A Girl Named Zippy

A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I listened to this on audiobook and I think it made the book more interesting because it was read by the author and her timing and character voices made it come alive. Otherwise it was a cute, funny memoir. Definitely made me realize that with a little embellishment any life story can be interesting.

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The Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

What I liked most about this book is its title. It is the perfect title to this book about conflict borne out of love. Conflict because of a desire for making things better. This book mostly deals with the non-violent protesters at the Seattle WTO meetings in 1999 and the police who dealt with them. It’s as lopsided a portrayal as the news coverage was of it back then, only skewed this time in favor of the protesters. The characters just didn’t seem to be believeable though and so despite the research and good intentions, I had a hard time buying the whole thing. Although Yapa includes some of her resources in the back, I wish she would have given a quick summary of her findings. My quick internet search did not reveal quite the same amount of brutality she documents. And I wanted to know what “facts” which true and which were imagined. Unfortunately, despite the feeling that this should be an Important book, I found it somewhat forgettable—which is why I am only just now blogging about it.

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An Unnecssary Woman

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a hard book to review. I sort of hated it right up until the end. Until then the inner musings of a Beiruti woman, living alone and translating translations of books felt unnecessarily meandering and erudite. She quotes authors and philosophies that I don’t know and haven’t heard of and so had a hard time connecting to. There was just enough “memories” of Beirut and its wars and culture to keep me reading. Then, at the end, you realize how masterfully Alameddine is at his subtlety in his message: it dawns on the reader at the same time it dawns on the main character, Aaliya, that an elderly, divorced, childless woman whose friends have died and whose family is estranged and who translates books no one will read is still remarkably, profoundly necessary all along.

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The cure for loneliness is solitude. —Marianne Moore, from the essay “If I Were Sixteen Today”

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza. —Franz Kafka, Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings

if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass—an hourglass that drains grain by grain. Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.

We rarely consider that we’re also formed by the decisions we didn’t make, by events that could have happened but didn’t, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

We needed an explanation because we couldn’t deal with the fact that it could have been any one of us. Assuming causation—she was killed because she couldn’t hear anything since the radio was too loud—lets us believe that it can’t happen to us because we wouldn’t do such a thing. We are different. They are the other.

As much as I loved it and felt at home within its cages, school is more Hades than Heaven—a ritual killing of childhood is performed in school, children are put to death. The guard was the ferryman.

Henri Matisse once said, “It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.”