Closing Lines from Books

I found this link via stumbleupon to the Best 100 Closing Lines from Books, and I just thought I'd copy and paste a few that I particularly liked for one reason or another.


"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
Origin of Species, Charles Darwin


"But that is the beginning of a new story - the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended."
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky


"A LAST NOTE FROM YOUR NARRATOR. I am haunted by humans."
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak


"Are there any questions?"
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood


"'When the day shall come, that we do part,' he said softly, and turned to look at me, 'if my last words are not ‘I love you’ – ye’ll ken it was because I didna have time.'"
The Fiery Cross, Diana Gabaldon


"I went on my way. A stormy wind rattled the scrap-iron in the ruins, whistling and howling through the charred cavities of the windows. Twilight came on. Snow fell from the darkening, leaden sky."
The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945, Wladyslaw Szpilman


"This is not a full circle. It's Life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it."
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Alexandra Fuller


"But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy."
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway


"Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days."
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll


"And so we stayed out in the garden of the old house until we couldn’t see to kick a ball, laughing in the gathering twilight, my mother and son, my wife and our daughter, making the most of the good weather and all the days that were left, our little game watched only by next door’s cat, and every star in the heavens."
Man and Wife, Tony Parsons


"One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, 'Poo-tee-weet?'"
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

Love in the Time of Cholera

I was given this book by a professor in college. He gave our entire class copies of it because we read a review of it by Thomas Pynchon (the course was Nabokov and Pynchon), which was, of course, incredibly poetic. Read it here, and I highly recommend that you do (though it does tell what happens, so if you want to avoid spoilers, wait).

Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I actually read another of Garcia Marquez's books when I was teaching a course on Forbidden Fictions, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which was a very short but, as you may be able to determine from the title, is quite the book. I loved his writing style, and as I was paying especially close attention to his craft because I was going to be teaching it, I really appreciated it. I am a little fuzzy on it now because it was three years ago (where does the time go?!), but I would like to reread it.

At any rate, even though I really liked Memories, I couldn't get myself to read Love in the Time of Cholera until recently. Even then, I had a similar experience to when I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; that is, many people whose opinion I appreciate greatly for literature had recommended it, but I just couldn't get myself committed to reading it the first few times. Love is somewhat slow to get going, and not because nothing happens - in fact, it begins with a suicide. Instead, it is Marquez's incredibly detailed writing style that is so hard to adjust to, I think, in a world of instant gratification and lack of such heavily written sentences. There is a plethora of detail and commitment to description that we tend to shy from in our reading and writing. But Marquez is so good at it that once you are accustomed to it and expect it, it is so beautifully rewarding that you wouldn't want him to use less. Except, perhaps, in the parts when he describes the less politically correct and polite activities of some of the characters, but that he attends to all that his characters experience in such detail, whether it is easy for readers or not, is part of the beauty of his writing. Sexuality is an element of every human's experience (even the unindulged) and depravity part of almost everyone's, to varying degrees. So to include it is to write a truth, even in fiction, about the human experience. It just requires the reader recognize that were their story told, these parts would be put to words and likely seem just as strange on a page.

The moment that caught me in the book was when one character exclaimed to another, "Only God knows how much I loved you." Now this is not so an incredibly creative of a line, but it was at such a poetic and almost comical moment, and such a thing to hear, that it really moved me. I suppose I was particularly susceptible to this and always am because I'm such a romantic, but at that moment I was hooked. And from then on, it was a love story. A stranger one than what we are used to, and unsettling at times, but a love story nonetheless, and is it not a pleasant surprise to read a story in which you cannot predict the outcome or course of events and twists and turns?

I think I will reread this book again after some time to see how my experience and opinion of it shifts after a different perspective and frame of mind, so for now, I leave you with some words from Pynchon's review:

It could be argued that this is the only honest way to write about love, that without the darkness and the finitude there might be romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera -- all genres, by the way, that are well represented in this novel -- but not the Big L. What that seems to require, along with a certain vantage point, a certain level of understanding, is an author's ability to control his own love for his characters, to withhold from the reader the full extent of his caring, in other words not to lapse into drivel.

