Tag: Books

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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When life is full of tasks, obligations, and events, time carries us, too swiftly it seems, for is it not our perpetual protest about life that there is not enough time for this or that? But those who complain about that—myself at different phases of my life, too—forget how fortunate they are: Life does not guarantee that time has the capacity to carry us. Time flies, time is fleeting, but then there comes a moment when time, no longer nimble-footed, no longer winged, is for us to carry.”

— Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 20 2025)

Notes:

  • 50% of the way in. Tough subject (losing two sons to suicide) but beautifully written.
  • NY Times Book Review (May 21, 2025): “Writing Into the Abyss After the Death of Two Sons.” In “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” the novelist Yiyun Li endures the aftermath of unthinkable loss.”
  • Guardian Book Review: “‘Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li review – a shattering account of losing two sons”
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Truth…

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Let’s talk for a minute about the etiquette of gifting books. The etiquette is that you probably shouldn’t do it. First of all, there is a 99% chance that you’re going to gift a book that someone won’t like. You’re gifting it because you like it, but you don’t know what the other person likes, so it will probably sit on a shelf somewhere. Second of all, it’s like gifting someone a vacuum cleaner. Great, but now I have to spend ten hours cleaning the house.

— Jared Dillian, from “Nobody Reads” in “We’re Going to Get Those Bastards” (May 16, 2025) (via The Layman’s Blog)

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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“No, eat the carrot first. Please.” She leaned forward, knife and fork on each side of the plate, a paper towel tucked in her collar. “It’s important.” He finished the carrot, then picked another from the bowl and put the whole thing in his mouth. “They’re good for you, believe me.” … “For the eyes, right?” “That’s a lie… Carrots,” she paused for effect, “give you the will to live.” “What do you mean?” he said, chewing. “It’s a root. And roots prevent you from getting the blues.” She picked one from the bowl; it gleamed under the kitchen light. “You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far—like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.”

— Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel (Penguin Press, May 13, 2025)

Notes:

  • NY Times Book Review: “Odd Couple Roommates, Bonds by Pills and Precarity. Ocean Vuong’s florid new novel, which seeks to find the dignity in dead-end jobs.”
  • Guardian Book Review: “‘Heartbreak and hope”
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

You used to call me Sparrow. Why?

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Dear Mother, You used to call me Sparrow. Why Sparrow? Well, because the woods are full of sparrows, and you loved everything outdoors. Songbirds, wildflowers, wind. You could read the weather like a poem. But why did I remind you of a sparrow and not another songbird? I never thought to ask. With their white cheeks and dingy underparts, plain brown sparrows are everywhere. They beg at outdoor tables and hop under city benches. They nest in chimneys and rafters and even tailpipes. Sparrows are not much to look at, but they’re smart. Canny. Tiny, feathered battle-axes. Sparrows are survivors. I like to think that’s what you meant… No woman is a star. No woman is a god or a tree or a magician. But for a while, in your arms, the universe was the right size, and I knew where I was…Mothers have a sixth sense. Their love is occult.

— Amity Gaige, Heartwood: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, April 1, 2025)

Notes:

96 years old and still laboring at her trade

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“How, after all, does one dare, how can one presume?” That is Cynthia Ozick on the paralyzing challenge of saying something new about Franz Kafka. But they can be applied equally to Ms. Ozick, who in her 60-plus years of publishing has produced a body of work—novels, short stories, essays, criticism, poetry and plays—unrivaled by any living American author. Can such a monument be summarized without being cheapened?

One dares to try in part because of the mist of obscurity that has always surrounded Ms. Ozick’s output, the rift between her reputation and her readership. Perhaps no other author of her accomplishment has been so consistently taken for granted. Ms. Ozick is 96 years old and still laboring at her trade like an outsider with something to prove. Not for her are the perquisites of eminence. There have been no vague, self-indulgent late works (her 2021 novel, “Antiquities,” is as sharp and questing as anything she has written); no retirement celebrations, Festschrifts or public tributes as there were for her contemporary Philip Roth. The closest Ms. Ozick may come to a career retrospective is “In a Yellow Wood,” a heaping selection of short stories and essays that seems likely to burnish her legacy while continuing to confound all attempts at marketing her. […]

The artist, Ms. Ozick continually asserts, must claim absolute imaginative freedom, even at the risk of being misunderstood. “Coiled in the bottommost pit of every driven writer is an impersonator—protean, volatile, restless and relentless,” she says in “Isaac Babel and the Identity Question.” […]

Such are the fertile contradictions of Cynthia Ozick, a self-described “fanatic” of literature who grasps better than anyone the moral perils of fanaticism, an accomplished writer who deeply distrusts the worldly authority her writing has earned her. “The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to,” she once said. So this titan of literature keeps her head down, toiling away like the hapless strivers and mole-eyed bookworms of her stories, working not for recognition but to contribute something lasting to posterity, with its dreamt-of future readers who are as avid for the pleasures of art as she is. Now that is daring, that is presumption.

— Sam Sacks, excerpts from his Book Review of “In a Yellow Wood” written by Cynthia Ozick (wsj.com, March 7 , 2025)