Instead of listing all the books I read this year, I’m going to include some of my favorite passages from what I read, some things I underlined.
Each of these I read for the first time this year.
Facing Too Large an Expanse, Czeslaw Milosz, in the collection To Begin Where I Am
We spread papers on a table beneath a tree and try to write or add columns of figures; the uneasy leaves, stirred by the wind, the birds in flight, the drone of insects—that incommensurability between open space and the operations of the mind—immediately drive us to a place with four walls, where our activities seem to acquire importance and dignity. Cocoons, caves, rooms, doors, enclosures, lairs, those underground galleries where Cro-Magnon man ventured, though endangered by cave-dwelling hyenas, so that in the farthest, deepest corner, he could draw magical beasts by torchlight: only there did his work become enormous, only from there could it govern the fate of the live animals on the surface of the earth.
Now I seek shelter in these pages, but my humanistic zeal has been weakened by the mountains and the ocean, by those many moments when I have gazed upon boundless immensities with a feeling akin to nausea, the wind ravaging my little homestead of hopes and intentions.
*
Sodom and Gomorrah, Marcel Proust
At the time, there was applied to her lips a smile that did not belong to her personally, a smile I had already seen on certain people when they said to Bergotte, with a knowing air, “I’ve bought your book, it’s tremendous,” one of those collective, universal smiles that, when they have need of them — just as we make use of the railway and of moving vans — individuals borrow, except for a few ultra-refined ones, such as Swann or M. de Charlus, on whose lips I have never seen that particular smile settle. From that moment on, my visit was poisoned.
*
Real Life, Brandon Taylor
It would be too much to give it up, to be alone in the dark, now that he has been with Miller in the dark. What he fears, though, and it’s a cold, grinding, glittering fear rising in him, is that now he’ll never be able to face the dark alone again. That he’ll always want this, seek this, once it’s lost to him.
*
The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald
It had always been of the greatest importance to him, Ferber once remarked casually, that nothing should change at his place of work, that everything should remain as it was, as he had arranged it, and that nothing further should be added but the debris generated by painting and the dust that continually fell and which, as he was coming to realize, he loved more than anything else in the world. He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air, or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.
*
Open City, Teju Cole
There were sparrows flitting about in the distance, attempting to find a place to rest for the night, darting in and out of the network of coves formed by the bare trees and the interlocking arches of the university’s buildings. As I reflected on the fact that in each of these creatures was a tiny red heart, an engine that without fail provided the means for its exhilarating midair maneuvers, I was reminded of how often people took comfort, whether consciously or not, in the idea that God himself attended to these homeless travelers with something like personal care; that, contrary to the evidence of natural history, he protected each one of them from hunger and hazard and the elements. For many, the birds in flight were proof that we, too, were under heaven’s protection, that there is indeed a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
*
Brutto, from Helen DeWitt’s collection Some Trick
He hung the 20 hideous suits in his showroom in Milan. The show could never be so transgressive outside Milan — if you have no sense of style, if you know nothing of design, you cannot see the stupidity of the ugly pocket which only a trained apprentice could execute correctly. But in Milan they practically fainted. Miuccia Prada bought out the show.
*
The Counterlife, Philip Roth
Ten years, even five years back, he had indeed done what married men do and tried to fuck his way out of his life. Young men fuck their way into their lives with the girls who become their wives, then they are married and someone new comes along and they try to fuck their way out.
A Girl’s Story, Annie Erneaux
How are we present in the existences of others, their memories, their ways of being, even their acts? There is a staggering imbalance between the influence those two nights with that man have had upon my life, and the nothingness of my presence in his.
I do not envy him: I’m the one who is writing.
*
The Evening of the Holiday, Shirley Hazzard
She did not even ask herself: where will it lead? — assuming that she could only come, as it were, to grief. His awareness of this, his disarming, undemanding kindness, could not reassure her. Such reassurance is not within anyone’s power. Someone who says ‘Trust me’ must always hope in his heart that you will keep something in reserve; ‘Never leave me’ can only represent an inquiry into present intentions.
*
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
When I consider my life, I am appalled to find it a shapeless mass. A hero’s existence, such as is described to us, is simple: it goes straight to the mark, like an arrow. Most men like to reduce their lives to a formula, whether in boast or lament, but almost always in recrimination; their memories obligingly construct for them a clear and comprehensible past.
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