The Truth About Sleep and Productivity

As a caring teacher, I couldn't help but try and encourage them to do things to help them be better, happier, healthier, and more productive students. I still can't assign them articles like this, but I hope that my students and whoever else happens across this blog will still take the time to think about this and help themselves out by getting enough sleep every night. It makes a HUGE difference for kids and teens, but also for adults. It's worth it!

The Truth About Sleep and Productivity
By Margaret Heffernan

To be honest, this wasn't really new information for me. But it still is good to be reminded of it and see research on it and an explanation of why it is true.

Some of the important excerpts from it:

• Lose just one night's sleep and your cognitive capacity is roughly the same as being over the alcohol limit. 
• Up to around 40 hours a week, we're all pretty productive but, after that, we become less able to deliver reliable, cost-effective work. 
• After 24 hours of sleep deprivation, there is an overall reduction of six percent in glucose reaching the brain. (That's why you crave donuts and candy.) 
• But the loss isn't shared equally; the parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex lose 12 percent to 14 percent of their glucose. And those are the areas we most need for thinking: for distinguishing between ideas, for social control, and to be able to tell the difference between good and bad.

Joy of Cooking

Well, this isn't a book I've read, per se. But it is a book that I got recently and have been spending some time with. There was a groupon to get it at significantly less than it's standard listing price, and I figured that since I love cooking so much (see cooking blog), it would be good to have a classic like this on hand.

Joy of Cooking, 75th Edition
By Irma von Starkloff Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan Becker

I have definitely used the internet much more than the couple of cookbooks I have, but I thought a standard like this should definitely have a place on my shelf. I've made a few cookie recipes, a pork shoulder roast, and a loaf of bread from it so far, and I do like it. I think the format is a bit different, what with the ingredients listed as you use them and amongst the direction text, but I'm adjusting to it. I'm excited to read more about different things and learn about food from it. It has pretty extensive descriptions at the beginning of each chapter about the food and how to identify different characteristics about it and work with it.

Excerpts from the book summary:

Seventy-five years ago, a St. Louis widow named Irma Rombauer took her life savings and self-published a book called The Joy of Cooking. Her daughter Marion tested recipes and made the illustrations, and they sold their mother-daughter project from Irma's apartment. 

Today, nine revisions later, the Joy of Cooking -- selected by The New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important and influential books of the twentieth century -- has taught tens of millions of people to cook, helped feed and delight millions beyond that, answered countless kitchen and food questions, and averted many a cooking crisis. 

It features a rediscovery of the witty, clear voices of Marion Becker and Irma Rombauer, whose first instructions to the cook were "stand facing the stove." 

JOY remains the greatest teaching cookbook ever written. Reference material gives cooks the precise information they need for success. New illustrations focus on techniques, including everything from knife skills to splitting cake layers, setting a table, and making tamales. This edition also brings back the encyclopedic chapter Know Your Ingredients. The chapter that novices and pros alike have consulted for over thirty years has been revised, expanded, and banded, making it a book within a book. Cooking Methods shows cooks how to braise, steam, roast, sauté, and deep-fry effortlessly, while an all-new Nutrition chapter has the latest thinking on healthy eating -- as well as a large dose of common sense. 

Secret Lives of Great Artists

My mom passed this book on to me a while ago, and although it has taken me forever to read, it is really good and easy.

Secret Lives of Great Artists
Elizabeth Lunday

This is a pretty quirky book, and I've never read anything like it before. Basically, there are about 3-4 pages about each artist featured, in chronological life order, and each artist gets a brief little life and art bio. Unlike most other summaries of artists, this features crazy facts about the different artists, many of which I had no idea before. I think it's beyond just voyeuristic to get to peek into their closet of secrets (most well-known by societies at the time) because it often helps inform the viewing of their art better. Also, getting an understanding of the artist's real life can enhance our understanding not only of the person behind the art, but the society as a whole. And as Art History has always appealed to me as a way to better know a culture and time period, I think it's nice to get that extra glimpse and perspective. Plus, it's an entertaining book...

