"When we choose a place to visit, the way a country carries itself and markets itself—the way it knows itself, really—is everything. We flee certain resorts not just because they are touristed but more because they have begun to see themselves through tourists’ eyes, to amend themselves to tourists’ needs, to carry themselves in capital letters: because, in short, they have simplified themselves into their sense of what a foreigner wants."
Vietnam: 1991 — Yesterday Once More / Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of The World / Pico Iyer
The Intimates / Ralph Sassone
The Briefcase / Hiromi Kawakami
In One Person / John Irving
"Gen, in his genius for languages, was often at a loss for what to say when left with only his own words. If Mr. Hosokawa had still been sitting there he might have said to Gen, Go and see what that girl wants, and Gen would go and ask her without hesitation. It had occurred to him in his life that he had the soul of a machine and was only capable of motion when someone else turned the key. He was very good at working and he was very good at being by himself. Sitting alone in his apartment with books and tapes, he would pick up languages the way other men picked up women, with smooth talk and then later, passion. He would scatter books on the floor and pick them up at random. He read Czeslaw Milosz in Polish, Flaubert in French, Chekhov in Russian, Nabokov in English, Mann in German, then he switched them around: Milosz in French, Flaubert in Russian, Mann in English. It was like a game, a showy parlour trick he performed only for himself, in which the constant switching kept his mind sharp, but it was hardly the same thing as being able to approach a person who was looking at you intently from across a room."
Bel Canto / Ann Patchett (Such a good read.)
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen / Christopher MacDougall (An incredible, inspiring read even for non-runners ie. me.)
Where the God of Love Hangs Out / Amy Bloom
The Sweet Life in Paris / David Lebovitz
Let Me Eat Cake / Paul Arnott
The Gatecrasher / Madeleine Wickham
"
It’s quite something to go bare-handed up through an animal’s ass and dislodge its warm guts. Startling, the first time, how fragilely they are attached.
I have since put countless suckling pigs—pink, with blue, querying eyes—the same weight and size of a pet beagle—into slow ovens to roast overnight so that their skins crisp and their still-forming bones melt into the meat, making it succulent and sticky. I have butchered two-hundred-twenty-pound sides of beef down to their primal cuts, carved the tongues out of the heads of goats, fastened whole baby lambs with crooked sets of teeth onto green ash spits and set them by the foursome over hot coals, and boned out the loins and set them by the foursome over hot coals, and boned out the loins and legs of whole rabbits that—even skinned—still look exactly like bunnies. But at the time of the chicken killing, I was still young and unaccustomed.
I retrieved the bird off the frozen ground and tied its feet and hung it from a low tree branch so it could bleed out. Then I went inside and boiled a blue enamel lobster pot full of water. Once the bird bled out, I submerged it in boiling water to loosen its feathers. Sitting out on the back steps in the yellow pool of light from the kitchen window, I plucked the feathers off the chicken, two and three at a time. When I finished, it was reduced in size in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Its viscera came out with an easy tug; a small palmful of livery, bloody jewels that I tossed out into the dark yard.
Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef / Gabrielle Hamilton
"
“Are you preparing for another war, Plutarch?” I ask.
“Oh, not now. Now we’re in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated,” he says. “But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction. Although who knows? Maybe this will be it, Katniss.”
The Hunger Games #3: Mockingjay / Suzanne Collins
The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay / Suzanne Collins
"He seemed, like Albert Vetch, simultaneously haunted and oblivious, the kind of person who in one moment could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek."
Wonder Boys / Michael Chabon
"Yeah, because what else are you going to draw from? You’ve got the people you know, which are problematic. Always. They’re rich but they’re also real people living their lives alongside you. Then you’ve got the people that you make-up completely, who are often missing a dimension if they don’t have some reference to real people. So strangers exist in this in-between space, where in not knowing them, you are creating a fiction for them, even in passing, but at the same time, there they are, with their actual bodies and their actual clothes. It’s totally enticing. The most inspiring person is the person I know a little bit but not very well. I was talking to my friend the other day about this thing I’m writing now, and I said, “Did you know your sister is a big point of reference for this main character in my book?”. She said “My sister? When have you even met my sister?” and I told her “Oh, I met her years ago. Remember? The wedding?” That’s the perfect amount of knowing someone. It gives you a lot of room and freedom."
Miranda July in this interview with The Rumpus, in response to the question, “Would you say strangers are an important theme in your work?”
