Elizabeth Finch - Julian Barnes

 This was quirky.  It speaks to the impact a teacher can have on us for the rest of our lives.  A 30ish man attends a class taught by Elizabeth Finch.  She challenges her students to think and her lessons stick with him.  They become friends and we she passes he seeks to find out more about her.  There were many noteworthy quotes that made it enjoyable but not a particularly satisfying story; rather a comment on what we can do with our lives.

Quotes:

"We must certainly consider, not just in this class, but outside it, in our own turbulent and fretful lives, the element of chance.  The number of people we deeply meet is strangely few.  Passion may mislead us furiously.  Reason may mislead us just as much.  Our genetic inheritance might hamstring us.  So might previous events in our lives.  It is not just soldiers in the field who later suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.  It is often the inevitable consequence of a seemingly normal sublunary existence."

"I have quite as many friends as I need.  They do not, on the whole, interconnect.  Which makes some of them imagine that they are more central to my life that they are.  Others, the opposite."

[After she is slandered in the rag newspapers] "They choose to understand nothing.  It was kind of you to be upset on my behalf, but unnecessary.  They choose to understand nothing."

[on the quote she repeated from the Handbook of Epictetus] Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us.  The things that are up to us are by nature free, unhindered, and unimpeded; while the things that are not up to us are weak, enslaved, hindred, not our own.  You can only be free and happy if you recognise this essential difference between what you can change and what you can't.  Among the things not up to us are our bodies, our possessions, our reputations and our public offices."

"Does civilization progress? Elizabeth Finch like to ask us that question.  Undoubtedly it does in terms of medicine, science, technology.  But in human, moral terms?  In terms of philosophy?  In terms of seriousness?"

"[I] ...turn my life into a story.  We all do it.  EF wasn't like that.  She'd give you the conclusion but not the narrative.  Why?  The obvious, normal reason would be a sense of privacy, of discretion.  But I decided that it was also perhaps something bigger: a sense that a life, much as we would like it to be, does not amount to a narrative---or not a narrative such as we understand and expect".

Published: 2022  Read: March 2023  Genre: Philosophy 

In Five Years - Rebecca Serle

A young, successful, woman lawyer (Dannie), engaged to the perfect, considerate man (David) experiences her future one evening - and she's with a different man, in a different place.  She's shaken to her core and we she meets that future man (Aaron) she's convinced she can alter the future.  This was a clever take on predestination and what we think we can control in our lives.  I finished it up in a  couple days. Her relationship with her best friend since childhood (Bella) plays counterpoint to her structured, managed life.

Clever, quick read.

Quote:

"You mistake love.  You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn't.  It's the only thing that does not need to become at all.  It matters only insofar as it exists.  Here. Now. Love doesn't require a future."

Published:  2020 Read: March 2022  Genre: Fiction

Upstate - James Wood

Picked this up in the library on the New listings shelf.  A quiet, thoughtful story of a father and his daughters dealing with the fall out of his long ago divorce from their now deceased mother.

Quotes:

[comment on nursing home] "It was all pretty good, or as good as it can be when one's whole life has been reduced to souvenirs of selfhood."

"Wel, religious is just someone else's definition of what is sacred"

"You're only as good as your suppliers, all the way down the chain.  Sort out who supplies you, find the people you can really trust, and that's half of the work done there." 

 

Published: 2018  Read: November 2018   Genre: fiction

A Fall of Marigolds - Susan Meissner

This book is a joy to read.  The story of two lives scarred by tragedy intersecting across decades.
A young mother working in a fabric store in modern day New York seeks a particular design she saw years ago.  A nurse on Ellis Island helps a widowed immigrant back to health.  These two characters lives come together over time to tell stories of great loss and how we react to it and eventually move on. 

Some quotes:

"Kindness is always motivated by something nobler than just a desire to be kind.  I had a wounded heart.  Like his.  That is what I had."

"I want to be able to remember and have it not hurt. I think it's possible to remember someone you loved and lost and feel blessed that you knew them, even for just a short time, without it hurting."

"The person who completes your life is not so much the person who shares all the years of your existence, but rather the person who made you life worth living, not matter how long or short a time you were given to spend with them." 

"...a strange but welcome ache for the loss of my island fell over me: the ache of losing something that is comfortable only because it is familiar, not dear." 

"Perhaps you are thinking, as I once did, that love is too precarious to want to lavish it again on another.  I want you to know that love is not a person.  It is not of this earth at all.   It wasn't until now that I realized I had mistakenly come to believe that love came from a place inside me and therefore I had to protect that place.  It comes from heaven.  It is given to us not to hold on to or hide from but to give away."

Published:  2014  Read: November 2017  Genre: Fiction

In Calabria - Peter S Beagle

I need to start being more selective with what I pick up at the library.  This little book had some good reviews (but then, don't all book covers have glowing reviews?) and I recognized the author.  It's a fable, of sorts, about a unicorn that comes to the farm of an isolated, older man to have her colt.  The man befriends the unicorn at the same time he opens up to being a friend of a young woman who brings his mail.

The author wrote one of my favorite books, A Fine and Private Place back in the 1960's.  It's a story of unresolved love in the afterlife.  This book has none of the charm or magic power of his earlier one for me.  Not recommended.

Published:  2017  Read: July 2017  Genre: Fiction (fantasy)