In the words of the write-up for the book on the publisher's site:

Here are outrageous and uncensored profiles of the world’s greatest artists, complete with hundreds of little-known, politically incorrect, and downright bizarre facts. 

Consider:
• Michelangelo had such repellant body odor that his assistants couldn’t stand working for him.
• Pablo Picasso did jail time for ripping off several statues from the Louvre.
• Gabriel Dante Rossetti’s favorite pet was a wombat that slept on his dining room table.
• Vincent van Gogh sometimes ate paint directly from the tube.
• Georgia O’Keeffe liked to paint in the nude.
• Salvador Dalí concocted a perfume from dung to attract the attention of his future wife. 

With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Leonardo (accused sodomist) to Caravaggio (convicted murderer) to Edward Hopper (alleged wife beater), Secret Lives of Great Artists is an art history lesson you’ll never forget!

fiction writing reading list

This fall, I took a Fiction Writing Workshop at the University of Texas through the Extension school program. I am more interested in Creative Non-Fiction, but as I haven't really taken any creative writing courses, I thought it would be a good experience nonetheless. I definitely benefited a lot from forcing myself to write (we submitted 3 pieces plus a final rewrite of one) and then going through the workshopping experience with my classmates. Each week, we also had assigned readings, mostly in our textbook.

The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction
50 North American Stories Since 1970

Our assigned readings:

• Rick Bass, The Hermit's Story
• Sanda Cisneros, Never Marry a Mexican
• Jhumpa Lahiri, A Temporary Matter
• David Leavitt, Territory
• Kelly Link, Stone Animals
• Susan Minot, Lust
• Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
• Julie Orringer, Pilgrims
• ZZ Packer, Brownies

There were some other short stories that we read as copies and handouts as well as some other notes on writing. We kept a reading response journal, so perhaps I will type up some of my responses to the stories as individual posts. 

I've not been much of a short story reader, and I still have mixed feelings about it, but it was definitely helpful to read it while trying to write it. It is really surprising to see how different short stories can be and what the author can do within the span of a few to twenty pages. I'm casually reading some of the other stories in the anthology, but I think I prefer a longer medium. 

Bossypants

I love 30 Rock and I love Tina Fey. So, when I saw that Ms. Fey had written a book, I knew I wanted to read it. I was very pleasantly surprised to see that my stepdad/mom had bought the book on our Amazon account, which meant I could read it on my phone (oh, technology!). Even better, the version we have has some pictures and even Tina reading a chapter outloud.

Bossypants
Tina Fey

Well, for starters, let's let the book speak for itself. Because when you have someone as hilarious as Tina Fey writing, what more can I really offer?

Before Liz Lemon, before "Weekend Update," before "Sarah Palin," Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV. She has seen both these dreams come true. At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon -- from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence.Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've all suspected: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.(Includes Special, Never-Before-Solicited Opinions on Breastfeeding, Princesses, Photoshop, the Electoral Process, and Italian Rum Cake!)

This book was so good and so funny that I read it in two days while laughing uproariously by myself in my little apartment. You, too, can have a great experience like that just by reading this book! I love a book that makes me belly laugh because the author is just that good at comedy. I learned a lot about Tina Fey's life from this book, but mostly, I was just really entertained. I haven't been reading much lately, and this reminded me how much fun it can be.

I will absolutely read it again, and you better at least give it a try. Just go to Barnes and Noble and snag one to read while lurking in the shelves or in one of their comfy chairs. If you get self-conscious at how much you are laughing in public and appearing insane to others, then buy it. Or you can be like me and be comfortable in your off-beat persona. Or you can go to the google books preview and sample it on your computer on the interwebs. Whatever floats your boat.