Book Passage of the Week (2/15/2016) – from In the Country of Desire, by Leslie Garrett

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I just finished In the Country of Desire, by Leslie Garrett.

This, and Beasts, his other book, are both out of print. They’re easy to come by — I grabbed a used copy off Thriftbooks — while information on Leslie Garrett is not so easy to come by. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. He was a contemporary of Cormac McCarthy, and the best I could find was this page:

As my friend Leslie Garrett lay dying of cancer that clutched him by the throat, news came that his old comrade and competitor, Cormac McCarthy, had just realized his greatest professional triumph–winning the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses. The award catapulted McCarthy to the front ranks of American letters. Less last book, In the Country of Desire, meanwhile, was dying like its author–a slow, painful wasting in obscurity.

I’ll cut to the chase: I didn’t enjoy the book. It was fairly well written, but I didn’t care about the people  that much. I do plan on checking out Leslie Garrett’s first novel, Beasts.

Here’s a couple passages that stuck with me:

There is a street in the city dedicated to lonely men. It serves not the ordinary loneliness of ordinary men, which is wistful and longing, but that loneliness which deadens the spirit and makes the mind and body scream. And yet these are the quietest of men.

And:

Willa had asked where God lived, and her grandmother had told her that he lived so far up in the sky that no one could see him. Later Willa went to the woods and climbed as far up in a tree as she could go and searched the sky for hours, but she could not see God. Now she thought that perhaps, in her own way, that was what her mother had been searching for too: the face of God that no one ever sees.

An average book despite some nice writing. Worth checking out if you’re into obscure books.

Book Passage of the Week (2/6/2016) – from The Old Man & the Sea

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The first Hemingway I read was The Old Man & the Sea.

I didn’t read it in high school, or college. I read it in China, summer 2009. I’d bought it from a Hong Kong bookstore earlier that year. Back then (and maybe today, it’s a safe bet) Wuhan did not have a wide selection of English books. Even the much-touted store on Zhongnan Lu had little more than classic books.

I did most of my book buying through Albiris and later Thriftbooks. I did grab a few from some street vendors in Wudaokou on trips to Beijing, which netted me a copy of the fabulous Time Traveler’s Wife, a pirated copy whose text began repeating near the end.

Here’s a passage I underlined almost seven (seven!?) years ago:

He looked across the sea and knew how alone he was now. But he could see the prisms in the deep dark water and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm. The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Book Passage of the Week (1/30/2016) – from Atonement

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This week’s passage is from Atonement by Ian McEwan. I read Fight Club before watching the movie, read No Country for Old Men before watching the movie, but Atonement one of the few books whose movie version I watched first.

It helps to see the movie so you know what’s coming. Because this book drags, particularly at the beginning. Had I not known what was going to happen, I would’ve put it down.

I love the ending passage, but I ultimately decided not to put it here. I went with a passage instead that helps explain why Briony stuck to a story that ruined two lives:

Children hated generously, capriciously. It hardly mattered. But to be the object of adult hatred was an initiation into a solemn new world. It was promotion.

Or perhaps not, when you see how many people grow older but not up.

Sea Age (from a work-in-progress)

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On the way home, William thought about aging.

William had seen the effects of the Navy. You had a shore age and a sea age, and your age at sea could affect your shore age. For example, a former AG, Tindale, had joined the Navy at nineteen. Four years later, he left at twenty-three, only he looked closer to forty-three. Life as a ship’s company AG — duty days, maintenance, cranking in the mess decks twice — had made him skip a few grades in the primary school of life. Now he was in college, older, wiser, haggard . . . and not without a huge drinking problem, undisputed master of the beer funnel.

Your shore age is twenty-nine. Which made his sea age . . . he thought about it. One did not simply add a number to get one’s sea age.

William parked in his driveway and looked in the rearview mirror. Adding a number didn’t cut it. You had to look in the mirror too. The changes to your face helped determine the number; they didn’t lie.

“I’d say about fifty,” he said to the face in the mirror.

The lines on that face agreed.

 

Other samples from Keepers of Time:

Bloody Marys

Book Passage of the Week (1/23/2016)

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Missed last week. Working three mids shifts in a row, I had no time or energy for last week. In that regard, the Navy has finally succeeded in its purpose: it took over my life, if only for a few days.

Here’s another quote from Happy Hour is for Amateurs. I’ll leave it alone. It speaks for itself:

 A friend of mine once explained the average life of toil by quoting his father, a psychiatrist. “People hate their jobs. We call it depression and give them drugs.” “Do anything solely for money and you’ll never be rich,” my father used to tell me when I was young. … Now the lesson was finally sticking. A little late, a little costly, but I was still lucky. For a lot of people, it never registers at all. They piss away the only irreplaceable resource they’ll ever have.

Last night a young E-3 said he regretted not taking SGOT-Norfolk orders. He finds the watchfloor too tedious…as if tedium goes away when you’re out to sea for months at a time. Perhaps he’d like to work mids on the ship, and have to wake up in the middle of the day for twelve GQ drills on a twenty-five day underway. I wanted to laugh, but when you’re awake long enough, you forget what laughter is.

Humor is secured. Bitching, on the other hand…