Wyndy > Recent Status Updates

Being scared doesn't mean that I haven't the courage to do things that frighten me. ~ Harriet Hörnfeldt

“When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”
~ From ‘Blue Highways’ by William Least Heat Moon

I’ve spent seventy-one years with these people so far, and I’m still 100% invested in their lives. This is storytelling at its best.

“What is worry but fear of what the future holds?” ~ Big Ammachi, 1967, Parambil

This is Verghese’s magnum opus so far, imo. We shall see where the second half leads. I’m fully invested in every single human being in this novel. And I want to live, even briefly, at Parambil.

“For twenty-eight years of Baby Mol’s life, the sun has never failed to come up, yet every morning she’s ecstatic at its return. To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.”

This is a tale for the ages - wonderfully detailed and transportive. Finney even includes an alienist and an amanuensis.

A slice of life in the Kentucky hills:

“Murder was uncommon in Rocksalt and when it did occur, it was usually family or a neighbor and everyone knew who did it.”

“The hill way was to help if you could, with no expectation of return.”

I love this author. "The wolf turned his head. They regarded each other and the man felt plumbed, known, seen in his entirety, and there was no fear in him, only calm like the unwavering gaze of the wolf leader. The wolf stood. He swept his gaze back and forth across the star-dappled blanket of the heavens and Starlight followed the look. The universe, deep and eternal, hung above them: solemn and frank as a prayer."

"The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way." ~ the judge

Classic McCarthy:
“They set forth in a crimson dawn where sky and earth closed in a razorous plane. Out there dark little archipelagos of cloud and the vast world of sand and scrub shearing upward into the shoreless void where those blue islands trembled and the earth grew uncertain, gravely canted and veering out through tinctures of rose and the dark beyond the dawn to the uttermost rebate of space.”

Just picked this up from the library today. Trying to keep my expectations low . . .

This story keeps getting better and better. I hope Patchett stays on track for the second half. She has been known to disappoint me down the stretch but I sense a favorite coming on.

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it.

“Cousin Marie says politicians aren’t gentlemen, said Cornelia.” How timely, given today’s news. Circa 1937.

“The United States is an entire universe; it contains several nations and every landscape imaginable within its territory.” Truth, from a Chilean author no less.

This place. These people. This amazing author. Survival and fortitude on every single page:

“The boy also raises his voice, they sing other Christmas songs, sing loudly, almost scream them far up in the mountains, inside a snow-hole, far from human habitation, in winds bent on beheading, with their backs up against a coffin, and it’s the end of April . . . They sing, and in the meantime forget their hunger.”

. . . the room was rather small, not much space around the desk, the shelves behind it full of books in variously handsome bindings, some
half tattered like old, worn-down men, others better; several beautiful, even brilliantly beautiful, and then there is this wonderful smell of books and dust. He breathes it in deeply; Heaven probably isn’t much bigger than this, it must be blissful to live here.

Book Two in the trilogy is officially underway. I rarely move straight into a sequel, but decided I wasn’t quite ready to leave this Icelandic “Village”or “the boy” just yet.

"There can be such a gulf between one's exterior and interior lives, and this should tell us something, it should teach us not to trust appearances too much; he who does so misses the essence."

This book . . . so many nuggets of perfection:

"Dreams sometimes free us from life. They are the sunshine behind the world.”

I am loving all the elements of the natural world this book contains - they are such intricate characters in themselves and have me rereading almost every sentence:

“Words vary. Some are bright, others dark; ‘April,’ for instance, is a bright word . . . the word ‘April’ is composed of light, birdsong, and eager anticipation. April is the most hopeful of months.”

“Life also has an advantage over death in the way you have some idea of what you’re dealing with, death on the other hand is the great uncertainty, and there is little more antipathetic to human beings than uncertainty; it is the worst of all.”

Oron sat forward and he realized he could put the pistol behind the man’s ear and pull the trigger and this would be the end of whatever had begun. No matter if this man was the good guy or the bad guy or somewhere in between he could have this all done by daybreak with a bullet and a shovel and then life could be what it was when the sun last came up.

This book holds some of Smith’s best writing to-date, IMO. Here is one tiny example:

“The coyote emerged from the blackwood and trotted across the clearing of the hillside, moving through the luminous night in the rangy gait of the underfed.”