Best of 2014: Favorite Books
I absolutely love reading. In the last couple years, coupling my self-employed lifestyle with two library cards and an endless supply of ebooks, I’ve really gotten to indulge my inner bookworm. Usually, I do a brief recap of my favorites in my annual year-end reviews (2014, 2013, 2012, and 2011). But here’s a more thorough round-up of all the books I read in 2014 and my mini-reviews of each. Happy reading!
“The stress of the disaster narrowed people’s fields of vision, as if they wore blinders to anyone’s experience but their own.”
“Good should be done regardless of the difficulties of the time and regardless of the level of power or importance that one possesses.” -Dr. Boro Lazic
“On those days, I sometimes found it useful to remind myself of what happened to the Spanish after they discovered California in 1542. For more than two hundred years after that, as their explorers sailed up and down the coast, dreaming of a safe harbor, they kept missing that narrow, fog-shrouded break in the coastal mountains that we now call the Golden Gate. That story is a parable that applies to all of us, whether we live in San Francisco or Sheffield, Perugia or Paris, New York or New Delhi. The real treasures are right under our noses.”
“San Francisco offers a rare gift: a chance to live face-to-face with the inhuman universe. That gift comes at a price. But it is one that those of us who live here are willing to pay. To dance on the brink of the world …”
“Chinatown’s appearance captures one critical moment in the long process by which an immigrant group, once outsiders and subjected to bigotry, intolerance, and violence, becomes a part of America. Paradoxically, the buildings created to fetishize Chinese-ness can be seen as the concrete embodiment of the melting pot.”
“The destruction of the Western Addition was the result of a perfect storm of good intentions, unconscious racism, naïveté, greed, and technocratic optimism. It was San Francisco’s cardinal sin, and the city is still living with its legacy.”
“That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It demands to be felt.”
“You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”
“There is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”
“I thought of my dad telling me that the universe wants to be noticed . But what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us— not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us, as individuals.”
“Life: a constellation of vital phenomena— organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.”
“If you think a story can be like a kind of cement, the sloppy kind that you put between bricks, the kind that looks like cake frosting before it dries hard, then maybe I thought it would be possible to use what Toby had to hold Finn together, to keep him here with me a little bit longer.”
“I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.”
“Usually I wouldn’t want to know. Greta always wanted to know everything. Every little detail. But I understood. You can ruin anything if you know too much. But things were different now. I was in charge of taking care of Toby. I needed to know things.”
“Toby’s eyes had started to water. I wanted to say of course I know that. I know all about tiny things. Proportion. I know all about love that’s too big to stay in a tiny bucket. Splashing out all over the place in the most embarrassing way possible.”
“She buried her nose in Lydia’s hair and made silent promises. Never to tell her to sit up straight, to find a husband, to keep a house. Never to suggest that there were jobs or lives or worlds not meant for her; never to let her hear doctor and think only man. To encourage her, for the rest of her life, to do more than her mother had.”
“How had it begun ? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers. Because long ago, her mother had gone missing, and her father had brought her home. Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.”
“He pushed her in. And then he pulled her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another.”
“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it. All those times he’d pretended to lose her. He sinks down on the carpet, dizzy with loss.”
“Even as a boy, I defeated my opponents without dishonoring them.”
“I always remember the regent’s axiom: a leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”
“I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair . That way lay defeat and death.”
“People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
“But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.”
“It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death— losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, ‘Old age is a continuous series of losses.'”
“All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story . That story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.”
“The result: those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives— and they lived 25 percent longer.”
“We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?”
“[…] the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.”
“Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.”
“These days I have to ask myself: What made me angrier? That Oscar, the fat loser, quit, or that Oscar, the fat loser, defied me? And I wonder: What hurt him more ? That I was never really his friend , or that I pretended to be?”
“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in. And that’s what I guess these stories are all about.”
“Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.”
“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness— not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm’s reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I’d been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on that powerful current and drifting out there somewhere: a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea.”
“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”
“I have taught myself the recipes of my mother’s people because those foods are for me, as a chef, the easiest connection to the mysteries of who my mother was. Her identity remains stubbornly shrouded in the past, so I feed myself and the people I love the food that she made. But I cannot see her face.”
“I knew my path would be different— the cruise ship travels had confirmed it— but I respected that language the way a modern composer might respect Bach. The better I could speak it, the freer I would be to create my own.”
“The fact that if you do well for your chef he’ll send you away still strikes me as one of the most generous professional acts I’ve heard of.”
“As chefs, we definitely are in the memory business: We are creating a memory with ingredients.”
““It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.”
“That’s the thing with handmade items. They still have the person’s mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone.”
“There was love to be felt, and discovered, still.”
“I’ve always sort of felt that you prepare yourself over the course of your whole life for the big moments, you know? But when they happen, you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they’re not what you thought. And that’s what makes them strange. The reality is really different from the fantasy.”
“I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don’t want that to happen to me.”
“But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting. Anyway, she knew, the definition could change; it had changed, for her.”
“Sometimes being hotheaded and doing it your own way and walking out on all the hot shit might be the right thing to do.”
“Everybody has a heart that can be touched by something.”
“There’s nothing waiting inside but retail slavery, endless exploitation, and personal subjugation to the whims of our corporate overlords.”
“Sometimes things come out of your mouth that you regret later on. Or no, not regret. You say something so razor-sharp that the person you say it to carries it around with them for the rest of their life.”
“These were the ways and moves of … of a predator. The thought popped into my mind without my being able to stop it. ‘Of an athlete’ was what I had meant to say – to think. A sportsman.”
“I discovered that when one follows the artist’s eye one sees unexpected treasures in so many seemingly ordinary scenes. Paul loved to photograph architectural details, café scenes, hanging laundry, market women, and artists along the Seine. My job was to use my height and long reach to block the sun over his camera lens as he carefully composed a shot and clicked the shutter.”
“It seemed that in Paris you could discuss classic literature or architecture or great music with everyone from the garbage collector to the mayor.”
“You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made,” he said. “Even after you eat it, it stays with you—always.”
“Usually one’s cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile, as my ersatz eggs Florentine surely were, then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile— and learn from her mistakes.”
“Now that I had started writing, I found cookbookery such fulfilling work that I intended to keep at it for years and years.”
“The look right before you kiss the one person whose existence strikes you as both necessary and miraculous.”
“Those were the happiest days of my life, working at something while knowing how exceptional it was , not yet having finished it but knowing how beautiful it would be when finished .”
“Writing, and even more so, revising, has become my way of understanding and fixing my life , as a painter paints many layers and then fixes his colors with a glaze. Life is transitory. Words have the power to correct, conceal, and endure.”
“I am writing about women, about love and humiliation. Men do it to us, but mostly we do it to ourselves. We love the wrong people; we love at the wrong time. We think that we can make it right, reconcile the irreconcilable. We are like game-show contestants who don’t know when to stop. We could go home right now with the money and the washing machine, but we want the car so we keep going and we get the answer wrong, or choose the wrong door, or spin the wheel too hard, and then we have to go home with nothing.”
