She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
This is the first of seven autobiographies which chronicle the life of Marguerite Johnson, aka Maya Angelou. We start off with Maya being sent with her brother Bailey to live with her grandmother and uncle in Stamps, Alabama. As time goes on, Maya eventually goes to live with her mother in St. Louis, as well as in San Francisco, and spends time with her father at various points as well. Some pretty rough stuff goes down (think mom's boyfriend getting too friendly with an 8-year-old Maya) but Maya manages to persevere into young adulthood, at which time she becomes a parent herself.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Blob friends, 
   I didn't love this book, nor did I dislike it. I really liked various parts of it, and most of all, I really liked Maya Angelou herself after reading it. As a book, I'm not sure I'll walk away remembering every detail for years to come, but it definitely made an impression. Here are some other thoughts...

Hot takes
- Maya Angelou is very funny.
- Maya Angelou had a pretty intense coming of age, and it's fairly miraculous that she not only survived, but thrived and then recounted it so eloquently for us.
[For evidence, see such scenes as "driving dead drunk dad home from Mexico when you don't know how to drive, let alone drive stick shift", or "bounces back after her mother's boyfriend rapes her when she is 8"]
- Maya Angelou is a badass.

Seven volumes of autobiography
Okay, so I didn't know there were seven volumes in her autobiography, or that this was only the first of the seven. Admittedly, she had a pretty cool first 17 years, so I can see there being plenty of fodder for more books, but seven? That feels like a lot. That reminds me of someone else... (Cough) Proust? ;)

Maya and Bailey/Scout and Jem
The relationship between Maya and Bailey reminded me a lot of the relationship between Scout and Jem. Both were the only pair of children in their families, both grew up under one strong parental voice (Atticus, Momma) and both fiercely fought for the other at various critical points of childhood.

Momma and Marilla
Since we're on the topic of other books this book reminded me of, I'll just also let you know that Momma (Maya's grandma) reminded me a lot of Marilla Cuthbert. Some samplings:

• Momma never answered questions directly put to her on any subject except religion.

• Knowing Momma, I knew that I never knew Momma. Her African-bush secretiveness and suspiciousness had been compounded by slavery and confirmed by centuries of promises made and promises broken.

Mom's family in St. Louis
Lots of things happen when Maya and Bailey move to St. Louis for a time and live with their mother. This was one of my favorite lines, in reference to her mother's brothers:

I admit I was thrilled by their meanness. They beat up whites and Blacks with the same abandon, and liked each other so much that they never needed to learn the art of making outside friends.

Not condoning violence here, but I liked the idea that they were so insular they never bothered to learn how to meet other people. 

Did de-segregation burst something beautiful within the Black community? 
I'm sure I am not the first person to ask this question. In fact, I'm sure there are whole treatises and papers on the subject. I mention it here because the community that Maya grows up in in Stamps, while certainly suffering in a variety of ways because it is segregated from the white community, has an incredible warmth and vibrancy and community. I'm sure various sub-communities still exist within black culture, but this was the first time I read something that really made me stop and go, "ooh, did we ruin something while we were trying to fix something else?"

Lampfish of Twill
Was one of my favorite books growing up, and I thought of it when I read this line: 

• The lamplight in the Store gave a soft make-believe feeling to our world which made me want to whisper and walk about on tiptoe.

After
As Maya tries to recover from being raped, she's still only 8 or 9 years old, so in many ways she doesn't really know how to process what she's feeling. I liked what this line captured, and it reminded me of the way that Roxane Gay talks about her life in terms of "before" and "after". 

For nearly a year, I sopped around the house, the Store, the school and the church, like an old biscuit, dirty and inedible.

Mrs. Flowers
Mrs. Flowers is a delightful character, and a real person who serves as a critical role model for Maya when she returns to Stamps after her time in St. Louis. She reminded me of many such a character - the old wealthy woman who shares her books - only here, her library and wealth are all the more remarkable because she is also a black woman in the early 20th century. Here are some lines I liked: 

• It would be safe to say that she made me proud to be Negro, just by being herself.

• I was liked, and what a difference it made.

• I wouldn't miss Mrs. Flowers, for she had given me her secret word which called forth a djinn who was to serve me all my life: books.

