Brief Book Chatter

Gang. You know I could talk about books for the rest of my days, right? Here's five minutes of the chatter for you.

Recently I read one of the most phenomenal books I've ever read, one I am still wrapping my brain around, one I am so very, very thrilled I decided to pick up out of the hundreds I had to chose from, one I feel will stay with me for months going forward. I am lucky, in that often I find myself reading good books. Every once in awhile, though, I stumble upon a great one and feel like the luckiest girl in the world. Or, perhaps it's more a feeling of gratitude, because of all the books, in all the world, I found a gem. (Or do the really great books find me?) I believe I could talk about this book for hours and not tire of it. It is a story of ten people, both ordinary and extraordinary and the way in which their lives occasionally overlap during the course of one summer day in 1974, in New York City.

Funny thing, actually. When I was picking this book, (because it also happens to be my choice for our August book club) I talked to a few different friends about the contenders in my short stack. One friend, who I do love dearly, but we, eh...tend to view things a bit differently...said this book "didn't really do it for her." Which was pretty much the last push I needed to go ahead and pick it. For I am learning that the books she loves? I "just kinda" like. The ones that she "just kinda" likes? I usually adore. Case in point.

I have a habit of underlining lines in my books, of recording moments and passages I find particularly moving. If they're really worthy they even make it into my "blank book," a notebook I keep filled with quotes and lines from literature I record for posterity. Yesterday, I sat down with the intention of copying all of my underlined passages from Let the Great World Spin. I filled seven pages.

I'm hard pressed to pick just one favorite. Instead I'll share four very, very good ones:

"I can still to this day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a dime, maybe things could begin and end right there, at the moment of laughter, but things don't begin and end really, I suppose; they just keep on going."

******

"One of those out-of-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief."

******

"Still. Just one evening. To sit with her mother and watch the way she painted her nails, maybe, or see the way she put coffee in a cup, or watch her kick her shoes off, a single moment of the ordinary. Running the bath. Humming out of tune. Cutting the toast. Anything at all. Up a lazy river, how happy we could be."

******

"We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others, the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough..."

I hope if you decide to read it you'll drop me a line or leave a note in the comments. It is a book that gives one so much to talk about, well, I'm not even sure where we'd begin - though I am confident we'd eventually find a starting point...and after that, we might never be able to stop. We'd just keep spinning.