The Book Corner
From the pages of books I've read and loved - passages to inspire, lift, and enliven...
September 17, 2025
~ From The Book of Lost Friends, a historical novel by Lisa Wingate
Two stories, two young girls - a newly 'freed' teenager at the close of the Civil War, and a teacher in the 1980's. First, the telling of a journey across the rugged and dangerous post-war country as the fifteen-year-old searches for a family lost when at the age of six she was stolen and sold as property to enrich the lives of strangers. The other, of a modern-day search driven by the teacher's love of history and old books, connecting us to the discovery of not one, but thousands of families separated from what was everything to those with nothing - the people they loved.
Based on inquiries placed for a fee of 50 cents in a Southern newspaper asking readers to reply with sightings or knowledge of mothers, fathers, children, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, separated in violence during the war, Lisa Wingate, brings to life the way it would have been for those whose lives were spent searching, and how the collection of notices became the actual, "Book of Lost Friends".
Recently, quite by accident, reading three books related to this time in history, told through the eyes of the enslaved, my shame grows as I realize how little I've known about what we've done and are capable of doing. I'm deeply saddened, but awakened as I should be, by stunning stories of bravery, courage and love.
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September 5, 2025
~ From A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf
I've read and re-read this wonderful exploration of women's role in literature and the centuries long suppression of creativity due to lack of financial independence and space to call their own. In this exquisitely written essay presented to the Arts Society at Newnham and the Odtaa at Girton in October, 1928, Woolf asks, 'what if...women had enjoyed the same freedoms as men?'.
Following an evening reading we share Woolf's thoughts as she walks to her lodging, considering the way things were and might have been had women not been constrained and, moving forward, how to keep the doors of opportunity open, never letting them close again.
"But it is useless to ask these questions, because you would never have come into existence at all. Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned.
....for all the centuries before that it would have been her husband's property - '...every penny I earn', they may have said, 'will be taken from me and disposed of according to my husband's wisdom...'.
"...I pondered this and that, as one does at the end of the day's work. I pondered why it was that Mrs. Seton had no money to leave us; and what effect poverty has on the mind - and I thought of the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky."
August 8, 2025
~ From Solitude; A return to the self, by Anthony Storr
When you visit a book after many years, the journey is new. As inspiring as the first time, but, fresh and unfamiliar due to forgetting, or experience and the effects of time.
Much has changed since the 1988 publication of Solitude and the author's death in 2001, as we find ourselves with less and less time, but no less need for quiet reflection. Storr's message and bold assertions may be more important than ever as he questions what is considered the optimal value of relational intimacy over the enriching and enduring effects of man or woman's work and creativity.
Referring to an historical figure, Admiral Byrd, manning a weather station in the Antarctic during a fierce winter in 1934, Storr, quotes Byrd...
..."Nothing whatever, except one man's desire to know that kind of experience to the full, to be by himself for a while and to taste peace and quiet and solitude long enough to find out how good they really are."
..."I pause to listen to the silence...The day was dying, the night being born - but with great peace. ....Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence - a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of spheres, perhaps."
"...In that instant I could feel no doubt of man's oneness with the universe. ...The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was as rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night."
Storr writing more generally of the creative and others who spend time alone...
"The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, to find meaning in the universe through what he creates. He finds this a valuable integrating process which, like meditation or prayer, has little to do with other people, but which has its own separate validity. His most significant moments are those in which he attains some new insight, or makes some new discovery; and these moment are chiefly, if not invariably, those in which he is alone."
July 15, 2025
~ From The Great Alone, by Kristin Hannah
A story of love and survival set in the wilds of Alaska in the 1970's. A story that could be told of the millions we know in today's America, dreamers and the disappointed, innocent to their own lacking and vulnerability in a world moving too quickly and changing too fast, overwhelmed by the life-threatening challenges of poverty and climate.
From a newspaper article written by one of the main characters, commenting on her Alaskan life...
"This state, this place, is like no other. It is beauty and horror, savior and destroyer. Here, where survival is a choice that must be made over and over, in the wildest place in America, on the edge of civilization, where water in all its forms can kill you, you learn who you are. Not who you dream of being, not who you imagined you were, not who you were raised to be....you stumble into the truth of your existence. You learn what you will do to survive."