We are more alike than we are unalike
This is a line from a famous Maya Angelou poem that Oprah references in her introduction to my copy of this book. It struck me immediately, because I expected to have little in common with Maya, and instead found myself over and over again seeing points of connection and similarity. Here's the list I came up with: 

- Preserving (In Stamps the custom was to can everything that could possibly be preserved.) While this reminded me of my own family, it also reminded me of my most recent read, and Paradise Pickles and Preserves. So interesting how my books never fail to follow each other in seen and unforeseen ways.

- Singer sewing machines - Momma's black Singer sewing machine is featured prominently early on, which reminded me of my own sitting next to me and my mother's and my sister's and so on and so on. 

- Marguerite - Maya's name is Marguerite, and some members of family call her Ritie, while her brother ends up giving her the nickname Maya, which clearly stuck. Marguerite is a family name that shows up all over my maternal lineage, so I immediately felt a kinship with her. 

- Refuge in books/library - Maya has a lot to handle and absorb as she grows up, but, like me, she found refuge in books and in that wondrous invention, the library. 

When spring came to St. Louis, I took out my first library card, and since Bailey and I seemed to be growing apart, I spent most of my Saturdays at the library (no interruptions) breathing in the world of penniless shoeshine boys who, with goodness and perseverance, became rich, rich men, and gave baskets of goodies to the poor on holidays. The little princesses who were mistaken for maids, and the long-lost children mistaken for waifs, became more real to me than our house, our mother, our school, or Mr. Freeman.

- Frequently internalizes rather than verbalizes - I've worked on this over the years, but young Maya reminded me a great deal of myself. 

- Quilts - there's a great line about Momma checking to see if their feet are clean under the quilts. 

- Momma (Grandma) threatening you with her eyes to stay still and quiet at church - my grandma also struggled to keep me in line at church from time to time. ;)

- Laughter so easily turns to hysteria for imaginative children - I loved this line, and it reminded me of the only time I was kicked out of my house (very briefly, to stand on the back porch - no big deal, to be clear) which was for laughing too hard at the dinner table and being unable to control myself. 

- Feeling ungainly/unpretty, esp. as compared to family - Maya is surrounded by beauty in her family, and she feels a little like an ugly duckling, which I identified with. 

- Bologna, potato salad - Both staples at the Stamps summer picnics; both featured at many a family gathering I attended. 

- Going to parties and wanting to read - I distinctly remember going to a family get together, and upon seeing that there were several other children who had been allowed to read the latest Harry Potter in the front room, begging my mother to be allowed to return to the car and read my own copy. (She acquiesced.)

- Playing croquet & pinochle - I'm not sure why so many of Maya's childhood pastimes overlapped with ones I encountered, but again, I found it striking.

- Oakland, San Francisco - I found it particularly interesting to read the sections which took place in Oakland and San Francisco, as I have been there several times for work in the last year. 

Great lines about race
There were so many to choose from, but I've cultivated a selection for you. 

• If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.

• In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like. I remember never believing that whites were really real.

• The Depression must have hit the white section of Stamps with cyclonic impact, but it seeped into the Black area slowly, like a thief with misgivings.

• Maya, on a woman named Mrs. Cullinan calling her the wrong name repeatedly, then renaming her "Mary" to suit her: I decided I wouldn't pee on her if her heart was on fire. lolololololz

• Every person I knew had a hellish horror of being 'called out of his name'. It was a dangerous practice to call a Negro anything that could be loosely construed as insulting because of the centuries of their having been called n***ers, jigs, dinges, blackbirds, crows, boots and spooks.

• The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose.

• The night suddenly became enemy territory, and I knew that if my brother was lost in this land he was forever lost. This line and the one above reminded me so vividly of Emmett Till. 

• On thinking Joe Louis had lost a big fight against Max Schmeling (a white man): My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black Boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps. It was a white woman slapping her maid for being forgetful.

• It was awful to be a Negro and have no control over my life.

• The humiliation of hearing Momma describe herself as if she had no last name to the young white girl was equal to the physical pain. It seemed terribly unfair to have a toothache and a headache and have to bear at the same time the heavy burden of Blackness.

Great lines more generally

• The world had taken a deep breath and was having doubts about continuing to revolve. 

• On meeting her dad for the first time: And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again. I love the use of humpty-dumpty as a verb. :)

• Weekdays revolved on a sameness wheel. They turned into themselves so steadily and inevitably that each seemed to be the original of yesterday's rough draft.

• Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

• There was going to be a storm and it was a perfect night for rereading Jane Eyre.

Words new to me
Gladstone - a small portmanteau suitcase built over a rigid frame which could separate into two equal sections, typically made of stiff leather and often belted with lanyards. The bags are named after William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), the four-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

catheads - a Southern term for biscuits

didoes - mischievous tricks; pranks; antics. Also, baubles or trifles

mumbledy-peg - a children's game played with a pocketknife, the object being to cause the blade to stick in the ground or a wooden surface by flipping the knife in a number of prescribed ways or from a number of prescribed positions

I'll leave you with two of my favorite lines:

Idiots and lunatics drove cars, why not the brilliant Marguerite Johnson?

Although I had no regrets, I told myself sadly that growing up was not the painless process one would have thought it to be.

If I don't blob before we get there, happiest of holidays and happy winter, friends! I'm off to A Separate Peace. 

They were strangers who had met in a chance encounter. They had known each other before Life began.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
The God of Small Things is a tale of twins. We follow Estha (Esthappen) and Rahel through their present, past, and future, in India and abroad, delving into tragedy and reliving their childhood. They are, in many ways, more a we than a he and a she. They seem to know each other's innermost thoughts and feel each other's pain. The story weaves us back and forth from past to present, and we learn the circumstances that split Estha and Rahel apart, the eventual death of their mother, and how the twins are eventually reunited.

The rest of the family plays an integral role in the plot, from the twins' great-aunt Baby Kochamma, to their grandparents Mammachi and Pappachi, to their uncle Chacko and cousin Sophie Mol. The story is full of death and full of life, packed with flavor and aching with pain and desire. Ultimately, what the twins find and seek is not so much resolution as reincarnation.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

People whose names begin with the letter D
Dear readers, I wanted to like this book. In fact, I wanted to LOVE this book, since two of my dearest friends (both with names that start with D) are big fans. Alas, I did not love this book. I won't go so far as to say that I hated it, but I will say that it wasn't a very pleasurable reading experience to me. In much the same way that Great Expectations is full of sadness, this book is full of trials and challenges for its characters. But, where GE succeeds for me is that it gives the reader levity and joy within that desolation. This is not to say that only happy books are good ones - that, certainly, is not true. But in this case, I wanted not only a little more joy, but also to genuinely care about what happened to the characters. Perhaps because it took place mostly in retrospectives, I didn't feel that I really got to know the characters, so when things happened to them, I didn't really care very much. In any case, I always encourage readers to make their own decisions about books, and of a trio of readers, this book still has a 67% recommendation rating, thanks to D2. So make up your own mind. 

Capital letters When the Mood seems to Strike
One of the things I really liked about this book was that it reminded me very much of the lyrical quality to several other books I've read by Indian authors (Home and the World, Haroun and the Sea of Stories). Obviously I don't want to lump all authors of a country together, but I do find that there are some similarities and kinships I really enjoy. One of these is a propensity to use capital letters in meaningful ways. Here is an example: 

In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us.

Church domes painted blue like the sky.
During a funeral, Rahel examines the church ceiling, and it is domed and painted like the sky, which reminded me very much of the church I grew up going to. I used to count the stars in the ceiling and imagine the sky beyond that sky, so I liked the idea of us having similar mental explorations continents apart. 

Now tell me, are you jelly, or are you jam? 
Another thing I really liked about this book was that the family owns a factory called 'Paradise Pickles and Preserves'. As I've mentioned in other posts (Please Look After Mom) the process of preserving and pickling makes me think fondly of my mom and my aunts and my great aunts. I loved this line in particular, as my mother and I have discussed the difference between jelly and jam at length: 

They used to make pickles, squashes, jams, curry powders, and canned pineapples. And banana jam (illegally) after the FPO (Food Products Organization) banned it because according to their specifications it was neither jam nor jelly. Too thin for jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they said.

Pappachi
Pappachi reminded me in a very negative way of Things Fall Apart and some other classic wife-beaters in literature. That said, here are a few lines about him that I enjoyed:

In the evenings, when he knew visitors were expected, he would sit on the verandah and sew buttons that weren't missing onto his shirts, to create the impression that Mammachi neglected him. haghaghaghahgagh.

His light-brown eyes were polite yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife. This sentence is so great. 

