"There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away." (Emily Dickinson)
Request: When you reference something in the book, please let us know where it is so we can all read along. Include the chapter number, page number, and the paragraph number. Like this: (C3, P245, G3) Thanks!
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Just one request: When you reference something in the book, please let us know where it is so we can all read along. Include the chapter number, page number, and the paragraph number. Like this: (C3, P245, G3).
Happy Reading!
BREATHING LESSONS by Anne Tyler
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD by Richard Yates
The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson
The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer
Death in the Garden by Elizabeth Ironside
A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis
Daisy Miller by Henry James
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen
6 Robert Frost Poems (3 Group Assigned & You Pick 3)
War as I Knew It by George S. Patton Jr.
Secret Lives of First Ladies by Cormac O'Brian
12 comments:
(C1,P15,G5)
"All she said was, she was marrying for security. She said she'd married for love once before and it hadn't worked out."
"Love!" Ira said. "She was seventeen years old. She didn't know the first thing about love."
Maggie looked over at him. Was *was* the first thing about love? she wanted to ask. But he was muttering at the oil truck now.
(P38, G5)
"She had assumed when she married Ira that he would always look at her the way he'd looked at her that first night, when she stood in front of him in her trousseau negligee and the only light in the room was the filmy shaded lamp by the bed. She had unbuttoned her top button and then her next-to-top button, just enough to let the negligee slip from her shoulders and hesitate and fall around her ankles. He had looked directly into her eyes, and it seemed he wasn't even breathing. She had assumed that would go on forever."
(P67, G2)
"Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore, and longtime jokes with friends?...Then besides the songs there were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair-spray ads and the panty hose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact."
(P97, G3)
"Maggie had never seen politicians as powerful. She saw them as beggars. They were always begging for votes, altering themselves to satisfy their public, behaving spinelessly and falsely in a pathetic bid for popularity."
Serena telling Maggie, "You always were impossibe. I suspect it's deliberate. No one could act so goofy purely by chance." (P125, G7)
"Well," Ira said finally, "we certainly livened up THAT little gathering." (P126,G4)
"He obeyed, mostly out of exhaustion." (P140,G2)
(P172)
"And Ira had thought, Ah, God, I have been trapped with these people all my life and I am never going to be free. And he had known then what a failure he had been, ever since the day he took over his father's business. Was it any wonder he was sensitive to waste? He had given up the only serious dream he'd ever had. You can't get more wasteful than that."
(P181,G1)
He had known then what true waste was; Lord, yes. It was not his having to support these people but his failure to notice how he loved them...."
(P227)"Was it plain old envy, a burdened, restrained man's envy of someone who was constitutionally carefree?"
(P242)
"Don't you think I've tried? I've talked till I'm blue in the face. But everything I say seems to come out wrong. She takes offense, I take offense; we just get all tangled in knots somehow. By now we're used up. We're worn down into the ground."
(P243)
"Music is so different now," she had said to Jesse once. "It used to be 'Love Me Forever' and now it's 'Help Me Make It Through the Night."
"Aw, Ma," he had said, "don't you get it? In the old days they just hid it better. It was always 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.'"
My mentor teacher always alludes to "the red ants" and she told me I would find out what that reference was about when I read this book. So I was happy to find it at the end... and indeed, I think it is profound. It is when Maggie calls Serena after the LONG day to apologize and check on her...
"I wish you lived closer," Maggie said. Serena said "I don't have anyone to tell about the trivia, what the plumbing up to and how the red ants have come back in the kitchen." "You can tell me" Maggie said. "Well, but they're not your red ants too, don't you see? I mean you and I are not in this together." "Oh" Maggie said. There was a pause. (Part III, C4, P344).
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