that this may come long after they are gone.
Matar, Hisham. My Friends. First U.S. edition. New York: Random House, 2024.
“There’s something about the faces of everyone in my family…I think you can see in our eyes the kind of sadness, which is in two places at once — mourning the past, grieving the future. Sad in a historically significant and visually satisfying way. Looking sad like it’s your job.”
Cornejo Villavicencio, Karla. Catalina. First edition. New York: One World, 2024.
This quote from the book, though, about museums and memorials, was money:
I was surrounded by the specter of 10,000 people moving through the galleries in a manner I had witnessed elsewhere, in other exhibitions: examining, with wistful, beatific expressions, each artifact…emblems of a shameful chapter which had, to them, closed; shaking their heads but ultimately marveling—often with childlike fascination—at how such a thing could have happened, when, amidst calls for it to never happen again, it is happening all the time everywhere.
Shimoda, Brandon. The Afterlife Is Letting Go. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2024.
“I used to think there was a ‘before’ and ‘after’ most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life. But now I know with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after. Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it’s still there, like that dam water, insisting, seeping, across the past and future. “
Wood, Charlotte. Stone Yard Devotional. Crows Nest, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2023.
Berry, Wendell. Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013-2023 (First Counterpoint edition. California: Counterpoint, 2024),59.
“A garden is just a way of mapping the strengths and limitations of your personality onto the soil. It would be too much to bear if nature didn’t temper a gardener’s ambition or laziness with her own unsolicited abundance.”
Klinkenborg, Verlyn. The Rural Life. (1st Back Bay pbk. ed. Boston [Mass.]: Back Bay Books, 2004), 33
“But in that strange way our world is arranged, petty causes have always given birth to great events, just as great ventures have always ended up with petty consequences.”
“And anyway, I am not fond of ruminations if ruminations are all they remain.”
From The Old World Landowners
Gogol, Nikola Vasilevich. And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon: Essential Stories. Translated by Oliver Ready. London: Pushkin Press, 2019.
