You can bend the paperclip
until it turns to a fishhook.
from “Question of Flight” by Katie Berger
This is what I got for an answer to a question I asked the Bibliomancy Oracle the other day. The question was trivial and the answer complex. I revel in the difficult to understand. I was going to continue that sentence with because but I realized that it would make no sense to you. Think paperclip. Think fishhook. A neighbor’s beautiful children rang my doorbell the other day and handed me a bouquet of orangey roses. They were from their mother with whom I’d been in a discussion about the nightmare situation in the Middle East. My neighbor is a devout Orthodox Jewish woman, someone who I probably have as little in common with as any other person of a fundamentalist religion, except that we both have children with disabilities, and that fact has bound us together in loving relationship. In the end, that’s what matters to most of us, isn’t it? Think paperclip. I read that the POTUS and his Treasurer chuckled together about someone’s claim that the great united states of america can’t afford a war on two fronts (i.e. Ukraine and Israel). Maybe they were boasting of course we can. Is this supposed to make us feel comfortable because it makes me feel ill. I might hate these people. Think fishhook.
I saw Cat Power last week in concert. She sang Bob Dylan, and it made me cry.
These are the novels and memoirs I’ve read or re-read in the past year, so far. I’ve starred those that I’m teaching and, therefore, am re-reading or have re-read. Reading is my only constant. If you want to know more about any of them, please leave a comment!
Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan* Medea by Euripedes Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt* The World and All That It Holds by Aleksander Hemon The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford Self Help by Lorrie Moore Wool Gathering by Patti Smith Middlemarch by George Eliot Story of a Poem by Matthew Zapruder All of This by Rebecca Woolf August Blue by Deborah Levy Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano Home Fire by Kamila Shamsi* A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney Antigone, translated by Seamus Heaney The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor When Reasons End by Yiyun Lee The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasm Frankissstein by Jeannette Winterson Frankenstein by Mary Shelley* The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury* Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte* Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut* The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne* Maus by Artie Speigelman* She may be lying down but she may be very happy by Jody Gelb The Road by Cormac McCarthy* Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf* A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf* To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf* Monster by Walter Dean Myers I'm a Fan by Sheena Patel The Glow by Jessie Gaynor Trespasses by Louise Kennedy Death Valley by Melissa Broder Dreaming by Roz Chast
I’m going to pluck one of these out and urge you to go forward and buy it, borrow it and read it. She may be lying down but she may be very happy was written by my beloved friend Jody Gelb who, along with her daughter Lueza, were Sophie’s and my first friends in the disability world. We walked the streets of New York City together in the mid-nineties and reveled in our moves to the west coast at the same time. We remain intensely connected, and while you might think that makes my opinion of the book biased, I can assure you that it’s a magnificent memoir and that I’d think that no matter who wrote it. You can buy it at all the usual places, but hopefully you’ll do so at an independent bookstore. Here’s a link to Jody’s website.
First person to leave a comment who wants a copy of the micro-memoir will get one!
I don’t read many memoirs but will get Jody’s! Will order at my local bookstore. :)
I went through an intense Middlemarch period once. I think I read it three times in a year or so, the last time with some random online book group formed just for that purpose. It was a lot of fun to discuss.
Paperclips. I am thinking now, paperclips.
I'm reading the Covenant of Water. I needed to read something different than me. Thanks for talking to me. I needed it. Hugs, Paula