There is no replacing the experience of reading a text. The very private interaction, the intimate communion of reading, sitting down with a book, living with it, having the book dwell inside of you - there is no substitute for that.
~Junot Diaz

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. 

~Albert Camus

Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonize. The birds are consulting about their migration, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

~George Eliot (letter to Miss Lewis, Oct. 1, 1841)

Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.

~Nora Ephron

A multitude of small delights constitutes happiness.
~Charles Baudelaire

The Joy of Walking

...summed up nicely by one of my favorite authors. At once erudite and irreverent, Bill Bryson's books are a delightful way to engage in some seriously fun reading as I did this weekend with a library copy of Road to Little Dribbling. I am also a big fan of walking, wandering, hiking, strolling, traipsing and searching my thesaurus ;) Isn't English fun?!

I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again."
~Lewis Carrol, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, the air gold and so clean it quivers.
~Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

Reading Notes

Even though I made it over half way through Jonathan Evison's The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, I just couldn't finish it. Ugh. It was predictable, for starters, and also just too . . . oh I don't know . . . trying too hard to be tender but 'real'? It was a forced kind of authentic. I'm usually wary of books with long convoluted titles (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, anyone?) so Revised Fundamentals must have snuck in under my reading radar. Isn't there a writing rule somewhere that recommends using fewer words whenever possible? A less-is-more kind of thing? I think that should apply to titles as well. The books themselves might be okay, it's just this one wasn't.

Anyway, moving on.

Before Wild, Cheryl Strayed wrote a novel called Torch, an emotionally heavy book about how cancer can wreak havoc on a family. I loved Wild and knew I would be reading everything else this author writes. So here I am reading Torch and loving it so far.

I sought peace in everything, but never was I happier than in a corner with a book.
~Umberto Eco

Was it fun in Paris? Who did you see there and was the Madeleine pink at five o'clock and did the fountain fall with hollow delicacy into the framing of space in the Place de la Concorde and did the blue creep out from behind the colonnades of the rue Rivoli through the grill of the Tuileries and was the Louvre gray and metallic in the sun and did the trees hang brooding over the cafés and were there lights at night and the click of saucers and the auto horns that play DeBussy. 
I love Paris. How was it?

~Zelda Fitzgerald in a letter to Scott
Summer 1930

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Leaving Before The Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller

 Reading Leaving Before The Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller reminds me why I love memoirs so much. In the hands of a skilled author a memoir can become an extension of what the reader already knows to be true, presenting new experiences alongside familiar ones. I respect and appreciate the deeply personal nature of one's own inner self and feel the act of sharing it with the reader must require much courage and trust. Her writing is lovely. This latest book, as with her others, is a pleasure to read.

(inside flap)
A child of Rhodesian wars and daughter of two deeply complicated parents, Alexandra Fuller is no stranger to pain. But the disintegration of Fuller's own marriage leaves her shattered. Looking to pick up the pieces of her life, she finally confronts the tough questions about her past, about the American man she married, and the family she left behind in Africa. A breathtaking achievement, Leaving Before The Rains Come is a memoir of such grace and intelligence, filled with such wit and courage, that it could only have been written by Alexandra Fuller. 

Leaving Before The Rains Come begins with the dreadful first years of the American financial crisis when Fuller's delicate balance - between American pragmatism and African fatalism, the linchpin of her unorthodox marriage - irrevocably fails. Recalling her unusual courtship in Zambia - elephant attacks on the first date, sick with malaria on the wedding day - Fuller struggles to understand her younger self as she overcomes her current misfortunes.

Fuller soon realizes what is missing from her life is something that was always there: the brash and uncompromising ways of her father, the man who warned his daughter that, "the problem with most people is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live." Fuller's father - "Tim Fuller of No Fixed Address" as he first introduced himself to his future wife - was a man who regretted nothing and wanted less, even after fighting harder and losing more than most could bear.

Leaving Before The Rains Come showcases Fuller at the peak of her abilities, threading panoramic vistas with her deepest revelations as a fully grown woman and mother. Fuller reveals how - after spending a lifetime fearfully waiting for someone to show up and save her - she discovered that, in the end, we all simply have to save ourselves.

An unforgettable book, Leaving Before The Rains Come is a story of sorrow grounded in the tragic grandeur and rueful joy only to be found in Fuller's Africa.

In Alexandra Fuller's first book about her African childhood in Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight  I was so enthralled listening to it as an audiobook a few years ago, that I knew I would be looking out for and collecting anything else with her name on it, memoir or otherwise. Several years and five books later my collection is growing nicely.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

How is it that Young Adult books like this are sitting alongside adult fiction? The storyline of Round House certainly has mature elements, but with a thriteen-year-old boy as the protagonist and hero of the story (and all the accompanying fascination with breasts and boners that come with that particular demographic) this book is soundly in the YA category. But because it was on the library shelf with other adult fiction, I kept expecting the teenage main character to grow up and conclude the story as wiser more enlightened, perhaps also more jaded, adult. But no. I'm increasingly baffled at the preponderance of teen books in mainstream reading lists. I don't get it.

Anyway, the story is touching and heartbreaking and compelling enough to see through to the end, but left me annoyed that it didn't go deeper.

(back cover)
In this bittersweet coming-of-age tale, Erdrich returns to the fictional setting of many of her novels, a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation. There in the spring of 1988, 13-year-old Joe's mother is raped; when efforts to bring the attacker to justice are thwarted by a labyrinth of laws applying to Indian lands, Joe considers taking action himself. Nominated for a National Book Award, the novel is another of Erdirch's haunting portraits of Native American life, tender but unsentimental and buoyed by subtle wit.

The book is still the most intelligent and interactive data retrieval system which has been devised - and you can take it into the bath.
~Stephen Bayley

One can say many things about the history of the world - except that it is rational. Give man every earthly blessing, satisfy his every desire, quench his slightest thirst, and he would still destroy what he has - just to  prove his freedom.
~Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From The Underground

She bought herself a street map of Paris, and, with the tip of her finger, she went shopping in the capital. She walked up the boulevards, stopping at every turning, between the lines of the streets, passing the white squares that stood for houses. Eventually she would close her tired eyes, and in the darkness she would see the gas-jets writhing in the wind, the folding carriage-steps that were let down with a great clatter outside the main door of the theater.

~Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

And he . . . he was in Paris, now. Far away! What was it like, in Paris? What an immense name! She said it softly to herself again, for the pleasure of the sound; it rang in her ears like a great cathedral bell, it flamed before her eyes, even on the labels of her pots of ointment.

~Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Keep reading. It's one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.
~Lloyd Alexander

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
~Italo Calvino