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

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

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

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

To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves -- there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.

-- Joan Didion, "On Self-Respect," Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Quote of the Day

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

-- Joan Didion