to be sorted later #10
considering the halfway point
June’s almost over, and that means we’re halfway there! No, I’m not talking about the calendar year: I’m now 50% of the way through War & Peace!
I can’t lie, I enjoy many of the war sections about as much as I enjoyed the so-called Presidential debate this week, which I decided to catch up on yesterday morning — why? Why did I do it?! — while cleaning out my work inbox.
Of course I’m still balancing out my sanity by reading other books, too: most recently, Sandwich by Catherine Newman and I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol. A woman can handle only so much Napoleon, especially in the summer.
What else is going on around here?!
What I’m Sorting Through, Currently …
A Short Story So Good, I Read it Twice
I read it in the print magazine, then I read it online, then I left the magazine open to the story for another week, just because I wanted to keep thinking about it. The story: “Chicago on the Seine,” by Camille Bordas. I then realized she wrote another piece for The New Yorker that I loved last year, too! I won’t give away too much about “Chicago on the Seine” aside from it covers some of my favorite topics: Paris! Chicago! Death! Ghosts!
Here’s an excerpt:
“That was the problem with talking about the dead. Even when you were pretty sure you were telling the truth, you could never feel a hundred per cent like you were. How could you be sure the person hadn’t changed her mind before dying, or wouldn’t have, if given a little more information, a little more time? You had too much power, when speaking of the dead. They had the double disadvantage of not being able to fight you if you said something false about them, and of not having had access to any of the new knowledge the world had amassed since they’d died. I often thought that that was the worst thing about dying: that all your last positions and opinions became fixed forever, that you couldn’t change your mind anymore. It made you look stupid.
I didn’t know whether my mother really believed in ghosts. She might’ve been serious when she’d said it, she might’ve been joking.”
A Fuddy-Duddy in Moscow
When I was back home at the beginning of June, my dad was raving about the show A Gentleman in Moscow, so I decided to check it out. Imagine my delight when I learned last weekend while visiting my aunt Kerry that she was also watching it, and my grandma had recently finished it, too. And to bring it all full circle, there are several mentions of War & Peace in the show. I’ve broken my personal rule here — I have not read the book! — but I’m not mad about it. After all, as Kerry told me: “So many books — so little time.”
So now you know that I’m cheating here when I share this quote from the book: “A man can never be entirely sure that he is not a fuddy-duddy. That is axiomatic to the term.”
Ewan McGregor and his mustache should win all the awards for this performance. A beautiful story. I’d hang out with him at the hotel bar any time.
On Repeat
“My goal is to recall my past lives
and be free in each.”
— “Interview” by Jordan Kapono Nakamura
previously:
