Bookin' It in 2024

Sadly, the challenges that plagued me last year continued in my 2024 reading year.  However, I was able to finish the following five books.  The titles in bold were particularly influential, inspiring or intriguing.

1. Menopause: A Comic Treatment edited by MK Czerwiec
2. Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley
3. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
4. Emerging from the Cracks: My Journey to Authentic Living by C. H. Danton
5. Wonder Woman: Tempest Tossed by Laurie Halse Anderson

Quote of the Day

Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing.  Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming.  All we can do is learn to swim.

-- Vicki Harrison

Quote of the Day

The work of a mature human being is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, and to be stretched large by these two things.

-- Francis Weller

Quote of the Day

In order to get over [the pain], I had to eat it and digest it.  I had to be in that zone.  I poured all my heart, all my emotions, all my mental torture into the music.  And maybe I'm moving on.  I selfishly compose for myself, but I don't think it's selfish because we are just human beings.  We do have a lot of differences, but we are much more similar than different.  I really truly believe that my very personal story can reach out to and appeal to a lot of people.

-- Jihye Lee

Quote of the Day

I think sorrow is natural.  And I had a friend once in the age when a psychiatrist thought it was a good idea to give you a lot of drugs if you were going through grieving and sorrow, and then you just wouldn't feel it.  What that means is you never get over it, because you haven't had that experience, which is a very human one, and everyone has it sooner or later.  It's grief.  And since I'm now in the land of windows, I'm the person that they phone and they say, "Will this ever be over?  How do I get through this?"  So one day at a time, but don't expect there to be no sorrow.

-- Margaret Atwood

Quote of the Day

There is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.

-- Edward Elgar

Quote of the Day

Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness.  It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love.  The only cure for grief is to grieve.

-- Earl Grollman

Quote of the Day

Grief is not a sign of weakness; it's a sign of love.  It's the price we pay for having deeply connected to someone or something.

-- Dr. Thema Bryant

Quote of the Day

My songs are like my journals.  And when other people relate to the music, I'm like, "Oh, thank God I'm not alone."

-- Laufey

Quote of the Day

I see your life as already artful, waiting,

just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

-- Toni Morrison

Quote of the Day

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.  I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.  Let them become the photograph on the table.  Let them become the name on the trust accounts.  Let go of them in the water.  Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.  In fact the apprehension that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day seemed today on Lexington Avenue so distinct a betrayal that I lost all sense of oncoming traffic.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 225-226

Quote of the Day

Dolphins, I learned from J. William Worden of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate.  Geese had been observed reacting to such a death by flying and calling, searching until they themselves became disoriented and lost.  Human beings, I read but did not need to learn, showed similar patterns of response.  They searched.  They stopped eating.  They forgot to breathe.  They grew faint from lowered oxygen, they clogged their sinuses with unshed tears and ended up in otolaryngologists' offices with obscure ear infections.  They lost concentration.  "After a year I could read headlines," I was told by a friend whose husband had died three years before.  They lost cognitive ability on all scales.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 46-47

Quote of the Day

When I checked the piece for publication I was startled and unsettled by how many mistakes I had made: simple errors of transcription, names and dates wrong.  I told myself that this was temporary, part of the mobilization problem, further evidence of those cognitive deficits that came with either stress or grief, but I remained unsettled.  Would I ever be right again?  Could I ever again trust myself not to be wrong?

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 200

Quote of the Day

A doctor to whom I mentioned (that I had inadvertently given the hospital an old address) shrugged, as if I had told him a familiar story.  Either he said that such"cognitive deficits" could be associated with stress or he said that such cognitive deficits could be associated with grief.  It was a mark of those cognitive deficits that within seconds after he said it I had no idea which he had said.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 200

Quote of the Day

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him.  This impulse did not end with his death.  What ended was the possibility of response.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 194

Quote of the Day

... consider those dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate.  Consider those geese who search for the lost mate until they themselves become disoriented and die.  In fact the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 193

Quote of the Day

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

-- Philippe Aries

Quote of the Day

People in grief think a great deal about self-pity.  We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it.  We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as "dwelling on it."  We understand the aversion most of us have to "dwelling on it."  Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 192

Quote of the Day

In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing."  A certain forward movement will prevail.  The worst days will be the earliest days ... We have no way of knowing ... ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 188-189

Quote of the Day

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 188

Quote of the Day

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn.  Grief was passive.  Grief happened.  Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 143

Quote of the Day

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces.  I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others.  The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.  It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 74-75

Quote of the Day

Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.  Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of "waves."

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 27

Quote of the Day

Heavy is the enchantment of places you know you will never see again.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 116

Quote of the Day

My grief for you will always remain unruly, even as I know it contains the logic of everyone who has ever felt it.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 191

Quote of the Day

But for now, I must poke holes in all this curiosity so that I might breathe, so that I might get on with the second half of my life.  If I desire the kind of life you wanted me to live, one of expansion over retraction, I must learn to be on the side of the living.  I must learn to accept that we are not the same. 

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 191

Quote of the Day

Sometimes I was lonely, sometimes I was just alone.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 168

Quote of the Day

The anxiety may have been a blanket but the sadness was a knife.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 168

Quote of the Day

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.  We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.  We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

-- Joan Didion, The White Album

Quote of the Day

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.  The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

-- Thomas Merton

Quote of the Day

Time only pushes wounds aside.  Regular life becomes insistent and crowds out the loss.  Usually, this is a good thing.  So much of healing is the recognition that not all your tissue got damaged in the accident.  But every so often, there is no such thing as regular life.  Every so often, life crowds out loss with more loss.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 154

Quote of the Day

Those living with grief know the particular sleeplessness it engenders -- so nonnegotiable, so immune to warm milk and narcotics.  Typical insomnia has an apologetic feel, like it doesn't want to be here any more than you do.  Like it knows you have a big day tomorrow but can't help itself.  Grief insomnia has a mouth on it: Time does not heal all wounds.  Time does not heal any wounds.  Who promised you that?  Get your money back.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 154

Quote of the Day

Anger is a cousin of intelligence.  If you are not revolted by certain things, you have no boundaries.  If you have no boundaries, you have no self-knowledge.  If you have no self-knowledge, you have no taste, and if you have no taste, why are you here?

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 133

Quote of the Day

... real literature, like love, comes from a desire to be known.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 122

Quote of the Day

It's unpredictable, this stage of grief.  Just when you think you have a handle on it, a crack opens up where the crazy gets in.  The pain is a weather system that builds and expands, occasionally touching down, like lightning.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 93