Words on Words – January 2016

I made a commitment to myself (I refuse to call it a resolution) to make more time to read this year. I used to read voraciously, consuming books in one sitting, reading anything and everything I could get my hands on. The bar code on my library card wore out from constantly being pulled out of and shoved back into my wallet. Lately, however, there have been a million excuses not to read. Life, work, and play take up so much time, I tell myself, that reading just isn’t possible. My library card and bookshelves have sat collecting dust.

So I set out, at the dawn of 2016, to rekindle that fervour. I set the bar at 50 books. I will read 50 books this year. I will read 50 books this year. I set no parameters for the books I will read. They will be of all lengths, all genres, all subject matters. I will rely heavily on referrals, asking friends and relations for books that have spoken to them. And in an effort to revive this much neglected space, I will reflect, at the end of each month, on the books I have thus read, and particular words in each which have spoken to me.

Perhaps this will be of no interest to anyone. Perhaps it will merely be a testament to myself, and keep me honest. Perhaps that is enough.

Here are the books I read in January, in order, and the words therein that stayed with me:

#1

“Human beings are more or less formulas. Pun intended. We are not any one thing that is mathematically provable. We are more or less than we are anything. We are more or less kind, or more or less not. More or less selfish, happy, wise, lonely.” – Never Always Sometimes by Adi Alsaid

Adi Alsaid’s first novel, Let’s Get Lost, was one of the best books I read last year. I featured it in one of the very first Words on Words. I found his writing deliciously readable. It was relatable without being commonplace, deep without feeling self-important. It was wise and playful and addictive and great. I was excited, therefore, to delve into this sophomore effort as the first book of the fifty I will read this year. Here again, as is naturally the case with many books about teenagers, Alsaid is concerned with the things which form our understanding of the self during that fertile time. It is a book about first loves, and second loves, and striving to be original.

The passage above stuck with me as I read the novel, and long afterward. Alsaid’s observations, on the whole, are gentle reflections on the human experience. He does not make an overt effort to be profound. He merely holds up a mirror to the reader and says, “What do you think?” And in this case he is exactly right. We often live our lives striving to be a hyperbole; we want to be the best at this thing or the most of that. We want to be an extreme, standing out from the herd of the utterly average. But to think that way misunderstands ourselves, and misunderstands the other. We are not completely one thing, or totally another, just at those we perceive as cliche and unexceptional are not entirely the things we believe about them. We are, all of us, more or less.

#2

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. – Love After Love by Derek Walcott, introduced by Tom Hiddleston

Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, while I disagree with the inherent gender stereotype in the title, is an excellently curated book of poetry. 100 men in the public sphere were asked to comment on the poems which evoke the most emotion in them; the result is a stunning and varied collection of great works. While there were poems which made me emote more strongly than this one (Daniel Radcliffe submitted Long Distance I and II by Tony Harrison, and JJ Abrams submitted The Lanyard by Billy Collins; you have been warned), Love After Love instantly felt like the kind of poem worth knowing by heart. I have never felt inclined to learn poetry by rote (excluding Shakespeare), but I felt such a deep connection to the language and the message of this piece. It is something I think about constantly: after we are done spending a lifetime living to please others, what we must hope is that the life we look back on is a feast of memory we may savour. At the end of the journey, it does not matter how rich our life was in the eyes of others; it is us who will sit down to feast on the recollection of the life we lived. As Hiddleston points out in his introduction, we live our lives trying to be “enough” for other people. The poet gently and perfectly reminds us that we are enough, each of us, as we are. Sit. Feast on your life.

#3

“But a knife ain’t just a thing, is it? It’s a choice, it’s something you do. A knife says yes or no, cut or not, die or don’t. A knife takes a decision out of your hand and puts it in the world and it never goes back again.” – The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

The Knife of Never Letting Go is a book about everything. It is about the chaos and the multitudes and the complexities inside of us that make us misunderstand ourselves and others. It is about responsibility. It is about accepting what life hands to us, however great or terrible, and making something out of it. It is about societal pressure and men and women and innocence and guilt and humanity. Patrick Ness has been one of my very favourite novelists for a while now – his  The Crane Wife and More Than This have been featured on this blog, and his A Monster Calls is one of the most emotionally impactful books I have ever read. He has, once again, created a beautifully realized world that is just different enough from our own to make you feel vulnerable as you explore it. The problem I run into when trying to discern what spoke most deeply to me in the novel, however, is that the book is fantastic in its entirety. The various passages and phrases I have tried to lift from the story for their particularly well-formed prose or their deeper observations simply do not do justice to what this book is.

I settled on the quotation above because it comes the closest, perhaps, to striking the bell at the heart of this novel, without giving too much away. While undeniably more powerful in context, I think it speaks to the important lesson that the things that happen to us do not define us. We define ourselves by the way we handle those things. The knife in our hand, the knife which we are handed, does not cut out our path in the jungle of life. We are holding the knife. We cut our own way through.

#4

“Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.” – The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell’s book was an interesting, quick read for me – well outside the normal realm of my literary ingestion, but that is one of the things I desired most of this project. It has a few inherent flaws: one, that the first chapters of the book are far more compelling in their argumentation than the last; and two, that most of the really interesting arguments could have been summed up in a much shorter work than the 294 pages of the copy I read. Perhaps I felt this way because I am more literary than the economists and sociologists featured in the book, and for whom it was written. Distributed among the verbosity, however, there are a number of interesting observations to be found on Gladwell’s topic: the ways in which small ideas can explode into movements and epidemics. He talks at length about the movers and shakers who are most often responsible for the “tipping” of trends and ideas, the specific personality types who have just the right blend of skills and traits to facilitate wide-scale change. I couldn’t help, as I read his descriptions of these various personality types, to consider the people in my life who might fit into each category – and which, if any, I fall into myself. I am not sure I fall into any, but I was taken with the idea of what Gladwell describes as a Connector, someone with a diverse group of acquaintances who brings the right people into contact with one another, bridging the gaps between distinct groups to facilitate the transmission of ideas. I am fortunate to know a few such people, these “special few,” who keep me connected more widely to the world around me, who broaden my understanding with their diverse knowledge and connectivity. Gladwell’s reflection made me grateful for them.

*****

One month down. Eleven months and 46 books to go! Check back every month for more Words on Words and other thoughts on An Awfully Big Adventure!