- Spellbinder by Melanie Rawn. Finished 5/8. I picked this book up because a) I’ve been a bit brain dead starting a new part time job, b) I needed some fluff after reading a long way gone, and c) I love Rawn’s dragon series. It’s more of an urban witch book than a fantasy and not, in my opinion, up to par with her past series–but still an enjoyable romance/magic/mystery novel. It accomplished what I needed it to; it was a quick, easy read that I didn’t need to chew on too much. The book is a great deal about connections and there is an interesting passage around p. 323 about really seeing people, and even more importantly how many people we can allow ourselves to be really seen by. Misc. quotes: “We come closest to Deity when we create–whether it’s a work of art, a friendship, a baby, a marriage, a satisfying meal, laughter, the smile on the face of a child…Don’t most of us venerate, in one form or another, the Creator of All? Something results from a creative act” (337). “Can there be only one path? Life is a journey toward knowledge–of self, of the world, of Deity–and if we don’t challenge ourselves to seek and to know, doesn’t that betray what we’re meant to be? Isn’t the journey the important thing” (380)? Compared to big city living, in rural areas we find “people who don’t live as fast, because they’re not afraid of not living enough” (392).
- The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. Finished ?. This is a re-read for me in preparation for a book club I’m doing this summer. I enjoyed it as much the second time around as the first. I think The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong is still my favorite of the stories because it is a re-telling of the concepts in The Heart of Darkness but it stretches the issues of violence and cruelty to being a human concept and not a gender concept.
- If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home by TIm O’Brien. Finished 5/29. A really good follow up to The Things They Carried, I would recommend reading the short stories first, and then this autobiography because it illuminates many of the stories in a fascinating way. Flying home to Minnesota he writes: “You fly into an empty, unkowing, uncaring, purified, permanent stillness. Down below, there are some roads. In return for all your terror, the prairies stretch out, arrogantly unchanged” (208).
~ by Kelly on Tuesday, 29 May 2007.
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