"For a few, the sturdy, the strong, the dreamers, Alaska is home, always and forever, the song you hear when the world is still and quiet. You either belong here, wild and untamed yourself, or you don't."
July 07, 2025
~ From A Simpler Life, published by the School of Life
A well done study on the topic of the overly complicated life, how to see and do it differently...
On the way we complicate relationships -
"People become frustratingly complicated when they doubt the legitimacy of their desires - and therefore don't dare to tell the world what they properly want and feel."
"It springs not from evil or cold manipulativeness, but from fear: the fear of how an audience might respond if one's true intentions were to be known."
On what it means to live a 'slow' day -
"...we meditate on what we really want to do with our lives. In place of the conventional aspirations that used to drive us, we might become sensitive to our own authentic ambitions. It could be nice to take up drawing; how might our relationship with our mother be improved; what kind of work gives us most satisfaction; what kind of fruitful relationships might be possible? We can dig around in the neglected territory of our needs and longings and begin to think through how they could realistically evolve."
On possessions -
"If we possess - and pay attention to - the few things we really love, we'll not need very many of them."
June 23, 2025
~ From Strangers in Time, by David Baldacci
"Behind one of those trees, a willowy maple with pointed dangling leaves, stood Ignatius Oliver. His old coat covered his lanky frame, his battered and stained hat rode on his head. He took a moment to wipe clear his specs on the sleeve of his coat. As he settled the glasses back on the bridge of his nose, he looked to the sky, where the birds still soared, looped, and dipped, living kites free of gravity's harness.
"The last time he'd been to a cemetery Oliver had stood and looked at the spot where his beloved Imogen should have been laid to rest for all eternity, with him to lie right beside her when his end came. On the other side were the graves of Imogen's parents. While the birds artfully rambled above, Oliver walked slowly away."
Note: this novel and Winter Garden (June 18), set in England and Russia respectively, chronicle the period of pre - and post -WWII - cultures and characters so different, but suffering of the innocent much the same. Reading two such tales back-to-back amplified the uselessness and pain of war told by the unwilling and voiceless as they find themselves caught in conflicts of passion driven by the egomaniacal urgency of a 'leader's' madness . While the existence of those in charge moves in and out as swiftly as the dark and destructive power of a tornado, those forced to follow are forever changed, with no choice but to carry the burdens of futility and loss for generations to come. Well worth the read.
June 18, 2025
~ From Winter Garden, by Kristin Hannah
"In utter darkness, I pack up the whole of my life, not that there is much left. Honestly, I do not know what I have taken and what I left behind. Most of our possessions have either frozen or been burned, but I remember to take my writings and my father's, and my last book of poetry by Anna Akhmatova. I take all the food we have - the sausage, half a bag of onions, four pieces of bread, some oil cakes, a quarter of a jar of sunflower oil, and the last of the sauerkraut.
I have to carry Leo. With his swollen feet and boil-covered arms, he can barely move, and I don't have it in me to waken him when he sleeps.
The three of us leave in the darkness of midmorning. Little Anya carries our only suitcase, filled with food. All our clothes we are wearing."
May 29, 2025
~ From The Shooting Party, by Isabel Colegate
"In one of his letters Lionel had written to her, 'You wrote something about me which was not true, something which made me out to be a better thing altogether than I am. So much so that then the strange thought crossed my mind that if you have illusions perhaps I have them too, and perhaps you are less perfect than I think you. And when I had stopped scolding myself for the incredible baseness of that idea, I thought anyway, anyway, my dearest and most adored Olivia, while we can, for as long as we can, oh let us believe...' She never ceased to do so."
May 25, 2025
~ From Playground, by Richard Powers
"Evie whispered, 'I could die now. I have seen the relentless engine, the inscrutable master plan to life, and it will never end."
Note: - in this fascinating and unusual novel, a private moment of delight expressed by one of the main characters, lifelong deep sea diver, Evie Beaulieu, as she watched the frenzied sexual dance of thousands of urchins 7 miles below sea level...
have you experienced such delight, seeing or feeling something you thought was enough to fill you for a lifetime...?
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