Elevated - ELEANOR AND PARK

Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park: a kind of brutal honesty--a not shirking from imperfection, from characters' own hangups over their imperfections. Which, by some strange alchemy, transforms them into something desirable, extraordinary, dimensional.

Too many great things to say about this book--the narrative voice(s), the awkward stumble-and-fall into love, the mounting anxiety that shit is going to hit the fan, the three-word postcard that narrows hope to a fine point.

What I'm stealing: a powerful self-consciousness about who one is that feels true. It ends up being the thing that makes us root for Eleanor and Park and fall in love with their love.

What They Say - RUNAWAY

The profound loneliness that belongs to love. It's there in Alice Munro's Runaway...making you almost long for the quiet pain of it all, the muted ache, the underside of love.

For some reason, I found myself nostalgic for a time and place I have never experienced--not fin de siècle Paris or early 20th century New York, which it's easy to romanticize. Something colder, more remote. The desolation of small lake towns in Canada in the 70s and 80s, of winters without end on a remote farm off some dusty road. Places where it makes sense that love perhaps always leaves you empty and fulfilled all at once. 

But that's not what I'm stealing here. Instead, I'm interested in the way Munro taps into the language of ordinary things. The way the world communicate with us, telling us how things are, the way metaphor smuggles in deeper truths. 

"The eyelids pressed down heavily, like punishment, over her faded eyes" (Powers).

And mouths: "She was a slim suntanned woman in a purple dress, with a matching wide purple band holding back her dark hair. Handsome, but with little pouches of boredom or disapproval hiding in the corners of her mouth" (Passion).

"He had a high pale forehead, a crest of tight curly gray-black hair, bright gray eyes, a wide thin-lipped mouth that seemed to curl in on some vigorous impatience, or appetite, or pain" (Passion). 

And rooms: "Along with the hard pressure of the light and the noise, there was the same feeling she got now in her own house, and that other people coming into her house must be aware of even more strongly.

     The feeling of something being out of kilter, in a way that could not be fixed or altered but only resisted, as well as you could" (Powers). 

So It Goes - SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE

Picked up Slaughterhouse Five yesterday and devoured it. Today, can't get Kurt Vonnegut's narrative voice out of my head. Humor and heartache and fabulous fantastical time-traveling reed of a character in Billy Pilgrim.

I love this line, among others: "And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
She was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes."

In a book where plundering a teapot gets you shot by a firing squad, here's what I'm stealing: the act of restraint. Not ramming something down a reader's throat, but placing it on the tongue. Letting it dissolve in time.

The Future is Nigh - FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE

When I was an undergrad, a philosophy professor of mine told our class that we'd better learn to "read with charity." The comment was directed at those students who flippantly dismissed Aristotle or who were quick to claim that Kant was a moron or that Heidegger simply got it all wrong. To read with charity is to assume from the outset that the text knows something you don't...and that the canon is not made up of dithering idiots, even if it should always invite healthy debate.

It is in the vein that I read Isaac Asimov's celebrated work, Foundation and Empire. Everyone under the sun (who reads and loves science fiction) has insisted I read it if I am writing (even remotely) in the field.

So, I guess I feel guilty (of foolish?!) for not loving it. Although the energy of the book picked up as it went along, I didn't get lost in the story, or connect with any of the characters per se. I wasn't bowled over by the language or flipping pages like a ravenous reader. Sill, it feels smart and complex and there are certain ideas that I know will find their way into Avie's world.

As for the plunder: The idea of psychohistory...something determinate--if not on the individual level, as least when it comes to humanity en masse. The future-seeing of Hari Seldon, which hovers over the work in mythical proportions, is linked in certain ways to my own clairvoyants, the Severii, for whom the future is both already-written and revisable.

Scaffolding of the Gods - THE WISE MAN'S FEAR

As the Violent Femme’s say, “Everything, everything, everything, everything.”

There's so much goodness in The Wise Man's Fear, follow-up to the equally amazing first book in the series, The Name of the Wind.

Patrick Rothfuss has the gift of narrative, pulling us in with magic and desire and betrayal. There's so much to steal here, but Avie needs one thing in particular from this book. 

What I’m stealing: The myth-making that functions at the depths of this story. Not just the Chandrian. or the Edema Ruh; not the legacy of magicians at the Unversity, or even the power of a Name. It is the myth of the moon--the beautiful way it elevates the entire story into the realm of the gods. I will take that, thank you very much.