ten books, ten sentences
my january reading round-up
hello old friends and new subscribers!!
It’s lovely to have you here.
Since January is almost over (!!!) I figured I’d do a very short post on the most striking sentences from the most striking books I’ve read this month. I tried to keep these to a sentence apiece, but copying out passages has taught me that some sentences—often the zingiest ones—require other sentences to bolster them up:
“You can’t train for a sport unless you believe you have control over your own destiny. The point of training is to change the outcome of the future. You train to change something you otherwise would have lost” (Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel).
“She was going to waste, she feared, she knew, the life she had made spoiling around her, turning to rot” (Piglet, Lottie Hazell).
“[Sigmund] Freud’s letters to [Wilhelm] Fliess are gravid with tantalizing metaphors; before one visit, for example, he wrote that he’d be coming with “two open ears and one temporal lobe lubricated for reception” (The Selfishness of Others, Kristin Dombek). 🤭🤭🤭
“The past was not a fixed point, and neither was the truth, and telling the truth about the past was like trying to hit a bull’s-eye with a shotgun” (The Fetishist, Katherine Min).
“The desire to please people is the desire to not be singular” (Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel).
“Naturally I was suspicious. Adela was shifting, elusive—her very face was inconsistent. Her reasons were bad, half-veiled. Then again, whose upper management am I not describing? Who trusts their workplace? Who thinks their job is on the side of right? They fed us all poison from a bottle marked “prestige” and we developed a high tolerance for bitterness” (The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley).
“A life taken over can be wonderful. But it can also be sappy and stupid and dramatic. A play directed by God is many people’s stage of choice” (Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel).
“Ideas are frictional, factional entities which wilt when pinned to flowcharts. Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions” (The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley).
“Looking up to watch a bird fly slowly across the sky, she realized that living as she had lived she had been investing the future with more and more of herself. The present, always slipping away, was ghostly, every moment spent itself in apprehension of the next and these apprehensions, these faded expectancies cumbered her memory, crowded out her achievements and promised to make the past barren” (The Hotel, Elizabeth Bowen).
“Life is the plumpness of all directions, of surprises and contradictions, of impulses, mistakes, duplicities, and redemptions” (The Fetishist, Katherine Min).
And since the eagle-eyed likely spotted that these are ten sentences from six books, here are the remaining four books, divided into two groups:
Books I read for information rather than illuminating language, but would still recommend: The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You by Julie Zhuo, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel.
. . . Normals Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson, King Nyx by Kirsten Bakis
See you all in February!