Feeling vomity
I loved this exchange between Estha and Ammu, his mother, at the movies: 

"Now WHAT?"
"Feeling vomity," Estha said.
"Just feeling or d'you want to?"
"Don't know."

It reminded me of many a conversation I have had with a middle schooler who was feeling vomity, and/or who might have already felt vomity and, say, thrown up in the bathroom sink. 

Books this book reminded me of:

• Please Look After Mom (house as factory, pickling, preserving)

• The Home and the World (zamindars, revolution, relationship between castes)

• Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Capital Letters but also lyrical storytelling)

• Hotel New Hampshire (incest, siblings intertwined)

• Things Fall Apart (treatment of wife beating as banal)

• Ulysses (made me feel vomity, tbqh)

• The House of Spirits (muteness becoming its own character)

Striking Sentences

• The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat.

• A hot river and a pickle factory. 

• This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

New words

dhobi - a caste group of India whose traditional occupation was washing clothes

veshya - a Hindu of an upper caste traditionally assigned to commercial and agricultural occupations

estivation - ZOOLOGY: prolonged torpor or dormancy of an animal during a hot or dry period; BOTANY: the arrangement of petals and sepals in a flower bud before it opens

mangosteen - The purple mangosteen, known simply as mangosteen, is a tropical evergreen tree believed to have originated in the Sunda Islands of the Malay archipelago and the Moluccas of Indonesia

mundu - in Kerala and other parts of southern India: a large piece of cloth worn wrapped around the waist and (when worn by men) frequently having the lower back edge pulled up between the legs and tucked into the waistband

lambent - (of light or fire) glowing, gleaming, or flickering with a soft radiance

kathakali - Kathakali (Malayalam: കഥകളി) is one of the major forms of classical Indian dance. It is a "story play" genre of art, but one distinguished by the elaborately colorful make-up, costumes and facemasks that the traditionally male actor-dancers wear.

I will leave you with this line, which was a reference to the kathakali, but I think speaks quite clearly to a broader truth: 

The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.

I'm off in search of more Great Stories, and to explore the beauty of southern California! Onwards to Maya Angelou. 

I used to be in a very revolutionary mood, but now I think that we'll gain nothing by violence.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

Cast of Characters (not all-inclusive) Zhivago, aka Yuri, aka Doctor Zhivago
Lara, aka Antipova (married name) (Zhivago's love, and one-time baby mama)
Antonina Alexandrovna Gromeko, aka Tonya (Zhivago's wife, and two-time baby mama)
Antipov, aka Strelnikov, aka Pasha (Lara's husband)
Viktor Ippolitovich Komarovsky (Lara's first lover/tormentor)
Evgraf Zhivago (half brother to Zhivago)
Can't remember her name (#sorrynotsorry) (Zhivago's second wife, and two-time baby mama)

Oh, I'm sorry, are you confused? I didn't even include the alternate diminutives, so really, I'm cutting you some slack here. 

In all seriousness, though, here's the gist of it: 

This is the story of Zhivago - the man, the myth, the legend. We begin with him in his boyhood, and we end shortly after his death. The interim is replete with the stuff of his life - love, loss, adventure, work, revolution (because come on, he's a Russian, so obvi), family, writing, and some more love. We travel with him across the great expanse of Mother Russia, we fall hard with him for the forbidden Lara, and we feel for him when he is caught within the various webs of war and revolution in his home country. This book is an epic in the very best sense, and like any good epic, it's a wild ride.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Oh, I'm sorry, were you wanting more plot just then? I don't feel inclined to acquiesce to your request. You'll simply have to pick up a copy (or borrow mine) and read it yourself if you'd like to know more of the details. 

So, what did I think of this book, you DEMAND TO KNOW? I loved it. It officially goes into a very specific category for me called "Books where I don't really like any of the characters but somehow the book is one of my all-time favorites anyway". There is one other book in it. Any guesses? Starts with "Gr" and ends in "pectations."

It's not that I found Dr. Z unlikable, but more that he felt kind of entitled and aimless toward the end. He also had a lot of children, and didn't seem super invested in figuring out how they would do that whole growing up thing, which I just can't condone. But there's something sweeping and grand and majestic about this book that's sort of impossible to capture, and that's what I loved about it. I have alphabetized and categorized my thoughts for your reading pleasure. 

