It’s happened to me a few times that a book is otherwise fairly forgettable presents a fantastic insight, or crystallizes an idea I’d felt but never verbalized. It’s one the major reasons I rarely stop reading books, probably to my detriment. I’ll give my example, but I’m curious what other people have discovered in books they probably wouldn’t recommend.
In Richard Farr’s “The Fire Seekers,” an adventure story with a historical bent that focused on all the wrong things in my opinion, had this line that literally led me to have a better relationship with my father: “[my father] wants to feel close to me, wants to understand me, and wants the
easy road to that result, which is me being more like him than I am.”
What about you?
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I read Don DeLillo’s “Libra” about 20 or 25 years ago and didn’t like it, mostly because I thought it was really badly written. However there were a couple of statements in it that resonated with me. I can only give approximate quotations though because it’s such a long time ago and I got rid of the book in the meantime.
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Strength needs no excuses. (This was about being honest instead of lying and it often helped me with staying honest even when that seemed frightening).
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She was like a little puppy - always coming back to her owner, no matter how badly he abused her. Just for a little bit of love. (About Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife if I remember correctly. That one resonated a lot with me in my life’s circumstances at the time.)
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In The Sundays of Jean Dézert, the main character Jean spends his whole life being utterly unremarkable and average, doing the same routine of deadend job day in and day out. The first and only substantial thing in his life occurs during the book, which is meeting and proposing to a woman, only for her to very quickly after agreeing wonder what she was thinking and call it off. As he’s walking home from the failure of the first and only meaningful event in his life, this passage occurs:
Two barges are moored next to each another, bow to bow. A length of rope occasionally creaks. “How well, I understand you, barges,” thinks Jean Dézert. “You spend your rectilinear existence in these narrow canals. You wait in front of the locks. You cross through cities, pulled under bridges by tugboats that loudly proclaim their pride at owning a siren like real ships. All in all, you resemble me. You’ll never get to the sea.”
The idea of ‘never getting to the sea’ really encapsulated some of the feelings I’ve had in down periods of my life.
“In the end I wore my smartphone like a boredom prosthetic and used the internet as a stop-gap for thought. Digital Polyfilla in the spaces where ideas might have bloomed.”
Things I Learned from Falling - Claire Nelson
“We as a country ask the men and women in the armed forces to go overseas and fight on our behalf. While they are there, they see and experience the unthinkable, things so horrible they dare not speak of it. And then we expect these same men and women to come home after their tours of duty and just pick up where they left off. How is that supposed to happen? Like I said before, this isn’t something new that Iraq and Afghanistan vets now face. Every soldier throughout time has gone through it. We come home different. All of us who served in combat do. Over there we have to be on high alert at all times.”
One Step At A Time - Josh Bleill“Me? I haven’t made all A’s in the art of livin, but I give a damn, and I’ll take an experienced C over an ignorant A any day.”
Greenlights - Matthew McConaughey