The Rule of Eight

They fairly vibrate with need,
Pinging across the universe,
Saturating themselves in light, color, scent;
Looking to connect, to share,
To lose a part of themselves,
Morphing and bonding;
Becoming something else completely.

I watch, unable to rise from my shell.
Matching their mania tires me,
Makes me unstable.
I cling to my core and watch as they dance.

Each day, following my same orbit--
Apogee equals perigee--
Never too far from the center.
A noble thing, perhaps,
But hardly alive,
Undectable, disregarded, dismissed.
An exhalation.
A sigh.

Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky by David Connerley Nahm
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another very original work. Written more as a novel-poem, this is a novel that relys on atmosphere more than characterization or plot. It definitely required more focus and some passages had to be read multiple times to let the image Nahm was relating crystallize into something recognizable ( which isn't really a criticism, as the image that became clear was suffused with emotion and detail that is often missing in more traditional novels). I found myself wondering why did Nahm describe it like this, why are some passages more poetic than other more straight forward passages? The answers helps flesh out the story as a whole and so I felt almost part of the process, or I imagined I had discovered some hidden aspects of the story. It is defintely a haunting story, and one that makes you wonder.

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“Well, no. I mean, yes, there are lots of objects, obviously, more than we know, but also, you know, the universe is mostly empty space. But that’s like all matter is mostly empty, you know, like we are made of molecules which are made of atoms which are made of electrons and protons and stuff which are made of subatomic particles like quarks and stuff and all that stuff, and atoms are mostly empty space around the electrons and protons and neutrons, but its all almost all empty space, you know. So when you think about it most stuff is empty and most of the universe is empty too just like that. So really there’s mostly nothing in the universe because even that stuff that there is, is mostly nothing anyway.”

All of the poetic pieces are her memories and they are more real than the day to day life that she lives.  Yet the memories are imbued with haunting and scary images because it haunts and scares her.  

The Atomic Weight of Love

The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Her is what I liked: I liked the facts about birds, I sympathized (a bit) with Meridian who follows her husband to New Mexico and sacrifices her dreams so he can fulfill his, and it helped me realize what a whiner I am when I complain about similar things. Here's the bits that I didn't like: characters didn't seem complex as much as inconsistent. Meridian seems optimistic and industrious yet gets mired down in poor-me thinking all the time. She relys on others too much to give her permission to follow her dreams. Her husband who can be preoccupied and takes her for granted reforms at times, but then suddenly turns into a snobby, controlling, over-bearing ogre just when Meridian needs justification for being unfaithful. I feel like Meridian was supposed to be some sort of heroine trapped by circumstances of the time. I found her to be infantile and selfish. But again, the bird facts were fascinating.


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A Tale for the Time Being

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What an original, insightful, mysterious book! Most of it consists of a "diary" written by Nao, a Japanese teenager who grew up in America but through her families financial misfortunes has relocated back to Japan. Ruth finds the diary washed up on the shore of a remote Canadian island where she lives with her environmental-artist husband. Both Nao and Ruth struggle to find their place in the world, and grapple with questions of time, purpose, and courage. Both have found themselves in places and situations that they didn't actively choose, and trying to figure out what to do next, There are great thoughts about time, courage, acceptance, the environment, and alternate realities. A very original novel that rings true.

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Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.

Because you see, this feeling of alive is not so easy to experience.  Even although life is a thing that seems to have some kind of weigh and shape, this is only an illusion.  Our feeling of alive has no real edge or boundary.  So we Japanese people say that our life sometimes feels unreal, just like a dream.
Death is certain.  Life is always changing, like a puff of wind in the air, or a wave in the sea, or even a thought in the mind.  So making a suicide is finding the edge of life.  It stops life in time, so we can grasp what shape it is and feel it is real, at least for just a moment.  It is trying to make some real solid thing from the flow of life that is always changing.

There she hung, submerged and tumbling slowly, like a particle of flotsam just below the crest of a wave that was always just about to break.

Jiko says that everything has a spirit, even if it is old and useless, and we must console and honor the things that have served us well.

And in that same fraction of time, that minuscule movement of my hand through space will determine the fates of all the Japanese soldiers and citizens that these same Americans (enemies, whose lives I save)may live to kill.  And so on and so on, until you could even say that the very outcome of htis war will be decided by a moment and a millimeter, representing the outward manifestation of my will.  But how am I to know?

Rebecca

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved this book! I loved the suspense, the characters, the symbolism, the writing, everything! Besides some of the obvious themes of marriage and the female role, I also enjoyed the emphasis on time and how moments can go too fast, or too slow. How in a moment our lives can change with a proposal or a gunshot, how in a moment you can lose everything or gain it all back. We share moments with the ones we love, where we are the only two people in a crowded room, and there are moments better spent by ourselves drinking in all our surroundings and noticing everything. How all those moments can add up to create sense out of a puzzle, and we can finally see the truth. Will definitely read more du Maurier!