Cortèges and Cholera
This book has a stellar opening scene. We begin with Dr. Zhivago's mother's funeral, and we're quite literally standing over her grave in the middle of snowstorm. It's totally epic and amazing. It also reminded me of the opening of Love in the Time of Cholera for some reason, something about funerals and somber carriages and such. 

Fragrances and Flashbacks
Often, authors write of smells that make me yearn to eat the food in the book, or experience a specific moment in space and time. But Pasternak had a real knack for writing about smells, and weather, and things dealing with the physical world. Here are a few of my favorite fragrance flashbacks (anyone else thinking about Proust and his madeleines?):

• Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, breathed in the intricately fragrant air of the vast space around her. It was dearer to her than a father and a mother, better than a lover, and wiser than a book. Lara, on returning home. I know it's odd, but this is what the smell of manure and hay does for me.

• The handkerchief had the mingled smell of mandarine and of Tonya's hot palm, equally enchanting. The childishly naïve smell was intimately reasonable, like a word whispered in the dark. Aren't these metaphors spectacular? 

• Then, like a telegram received on the way, or like greetings from Meliuzeevo, a fragrance floated through the window, familiar, as if addressed to Yuri Andreevich... Everywhere there were blossoming lindens. The ubiquitous wafting of this smell seemed to precede the northbound train, like a rumor spread to all junctions, watch houses and little stations, which the travelers found everywhere, already established and confirmed.

• The air smells of pancakes and vodka, as during the week before Lent, when nature herself seems to rhyme with the calendar. I love everything about this sentence. 

(Sometimes) Lugubrious Lara
I don't want to go into too much detail about Lara here (because I'd really prefer that you go read the book) but here are a few lines I liked about her: 

• Lara liked to talk in semidarkness with candles burning.
• I'm broken, I have a crack in me for all my life.

Love and Lovers
Since this is a Russian novel, there's no shortage of love in it. Okay, so maybe that's not true of all Russians, but it's true for several of the Russians I have read for this blob. 

• I don't think I'd love you so deeply if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret.
• I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely. 

I am not sure I want to be loved insanely. Infinitely sounds nice, and wildly sounds exciting, but insanely gets into some tricky territory, imho. 

Playing Pianos

In the corner a tuner produced the same note a hundred times and then spilled out the beads of an arpeggio.

I loved this line because it made me think of our piano in the living room, and Mr. Donley (sp?) ping-ping-pinging at it to get the strings just right. 

Philosophy and Pepper (not be confused with that famous pairing of Salt and Pepper)

• I think philosophy should be used sparingly as a seasoning for art and life. To be occupied with it alone is the same as eating horseradish by itself.

There is no shortage of philosophy in this novel (because, again, Russian) but this was by far my favorite line, from Lara, to Zhivago. 

Reading Russians

Reading this book reminded me of several fantastic Russian works, and I was ticking off a mental list of their common themes. Here's what I came up with: 

• Philosophy
• Existentialism/Death
• Trains
• Love affairs
• Strange coincidences
• Revolution

I thought of Bulgakov and Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky, and then, a thought came to me which clearly should have struck me before. What OTHER book that I love has all of these components? Did you guess Atlas Shrugged? And what did I recently learn about Ayn Rand. Was it that her real name was Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum. (slaps self on forehead) Of COURSE SHE'S RUSSIAN. Now it all makes sense. 

Okay, now that I've shared that epiphany (epiffy-wot?), here are a few things that felt quintessentially Russian: 

• Now, as never before, it was clear to him that art is always, ceaselessly, occupied with two things. It constantly reflects on death and thereby constantly creates life.

• The fear known as spymania had reduced all speech to a single, formal, predictable pattern. The display of good intentions in discourse was not conducive to conversation. Passenger and driver went the greater part of the way in silence.

• The war was an artificial interruption of life, as if existence could be postponed for a time (how absurd!). Note - that is the author's commentary, not mine. Though I quite agree. 

It is perhaps also worth noting that one of my favorite scenes in the book took place when Zhivago and Lara crossed paths in the local library. Get it? Reading Russians? ;)

Trains and Trajectories
Trains came up many times in this book, and I was totally here for it. I love trains, and train travel, and there's something that feels deeply romantic and also functional to me about train travel. Like you get to do two things at once but you can also be a normal person on a train, whereas on a bus or a boat or a plane you're more rumpled by the action of the vehicle or the air or the water.

