A Return to (some) Favorite Books

There hadn't been time in a long time to return to my shelf of books, but this morning I did. I felt like I do on those Saturday mornings when I leave in the near-dark for the Farmer's Market and stand (in advance of jostling crowds) before cases of fresh cheese, fat shrimp, silk chocolate, blueberry muffins. Rich. That's how I felt.

I pulled Elizabeth Graver's Awake to my lap and read again the last 50 or so pages—one of the finest renderings of maternal guilt and regret that I have ever read. I pulled down Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor was Divine and decided to read it all the way through again tomorrow, so that I could remember fully why I loved it so much a few years ago. I took Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses into my hands, and resolved to read it again on Sunday. I returned to The Cellist of Sarajevo and remembered: Another book of multiple voices, masterfully done.

And then I started reading Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy, and oh my, truly. Have you ever seen so much poetry in a novel's opening lines? Almost like reading Carole Maso's Ava—every detail an awakening, a surprise.

For you today, then, from Hansen:

Crickets.

Mooncreep and spire.

Ears are flattened to the head of a stone panther water spout....

Tallow candles in red glass jars shudder on a high altar.

White hallway and dark mahogany joists. Wide plank floors walked soft and smooth as soap.

Wide plank floors walked soft and smooth as soap.

Read more...

K.

I'm going to be honest: I was warned. Against taking on a high-school internship student, a writer, they said. Against getting involved, again. Didn't I know that I'd run out of hours? Didn't I see the stuff (meaningless, yet demanding stuff) piling up around my house? Didn't I know what happened to me when I let myself care, and I cannot manage not to care. Not ever. I'm all blood and bones with caring.

I knew. I saw. I said yes to K. anyway. It was only a month-long internship. One month, I said to me. One month, because when I asked him what he was reading at the time, his answer was all the persuasion that I needed.

Thing is, this K., this once-high school student, now graduate, this enormously greedy, never fatuous reader, this writer, and let me tell you, what a writer—this K. was no one-month internship deal. He was, how do I say this? A person with a massive heart and a way with words that broke my heart, even as I sat there, all Mentor-like, and attempted to suggest improvements. Will you read this little book about poems, I asked him, and he did. Will you read OUT STEALING HORSES, and he declared it brilliant, because it is brilliant, and that's K., the real K. He knows from brilliant.

And just now, when I was supposed to be interviewing a client, supposed to be pricing a project, supposed to be doing a bunch of ordinary, grown-up, work-a-day things, he sent an email, containing this quote, which was the thing, just then, that I needed to read. So I give it to you. Because hoarding just won't do.

"All right. He would write a book when he got through with this.
But only about the things he knew, truly, and about what he knew.
But I will have to be a much better writer than I am now to handle
them, he thought. The things he had come to know in this war
were not so simply."
-Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls

K., maybe you'll read THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO next. Because sometimes the hardest, most complicated, most wrenching of stories have to be contained inside the smoothest of shells. Because your patience with this book will be rewarded. Because it's about war, and not simply.

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Weather

We hovered on the tarmac beneath a storm. We flew through a thicket of clouds. Far past midnight the plane came down, and the winds have blown, and the clouds have gathered, and every now and again there has been sun.

While in Iowa, a terrible tragedy. While in Wyoming the air is angry. While we all go on, living as we have, watching the skies, wondering what it means for now, what it means for all the days from now.

In between looking up, I have been looking down, at some of the most extraordinary, nearly brutally brilliant books I've read in a very long time: DEATH OF A RIVER GUIDE. THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO. THE GATHERING.

We go away to get away from our own smallness. To be awakened again. By books. By weather.

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