Yesterday, author Maureen Johnson had a great idea. She tweeted “I do wish I had a dime for every email I get that says, “Please put a non-girly cover on your book so I can read it.
Talk about illuminating.
I want to have no dreams that don’t know you, and no desires that you will not or cannot fulfill. I want to perform no deed that does not praise you and tend no flower that does not adorn you. I want to greet no bird that does not know the way to your window and drink from no brook that has not once tasted your image. I want to go to no country in which your dreams have not roamed like strange miracle-workers and dwell in no huts in which you have never taken refuge. I want to know nothing of the days that preceded you in my life or of the people who dwell in those days. As I pass by them I want to place a rare faded wreath of remembering on the grave of these people, if they deserve it, since I am too happy not to be thankful. But the language in which they speak to me now is the language of tombstones, and when they say a word I grope about and touch only cold, rigid letters. I want to praise these deceased with a happy heart; for they disappointed me and misunderstood me and mistreated me and down this long road of woes led me to you.Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salome, June 9, 1897
Hurricane by Mary Oliver
It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.
I Go Down to the Shore by Mary Oliver
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable?
what shall -
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
Books Read in 2012
Presented chronologically:
- Ganymede - Cherie Priest
- A Storm of Swords - G.R.R. Martin
- Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea
- A Feast of Crows - G.R.R. Martin
- The Magicians - Lev Grossman
- Wild - Cheryl Strayed
- The Tiger’s Wife - Tea Obreht
- The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
- A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan
- A Timbered Choir: Sabbath Poems - Wendell Berry
- The Fox Woman - Kij Johnson
- The Rook - Daniel O’Malley
- Cold Magic - Kate Elliott
- Black - Ted Dekker
- Redshirts - John Scalzi
- Persuasion - Jane Austen
- Sonnets to Orpheus - Rainer Maria Rilke
- Twixt Firelight and Water - Juliet Marillier
- Remalna’s Children - Sherwood Smith
- Banner of the Damned - Sherwood Smith
- Soulless - Gail Carriger
- Fudoki - Kij Johnson
- Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties - Rainer Maria Rilke
- Hounded - Kevin Hearne
- The Ten Thousand Things - Maria Dermout
- Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen
- Changeless - Gail Carriger
- The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman
- Blameless - Gail Carriger
- The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
- The Drowned Cities - Paolo Bacigalupi
- The Killing Moon - N.K. Jemisin
- Goliath - Scott Westerfeld
- Letters on Cezanne - Rainer Maria Rilke
- Railsea - China Mieville
- An Uncommon Solider: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman - Sarah Rosetta Wakeman
- The Wise Man’s Fear - Patrick Rothfuss
You can check out my comments and ratings over at Goodreads.
That other island looked increasingly delicious. I’m not a kid anymore, Sham thought. Shouldn’t take anything for granted. A big bird cawed as he thought that, & Sham took it as applause. All my life, he thought, they’ve told me about the danger of the earth. Maybe it’s true. But… He kept his eyes on the foody island across the narrow railsea strait. But maybe it’s also useful for them if everyone believes it. If people are too scared to just go.Railsea by China Miéville
TO: Robert D. Clark38 W 59th St.New York City
Feb 9th 1920
Dear Bob:
Your letter riled me to such an extent that I’m answering immediatly. Who are all these ‘real people’ who ‘create business and politics’? and of whose approval I should be so covetous? Do you mean grafters who keep sugar in their ware houses so that people have to go without or the cheap-jacks who by bribery and high-school sentiment manage to controll elections. I can’t pick up a paper here without finding that some of these ‘real people’ who will not be satisfied only with ‘a brilliant mind’ (I quote you) have just gone up to Sing Sing for a stay—Brindell and Hegerman, two pillars of society, went this morning.
Who in hell ever respected Shelley, Whitman, Poe, O. Henry, Verlaine, Swinburne, Villon, Shakespeare ect when they were alive. Shelley + Swinburne were fired from college; Verlaine + O Henry were in jail. The rest were drunkards or wasters and told generally by the merchants and petty politicians and jitney messiahs of their day that real people wouldn’t stand it And the merchants and messiahs, the shrewd + the dull, are dust—and the others live on.
Just occasionally a man like Shaw who was called an immoralist 50 times worse than me back in the 90ties, lives on long enough so that the world grows up to him. What he believed in 1890 was heresy then—by by now its almost respectable. It seems to me I’ve let myself be dominated by ‘authorities’ for too long—the headmaster of Newman, S.P. A, Princeton, my regiment, my business boss—who knew no more than me, in fact I should say these 5 were all distinctly my mental inferiors. And that’s all that counts! The Rosseaus, Marxes, Tolstois—men of thought, mind you, ‘impractical’ men, ‘idealist’ have done more to decide the food you eat and the things you think + do than all the millions of Roosevelts and Rockerfellars that strut for 20 yrs. or so mouthing such phrases as 100% American (which means 99% village idiot), and die with a little pleasing flattery to the silly and cruel old God they’ve set up in their hearts.
