119/50 books read

march

• the waste land and other poems ▸ ts eliot
  • — "do i dare / disturb the universe?"
• shake loose my skin ▸ sonia sanchez
  • — "i spit teeth on the wonder of women, holy volcanic women..."
• sonnets to orpheus ▸ rainer maria rilke
  • — "the earth is like a child that knows poems by heart, / many, o many... "
• plainwater: essays and poems ▸ anne carson
  • — "he lives in a small country of hope, which is his heart."
• sum: forty tales from the afterlives ▸ david eagleman
  • — "each human feels the intensities of joy and grief as though his were the only real examples in the world."
• night sky with exit wounds ▸ ocean vuong
  • — "some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea"
• under milk wood ▸ dylan thomas
  • — "we are not wholly bad or good, who live our lives under milk wood."
• metamorphoses ▸ mary zimmerman
  • — "let me die still loving, and so, never die."
• m train ▸ patti smith
  • — "these are modern times, i told myself. but we are not trapped in them."
• john gabriel borkman ▸ henrik ibsen
  • — "i want his affection — his soul — his whole heart!"
• a woman without a country ▸ eavan boland
  • — "a spring planet bending ice / into an absolute of light."
• death and the downs ▸ charles hamilton sorley
  • — "saints have adored the lofty soul of you / poets have whitened at your high renown..."

february

• the life-changing magic of tidying up ▸ marie kondo
  • — "the space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past."
• the argonauts ▸ maggie nelson
  • — "what if where i am is what i need?"
• look back in anger ▸ john osborne
  • — "oh, don't try and take his suffering away from him — he'd be lost without it."
• the beauty of the husband ▸ anne carson
  • — "i thought changes were holy. i spilled them like grain."
• amadeus ▸ peter shaffer
  • — "goodness is nothing in the furnace of art."
• the history boys ▸ alan bennett
  • — "breaking bread with the dead, sir. that's what we do."
• making movies ▸ sidney lumet
  • — "all good work is self-revelation."
• the lady from the sea ▸ henrik ibsen
  • — "she's mine and she always will be. i shall go back and find her. even were i to drown i should rise up from the bottom of the sea to claim her; and she would have to follow me."
• the wild duck ▸ henrik ibsen
  • — "it seemed to me as though the world had come to a standstill — as though life itself were under an eclipse."
• burial rites ▸ hannah kent
  • — "see what i do for them? i eat stones, i shatter my teeth, and still they will not speak to me. only the wind."
• on earth we're briefly gorgeous ▸ ocean vuong
  • — "what if we are not what the light says we are?"

january

• the flies ▸ jean-paul sartre
  • — "you are god and i am free; each of us is alone, and our anguish is akin."
• bluets ▸ maggie nelson
  • — "the part i do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it..."
• the authorized roy orbison ▸ roy jr, wesley, and alex orbison
  • — "he seemed that he'd fallen from another planet. and he had purity when he sang. he did something nobody else did. and he always had that loneliness."
• rosmersholm ▸ henrik ibsen
  • — "they certainly cling to their dead at rosmersholm..."
• memoirs of hadrian ▸ marguerite yourcenar
  • — "for centuries to come priests with shaven heads would recite litanies repeating that name which for them had no value, but for me held all."
• state of siege ▸ albert camus
  • — "one plague, one people!"
• letters to a young poet ▸ rainer maria rilke
  • — "therefore, dear sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you, for those who are near you are far away..."
• all quiet on the western front ▸ erich maria remarque
  • — "i am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness; i belong to them, and them to me..."
• moby dick ▸ adapt. sebastian armesto
  • — "that same lightning that struck me i now strike into thee. can you feel it? does it burn?"
• six characters in search of an author ▸ luigi pirandello
  • — "each one of us is many persons... according to all the possibilities of being that there are within us... with some people we are one person... with others we are somebody quite different... and all the time we are under the illusion of always being one and the same person for everybody..."
• the notebooks of malte laurids brigge ▸ rainer maria rilke
  • — "if only we could learn above all else to endure, and not to judge."