Tag: book passages

Book Passage of the Week (11/20/2016) – from The 50th Law

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From The 50th Law, by Robert Greene and 50 Cent:

You do not wait for things to get better—you seize this chance to prove yourself. Mentally framing a negative event as a blessing in disguise makes it easier for you to move forward. It is a kind of mental alchemy, transforming shit into sugar.

 

No matter how much money or resources you have accumulated, someone will try to take them from you, or unexpected changes in the world will push you backward. These are not adverse circumstances but merely life as it is.

 

What you must do instead is accept the fact that all events occur for a reason, and that it is within your capacity to see this reason as positive. Marcus Aurelius compared this to a fire that consumes everything in its path—all circumstances become consumed in your mental heat and converted into opportunities. A man or woman who believes this cannot be hurt by anything or anyone.

If you buy the book (and I recommend it, because it’s great), then go for the paperback. Not only is it easier to make notes, but did you see the Kindle price? $14.99? Do they secretly want people NOT to buy the ebook?

Book Passage of the Week – from Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy

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Suttree and A Death in the Family are the two famous Knoxville novels. They even have similar openings; Agee’s book gives us Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and McCarthy gives us:

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.

Seven un-indented paragraphs of that, introducing us to Suttree’s Knoxville.

I’m in the middle of reading Suttree. I can’t say I enjoy the book — my favorite remains The Road  — but there are some nice passages:

In the long days of all they went like dreamers. Watching the sky for rain. When it came it rained for days. They sat in groups and watched the rain fall over the deserted fairgrounds. Pools of mud and dark sawdust and wet trodden papers. The painted canvas funhouse walls and the stark skeletons of amusement rides against a gray and barren sky.

And:

A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. The rusting carcass of an automobile passed slowly on his right. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan inkwash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea.

And this, from a fever dream. Shades of The Road?

By the side of a dark dream road he’d seen a hawk nailed to a barn door. But what loomed was a flayed man with his brisket tacked open like a cooling beef and his skull peele, blue and bulbous and palely luminiscent, black grots his eyeholes and bloody mouth gaped tongueless. The traveler had seized his fingers in his jaws, but it was not alone this horror that he cried. Beyond the flayed man dimly adumbrate another figure paled, for his surgeons moved about the world even as you and I.

While you’re here, check out Yelping with Cormac. My favorite is The Apple Store.

Book Passage of the Week – from The Corpse Walker (9/17/2016)

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Just finished The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu. I’m writing a full review as we speak.

From Zhou, the Public Restroom Manager:

My monthly profits are about two hundred to three hundred yuan. I’m pretty content with that. And for an old guy like me, managing toilets is easy work. Life is tough and tiring. All my nerves are strained. One of these days, one of the nerves will snap, and then I’ll be gone.

Luo, The Corpse Walker:

Country folk seldom got to visit the city and had no access to entertainment all year long. Public denunciation meetings offered free drama for many onlookers. None of them wanted to miss it.

Huang, the Feng Shui Master:

At the moment, my life is coming to an end, reaching zero. Zero is nature. The mountain is my home.

Deng Kuan, The Abbot:

When you turn one hundred, and look back on the early part of your life, a couple sentences are sufficient.

And let’s not forget the introduction, written by Wen Huang:

During the famine, [Liao Yiwu] suffered from edema and was dying. Out of desperation, Liao’s mother carried him to the countryside, where an herbal doctor “held me over a wok that contained boiling herbal water.” The herbal steam miraculously cured him.

There is a lot of mythologizing about Liao Yiwu. Not only was he born the year The Great Leap Forward was launched, he was also “miraculously cured”, a presumably divine act that would later allow him to live on the lam as a dissident writer, barely known in his own country.

Also, this is an abridged work; according to the introduction, Wen Huang chose twenty-seven stories they felt were both representative of the work and of interest to Western audiences.

I’ll be covering this and more in my full review.

Book Passage of the Week (4/16/2015) – from Requiem for a Dream, by Hubert Selby Jr.

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Like Atonement, it helps if you’ve seen the movie…though the book Requiem for a Dream is far better than Atonement.

The writing style? Let’s say it might take some getting used to. It’s also brilliant. I haven’t read Hubert Selby Jr.’s other books, so I’m not sure if this is his regular style, but it works great in Requiem for a Dream:

They looked at Marions sketches of the coffee house they were going to open, but with diminishing frequency and enthusiasm. Somehow there just didnt seem to be time for it though they spent a lot of time just lying around and not doing much of anything in particular and making vague plans for the future and enjoying the feeling that everything would always be alright, just like it was now.

 

 

 

Book Passage of the Week (3/19/2016) – World Gone By, Dennis Lehane

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I recently finished World Gone By. It’s the third book in the Coughlin Trilogy that begins with The Given Day.

I loved The Given Day and Live by Night. This one? I didn’t enjoy it as much as the others. World Gone By is much shorter than the other two books. Things are smaller scale, more like wrapping up the loose ends than telling a full story from beginning to end.

It’s Dennis Lehane, so there’s going to be some good prose. Here’s a couple passages I really liked:

He only saw Montooth’s face in the muzzle flash, it appeared out of the darkness like something disconnected from the man’s body, like a death mask in a fun house, and then the windshield spiderwebbed.

And this, which might spoil Live by Night:

The light took flight from his wife’s eyes. He watched her cross whatever transom led to whatever world or void lay beyond this one. In the final thirty seconds of her life, her eyelids fluttered nine times. And then never again.

And you know what? Fuck it, here’s one more:

[Joe] waited for others to come. He hoped they would. He hoped there was more to this than a dark night, an empty beach, and waves that never quite reached the shore.

If you’re going to read World Gone By, you’re better off starting with either The Given Day or Live by Night. Live by Night is more essential since both it and World Gone By have the same main character.