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When the leaves rustle, they sound very much like the stealthy movement of a woman in evening dress, and when they shiver suddenly, and fall, and scatter away along the ground, they might be the patter, patter, of a woman’s hurrying footstep, and the mark in the gravel the imprint of a high-heeled satin shoe.

I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. Today, wrapped in the complacent armor of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one lightly and are soon forgotten, but then—how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. A denial heralded the thrice crowing of a cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas. The adult mind can lie with untroubled conscience and a gay composure, but in those days even a small deception scoured the tongue, lashing one against the stake itself.

This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hairpin on a dressing table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.

This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hairpin on a dressing table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.

wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.

I wondered how it was I could be so happy when our little world about us was so black. It was a strange sort of happiness.

It was ours, inviolate, a fraction of time suspended between two seconds.

but tonight they seemed to take on a special significance, as though the memory of them would last forever and I would say, long after, in some other time, “I remember this moment.”

Never Mind

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn


DNF
This series was on a list of great writing. It is really good writing. But the characters were all so despicable, that I didn't care to spend any a more time with them. Except the 5 year old who has a drunk, distant mother and a sadistic bored father. Hevean only knows how screwed up he's going to get. And despite the writing, I didn't care to find out.


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Covenant Hearts

Covenant Hearts by Bruce C. Hafen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mostly doctrinal discourse on the importance of marriage and family. Hafen digs deep into the doctrine here, with statistics and some anecdotes. it was good to be reminded about the fundamentals of a good marriage, although he doesn't really go into practicalities, other than to remind us that our spouse should be our first and main priority. The last part of the book talked about how marriage was a critical to the community,which I hadn't thought about in those terms before. It is slightly outdated, and the anecdotes tended to be on the dramatic side....wished some of them could have been a little more relateable.


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Authority in the priesthood is given through ordination, but power in the priesthood is received through righteous living.” 6

these plots all represent variations on Freud’s family romance—the process whereby a young person comes to terms with parental authority, ventures out into the wider world, faces assorted tests and eventually achieves independence. Along the way, confusion is dispelled; alienation gives way to a new sense of wholeness and well-being,”

Yet marriage can mysteriously empower personal growth and fulness, so much so that the adversary helped hide marriage from priests, monks, and nuns during the darkness of the early Christian apostasy.

As the opportunities for women expand, it becomes harder to settle at being home

When the law upholds the individual’s right to end a marriage, regardless of social consequences (as happened with no-fault divorce), that principle can also seem to uphold the individual’s right to start a marriage, regardless of social consequences (as with same-gender marriage). That is how today’s national debate on gay marriage is conceptually linked to no-fault divorce.

The changes in recent decades have portrayed marriage as an individual adult choice, rather than as a crucial knot in the very fabric that holds society together. We have increasingly lost sight of how much every marriage, and every divorce, affects other people—especially children.

Nobody really wants to be lonely, but the lifestyles associated with today’s frenzied search for “individual freedom” often lead, unsurprisingly, to loneliness.

optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, [and often we create the kind of world we live in because] our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.”

As the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”

life story of Adam and Eve is the story of receiving the Atonement.

agree with Sister Marjorie Hinckley. Someone asked her the secret of her happy marriage, and she said, “I lowered my expectations.”
Because of its “unlimited ethical motivation,” the “sacrifice” of the covenant partner is “regarded not as a ... personal loss ... , but as a privilege freely and gladly bestowed.”
It is possible that Hosea was able to comprehend Jehovah’s capacity to forgive, not just to judge, because Hosea learned to replace harsh judgment with forgiving compassion toward his own wife. The merciful are the only ones who can obtain mercy.
The woman’s innate spiritual instincts are like a moral magnet, pointing toward spiritual north, except when its magnetic particles are unnaturally traumatized. In addition to his own spiritual instincts, the man’s presiding gift is the holy priesthood, except when he is not living the principles of righteousness. And their “counseling” is reciprocal: If he is wise, he will listen to the promptings of her inner spiritual compass, just as she hearkens to his righteous counsel.
Alma describes justice as masculine and mercy as feminine: “Justice exerciseth all his demands, and also mercy claimeth all which is her own; and thus, none but the truly penitent are saved” (Alma 42: 24; italics added). This does not mean that women are not just nor that men are not merciful. But in the masculine sense of justice and the feminine sense of mercy, we see interdependent principles that are reconciled by the higher unifying power of the Atonement. Here is perhaps a type of the way a husband and wife are unified by the combined male and female elements of a higher divine nature.