Category: Book Passages

New Fiction + Book Passage of the Week (12/26/2015)

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If you haven’t already, check out my short story Ghosts, in the Eighth Anniversary issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. The story is a reprint, originally published in Terracotta Typewriter. Since Terracotta Typewriter’s gone (and with a cool name like that, it wasn’t long for this world), I thought Ghosts could use another run.

It’s actually from an unpublished novel set in 2007 Wuhan.The book acts as a prequel to Little Red King, featuring a side character from that novel, detailing how he goes from English teacher at Wuhan University to living illegally in Hankou’s back-alleys.

 

Today’s book passage comes from The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane. No commentary; it speaks for itself:

The limestone dunes recalled dreams Danny’d had, ones he’d forgotten about until this moment. Dreams in which he hopelessly crossed vast moonlit deserts with no idea how he’d gotten there, no idea how he’d ever find his way home. And weighing down on him all the heavier with every step was the growing fear that home no longer existed.

Dennis Lehane is a great writer. If you’re looking for a good read, you can’t really go wrong with him.

Book Passage of the Week (12/19/2015) – from Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Cave on Earth

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About a year ago I read Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Cave on Earth, by James M. Tabor. It tracks the efforts of two teams, one led by American Bill Stone to the Cheve Cave system in southern Mexico and the other, led by Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk to the Kurbera supercave in the country Georgia.

Exploring caves is dangerous. It seems obvious, but Blind Descent opens it up in ways you wouldn’t imagine, from diseases to sound amplification (imagine sleeping next to a roaring 747 for months at a time) to The Rapture, an anxiety attack brought on by prolonged periods in darkness.

And by darkness, I mean complete darkness. Sometimes in spaces so tight you can barely wriggle through. All your light runs on batteries, and all your equipment must be protected.

You also have to deal with sumps, flooded underground tunnels which carry the risk of getting lost, damaging your equipment

And drowning:

Drowning is a cruel way to go. It throws two of the body’s most potent self-preservation reflexes into competition. Trapped underwater, you hold your breath as long as possible, with the urge to breathe growing from a whisper in your chest to a scream in your brain. As the carbon dioxide in your bloodstream builds up, you start to jerk and spasm. Gray fog closes down your peripheral vision. With your vision down to points of light, your fists clenched and toes curled as if in orgasm, your mouth opens not to scream but to inhale involuntarily. Finally, your lungs fill and you become negatively buoyant, floating slowly down, staring at eternity. There may be no good ways to die, but some are worse than others.

All in all, the book is great. Here’s a great interview with James Tabor about supercave exploration and be sure to check out this article about the Krubera Cave and the deepest point on earth, “Game Over”.

Book Passage of the Week (12/12/2015) – from Christopher Hitchens

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Tuesday will mark four years since Christopher Hitchens died.

You can read plenty about his career here and it’s always a pleasure to listen to him talk. My favorite is where he shreds Jerry Falwell:

He was a prolific writer too, whether it was exposing Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger or religion. He also supported the Iraq War and never backed down. There’s something to admire about that.

The quote below is from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It was one of several atheist books released during the time, along with Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Christopher Hitchens is easily the best (and most tolerable) of their little group.

Anyways…

Nothing optional–from homosexuality to adultery — is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash.

And that reminds me: whenever I hear Rick Perry ramble on about homosexuality, I wonder if the bathroom tiles still hurt his knees or if he’s gotten used to it by now.

Book Passage of the Week (12/4/2015) – from Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy

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Let’s look at some prose this week:

The yellow trees on the mountain subsided into yellow and flame and to ultimate nakedness. An early winter fell, a cold wind sucked among the black and barren branches. Alone in the empty shell of a house the squatter watched through the moteblown glass a rimshard of bonecolored moon come cradling up over the black balsams on the ridge, ink trees a facile hand had sketched against the paler dark of winter heavens.

January 2008 at the college bookstore. I was thinking about adding another class, when  I spotted Child of God on the bookshelf.

I’d found my new class.

I had read The Road the year before, which I discovered through the old Rudius Media Writing Forum (and isn’t a shame that place shut down? Now we’re stuck with the Absolute Write funhouse), and that book made me a huge Cormac McCarthy fan. I don’t like all his books — Cities of the Plain was awful, and I never finished The Crossing — but when he gets it right, he gets it right.

Here’s one more from Child of God. Because why not?

And you could see among the faces a young girl with candyapple on her lips and her eyes wide. Her pale hair smelled of soap, womanchild from beyond the years, rapt below the sulphur glow and pitchlight of some medieval fun fair. A lean skylong candle skewered the black pools in her eyes. Her fingers clutched. In the flood of this breaking brimstone galaxy she saw the man with the bears watching her and she edged closer to the girl by her side and brushed her hair with two fingers quickly.

On a related note, it seems Christmas is coming early in 2016.

 

Book Passage of the Week (11/28/2015)

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This week’s book passage comes from Philalawyer. His book, Happy Hour is for Amateurs, details his life in law and his eventual escape. What he writes about isn’t limited to law. Work sucks, but life doesn’t have to:

To the average law student biting his nails, scribbling notes furiously, chain smoking outside the library and mainlining espresso to stay up studying into the early morning, this thinking is insane. The job is the brass ring, and if you’re not pathologically devoted to “the law”, you’re at odds with almost everyone and everything around you. The statements professors routinely made about commitment to the field—”I never had time to read a newspaper in law school”, or “Law becomes your life”—struck me as signs of mental illness, low intellect, or a person trying to escape himself.

– Philalawyer, Happy Hour Is For Amateurs: Work Sucks. Life Doesn’t Have To.

Check out his blog (on the Internet Archive) and don’t miss his Commencement 2009 speech.