The Age of Miracles

In many areas of my life, the year 2013 has been exemplary.  I've traveled to both near and distant shores, taken on new positions and challenges at work, continued to grow and thrive here in my adopted home of Boston.  When I think back on 2013 though, a stellar reading list unfortunately isn't one of the top things that pops into my mind.  Oh, I did alright this year I guess.  I read somewhere once that the average adult only reads three books per year.  If that's my yearly measurement, I'm still far surpassing that average.  Just don't compare me to some of my friends and acquaintances who manage to tackle close to 100 books in a single year.

Part of all of this is the fact that, well, I hit a few duds this year.  There was nothing so terrible I stopped reading it or felt compelled to toss the book clear across the room in frustration and despair (that's only happened once for those of you keeping score).  But you know how it goes.  If you stumble across an amazing book, you cannot wait to pick it up again.  You'll pray for a delayed train on your way to or from work so you get more reading time, you'll talk about whatever you are reading to whoever will listen, you'll stay up past your bedtime, promising yourself 'just one more chapter.'  There is nothing quite like a great book, is there?

Unless it's not a great book.  If that's the case I find myself slugging through a book more like it's a chore than a past time.  I'll spend my morning train commute catching up on Words With Friends games instead of reading another chapter.  I will crawl into bed with said book still tucked into my bag, never having even bothered to dig it out and read at home.


But back to how great a really wonderful book can be.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker swept me up the minute I read the first page and hasn't let go since.  I'm always a sucker for a good coming of age story and this one certainly did not disappoint.  Rather than give too much of the plot away here, I'll instead just give you the directive to please, please add it to the top of your to-read queue. And then come back and tell me once you have so we can discuss the book in detail.

It is no secret that I'm a big believer in the power of words, a lover of the English language.  I keep copies of blank books where I write down my favorite lines from things I've read over the years; I turn often to them to reflect back on certain passages I have come to know, love, and rely on.  For often, I find that writing - and reading - helps me process what I'm thinking, feeling, doing.  How I'm living.  For that reason - among so many others - I truly think making time for ourselves to read is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves.  Personally I'd be lost without it.

Here then, are some of my favorite passages from The Age of Miracles, ones I scribbled out in my own cursive, in one of my blank books, where they will be always at the ready:

"Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees.  But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end.  The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown."

****
"This was the mythical period before I was born, when my mother was not a mother and was instead an actress who might make it someday, any day, maybe soon, a serious girl with a lovely face.  How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.  I like to think about how my parents lives once shimmered in front of them, half hidden, like buried gold.  Back then the future was whatever they imagined."

****
"On the first day of honors pre-algebra that year, Mrs. Pinsky had drawn a funnel chart on the whiteboard to illustrate that a sifting process had begun.  'You've all been placed in the honors class for now,' she said.  'But the number of kids who can understand the math is going to shrink every year from now on. '  It was that time of life: Talents were rising to the surface, weaknesses were beginning to show through, we were finding out what kind of people we would be.  Some would turn out beautiful, some funny, some shy.   Some would be smart, others smarter.  The chubby ones would likely always be chubby.  The beloved, I sensed, would be beloved for life.  And I worried that loneliness might work that way too.  Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom."

****
"Seth and I used to like to picture how our world would look to visitors someday, maybe a thousand years in the future, after all the humans are gone and all the asphalt has crumbled and peeled away.  We wondered what those visitors would find here.  We liked to guess at what would last.  Here the indentations suggesting a vast network of roads.  Here the deposits of iron where giant steel structures once stood, shoulder to shoulder in rows, a city.  Here the remnants of clothing and dishware, here the burial grounds, here the mounds of earth that were once peoples homes.

But among the artifacts that will never be found - among the objects that will disintegrate long before anyone from elsewhere arrives - is a certain patch of sidewalk on a California street where once, on a dark afternoon in summer at the waning end of the year of the slowing, two kids knelt down together on the cold ground.  We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew - our names, the date, and these words: We were here."