This could just as easily have lived in the fragrance section, but since it was the train station they were describing, I decided to include it here.

It smelled of early city winter, trampled maple leaves, melting snow, engine fumes, and warm rye bread, which was baked in the basement of the station buffet and had just been taken out of the oven.

Unfreedom

Despite the absence of fetters, chains, and guards, the doctor was forced to submit to his unfreedom, which looked imaginary.

Doesn't that line just blow your mind a little? Just a little? Or maybe a lot? So good. 

Whispers and Waiting
I loved this exchange: 

He tugged at Yura's sleeve, trying to tell him something. 'Aren't you ashamed to whisper in a stranger's house? What will people think of you?' Yura stopped him and refused to listen.

Because it reminded me of this moment from Proust: 
-- "Now, don't start whispering! How would you like to come into a house and find everyone
muttering to themselves?" -- YBN's great-aunt, on why whispering is impolite

Words of Weather
Several people asked me about my experience reading this book, and what I told them each was this: I would, without a doubt, like to live in a world that was entirely composed of Pasternak's weather. He has many great qualities as a writer (in my opinion) but I fell in love again and again with the way he described the physical world and its weather. Here are some highlights for your pleasure. 

Even the sun, which also seemed like a local accessory, shone upon the scene by the rails with an evening shyness, approaching as if timorously, as a cow from the herd grazing nearby would if it it were to come to the railway and start looking at the people.

The cow either tossed her head angrily or stretched her neck and mooed rendingly and pitifully, while beyond the black sheds of Meliuzeevo the stars twinkled, and from them to the cow stretched threads of invisible compassion, as if they were the cattle yards of other worlds, where she was pitied.

The moonlit night was astounding, like mercy or the gift of clairvoyance.

Suddenly out of the cloud a heavy mushroom rain poured down obliquely, sparkling in the sun. It fell in hasty drops at the same tempo as the speeding train clacked its wheels and rattled its bolts, as if trying to catch up with it or afraid of lagging behind.

Yuri
Here is my favorite line about Yuri, aka Dr. Zhivago:

• And to the muttering of the wind, Yuri Andreevich slept, woke up, and fell asleep in a quick succession of happiness and suffering, impetuous and alarming, like this changing weather, like this unstable night.

Lines I Liked

• The weather was trying to get better. lol. love this. 

• They went outside and did not recognize the air, as after a long illness.

• This was what life was, this was what experience was, this was what the seekers of adventure were after, this was what art had in view - coming to your dear ones, returning to yourself, the renewing of existence.

Lines that were in contention for the title of this blog: 

I may arrive any day now like a bolt from the blue.

Everything around fermented, grew, and rose on the magic yeast of being.

But everything truly great is without beginning, like the universe. It does not emerge, but is suddenly there, as if it always existed or fell from the sky.

So you've heard that there's nothing good coming, only difficulties, dangers, uncertainty?

Words Which Were New to Me
heliotrope - a plant of the borage family, cultivated for its fragrant purple or blue flowers, which are used in perfume; a light purple color, similar to that typical of heliotrope flowers

nicotania - an ornamental plant related to tobacco, with tubular flowers that are particularly fragrant at night

taiga - the sometimes swampy coniferous forest of high northern latitudes, especially that between the tundra and steppes of Siberia and North America

virago - a domineering, violent, or bad-tempered woman 

Congratulations, dear ones, we've made it to the end of this blob. I'll leave you with thoughts that seem to encapsulate this novel, which serves, in a way, as a love letter to Lara and to Mother Russia. 

And this expanse is Russia, his incomparable one, renowned far and wide, famous mother, martyr, stubborn, muddle-headed, whimsical, adored, with her eternally majestic and disastrous escapades, which can never be foreseen!

It's not for nothing that you stand at the end of my life, my secret, my forbidden angel, under a sky of wars and rebellions, just as you once rose up under the peaceful sky of childhood at its beginning.

With that, I'll leave you. I'm reading many books for a personal book bingo (and read 24 for a previous book bingo) which is why my blobs have been less frequent. I could apologize, but that would imply that I'm sorry I'm reading so much. Which I'm not. So look for me some time, perhaps soon, perhaps not! Off to The God of Small Things! Join me if you dare!