top 5 part 2
Top 5 books (2 requests!) (for the sake of sanity, I decided to only pick one shot fiction books, not books that are part of a series or nonfiction. Otherwise we'd be here all night)
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Achingly beautiful prose. Roy also really gets the child's POV, which isn't the easiest to pull off, while simultaneously showing the things the children aren't understanding about the adult world around them.
"They ran along the bank calling out to her. But she was gone. Carried away on the muffled highway. Graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night the broken yellow moon in it.
There was no storm-music. No whirlpool spun up from the inky depths of the Meenachal. No shark superfised the tragedy.
Just a quiet handing-over ceremony. A boat spilling its cargo. A river accepting the offering. One small life. A brief sunbeam. With a silver thimble clenched for luck in its little fist."
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
I had no idea what to expect going into this book. I'd never read any McCarthy. But the prose was so stark, so minimal, so haunting, that I read it in what felt like one sitting. And cried at the end. And if anyone asked me what the plot was, I'd have to say... a man and his son walk. A lot. And then they stop.
"When he woke again he thought the rain had stopped. But that wasnt what woke him. He'd been visited in a dream by creatures of a kind he'd never seen before. They did not speak. He thought that they'd been crouching by the side of his cot as he slept and then had skulked away on his awakening. He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The talkes of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he."
Smilla's Sense of Snow - Peter Hoeg
I still remember what I was doing the first time I read this book. More great prose. Maybe I should credit the translator. I'd love to be able to read the original Danish. Smilla is a fierce, determined woman, a take no shit woman, a smart woman who still has fears and desires and faults.
"The moment the pastor throws earth on the coffin and we are supposed to turn around and leave, a silence falls that seems to last a long time. The women are quiet, no one moves, it's the sort of silence that is waiting for something to burst. From where I'm standing, two things happen.
First, Juliane falls to her knees and puts her face to the ground, and the other women leave her alone.
The second event is internal, inside of me, and what bursts through is an insight.
All along I must have had a comprehensive pact with Isaiah not to leave him in the lurch, never, not even now."
Pollen - Jeff Noon
First: this book is just so weird. It's even weirder than the first book I read by Noon, Vurt. It's a mother/daughter sci fi tale as I'd never seen it before, with dog people and killer, possibly sentient pollen, and other strange and wonderful things.
"Coyote is the best black-cab driver of all time. He's taken more people more miles, to stranger places, in stranger times, with less hassle, less shit on the windscreen, with slicker twists of the wheel, deeper moves on the map, with fewer accidents, fewer wrong turnings, fewer complaints, fewer refunds, along more shortcuts and outlawed roads, and with more gravitas, for less money, and with more wounds to show for it all than any other driver could even imagine.
Two minutes to four in the morning, May 1, the world is fluttering all around him; dark wings, wings of soot, black fields and a blinded moon. Also, it's just about to start ot rain. Badly. This matters little; Coyote is a top dog driver and now his jaws are slobbering at the thought of some rich meat, some golden fare, some big juicy muscle of money."
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Somehow this one never gets dated. Huh. You'd think it would be by now.
"We learned to whisper almost without sound. In the semidarkness we could stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren't looking, and touch each other's hands across space. We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other's mouths. In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed:
Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June."