Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

... a chess world where you moved about like a knight trying to move like a rook trying to move like a bishop...

...and the irritation of thinking about all this and knowing that since it was always easier to think than to be, that in my case the ergo of the expression was no ergo or anything at all like it...

La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began up beyond her, and that I went along outside as I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.

Wong summing up Morelli's passage: "The novel that interests us is not one that places character in a situation, but rather one that puts the situation in the characters."

voyant vs voyeur - a seer vs. a spectator of others' pleasure

genius lies in choosing to be a genius and in being right

instead of obstinately connecting with a non-existent tunnel, as is the case with so many poets leaning halfway out the living-room window late at night

In some corner, a vestige of the forgotten kingdom. In some violent death, the punishment for having remembered the kingdom. In some laugh, in some tear, the survival of the kingdom. Beneath it all, one does not feel that man will end up killing man. He will escape from it, he will grasp the rudder of the electronic machine, the astral rocket, he will trip up and then they can set a dog on him. Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks. Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.

Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman

The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw

Couldn't put this down, an enormous 1948 novel about WWII. Told from three points of view: Noah, a young Jewish man from New York, just married; Michael, a cynical Hollywood screenwriter in his early 30s; and Christian, a former ski instructor, now a German soldier. Their thoughts and footsteps intertwine. Along with the THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, and ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, this novel completes my recent foray into the Second World War. All three books stunned me.

Friend of My Youth: Stories by Alice Munro

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

Lovely, old-fashioned novel. Just captivating. Very little happens, except in nature, where enormous things occur, and are noticed, and give life.

Eagerly awaiting Coplin's next effort.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Pretty great. Makes me want to go back and finish her new Hotel one.

A virus (timely!), some great Lear scenes. Futuristic without being science-fiction-y.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Couldn't get through this new one by Mandel, while awaiting The Station Eleven to arrive in the mail.

After Dark, My Sweet by Jim Thompson

Little hackneyed, little dull, after all these years.

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

Took a quick day to re-read this favorite of my adolescence, in these viral days. Still just as good. Great movie too.

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

Took me a month and two days to finish reading this final installment in Mantel's WOLF HALL trilogy. It was good even though I don't recall the first two books in any detail, and all the history is brand new to me. But man, was it long. 750 really thin pages.

In Wyatt's verse there is a tussle in every line. In the verse of Lord Thomas, there is no contest at all, just a smooth surrender to idiocy.

... he will try to return the poems to their owners... where they will be giggled at by whores, and used to wipe their arses. When he gets home he says to Gregory, 'Never write verse.'

[instructions to Bible printers] The trick is to get them to set the line right to the edge of the page. It does not make for good appearance, but no white space means no perversion by marginalia.

Wyatt?

To counterfeit a merry mood
In mourning mind I think it best.
But once in rain I wore a hood
Well were they wet that barehead stood.

'What should I want with the Emperor, were he emperor of all the world? Your Majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other kinds.'

Can you make a new England? You can write a new story. You can write new texts and destroy the old ones... You can write on England, but was written before keeps showing through, inscribed on the rocks and carried on floodwater, surfacing from deep old well.  It's not just the saints and martyrs who claim the country, it's those who came before them: the dwarves dug into ditches, the sprites who sing in the breeze, the demons bricked into culverts and buried under bridges, the bones under your floor. You cannot tax them or count them. They have lasted ten thousand years and ten thousand years before that.

'Oh, Wyatt,' the king says. 'What he says he does not mean, and what he means he does not say.'

When he was an infant, his sister Kat used to tell him the bells made the time. When the hour strikes, and the music shivers in the air, you have the best of it; and what's left is like a sucked plumstone on the side of your plate.

He yawns. But speaks to himself: you must not be tired. If a man should live as if every day is his last, he should also die as if there is a day to come, and another day after that.

Endgame by Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Re-reading Waiting for Godot after all these years, in the midst of finishing up Deirdre Bair's biography of Beckett, I'm struck by the simplicity and insistence of the text. Generations now have tried to apply some sort of symbolic system on the play: it's about slavery, it's about the existence of God, it's about communism. Beckett himself always rejected all these sorts of filters, arguing, as a poet might, that it's about the words. Concentrate on the words and exclude ideology, and the weirdness of the words and characters and situation create their own system.

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Murphy by Samuel Beckett