My year in books: 2017
What a great year. I am amazed of all the books that my eyes read in 2017. From short stories, books on economics, poetry and non-fiction. These books were in my bag all the time. They were my guide while I was sick, when I was recovering from a deep heart break and while I was exploring new places.
Also, I did not included all the academic work that I read for my "Politics of Infrastructure" class and all the New Yorker Magazines.
Bonsai - Alejandro Zambra
“No por saber una cosa se la puede impedir pero hay ilusiones, y ésta historia, que viene siento una historia de ilusiones, sigue así.”
“Si bien el instante apenas dura, todos los tiempos están contenidos en él. Lo que sucederá, sucede o sucederá aparece como un resplandor que nos ciega. Presencia absoluta. Ante nuestros ojos, en un aquí y en un ahora permanente: todo.”
“Y donde sea que yo esté, también estarán mi respiración y mi corazón. ”
“No ha pasado suficiente tiempo y ya quisiera y borrarlo todo. El problema de todo este libro en realidad, es que es un registro de alguna que fui, y eso no se puede borrar, por más que me avergüence, me aburra o me deprima.”
“Writhing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle
And hoping
It will reach Japan”
“But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. ”
“It reminds us that, in disaster, we are often at our best, however briefly, that in those hours and days many have their best taste of community, purposefulness, and power. ”
“If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I. ”
“There is no one in particular I can thank for this turn of events: only Fortune, and the Montaignean truth that the best things in life happen when you don’t get what you think you want. ”
“Loss aversion.... The basic finding is that losing something has a stronger emotional impact than finding that gaining something of the same value”
“Dejar una vida. Dinamitar todo. No, no todo: dinamitar el metro cuadrado que uno ocupaba entre la gente. Más bien: dejar sillas vacías en las mesas que se compartían con las amistades, no a modo de metáfora, sino en verdad, dejar círculo de silencio en torno a uno que se ensanche y se llene de especulaciones. Lo que pocos entienden es que uno deja una vida para empezar otra.”
“Beginnings are new horizons that want to be seen; they are not regressions or repetitions. Somehow they win clearance and become free of the grip of the past. What is the new horizon in you that wants to be seen?”
“On the last day of love my heart cracked inside my body.”
“Aceptamos el mundo como admitimos los sentimientos mas abstractos, siempre son pero no están. ”
“People tend to stick to their own size group because it´s easier to the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you. ”
“It would be wise to start focusing your pitch on your future, rather than on your past - even it that past is very impressive indeed. It´s what you could be that makes people sit up and notice.”
“Meditating upon myself makes one thing evident: the rest of the world is in rhyme.”
Julian Barnes - Pulse
“The thing was, he´d never been much good at flirting, never said quite the right thing. And since his divorce, he’d got worse at it, if that was possible, because his heart wasn’t at t. Where was his heart? Question for another day. Today’s subject: flirting. He knew all too well the look in a women’s eye when you didn’t get it right. Where’s he coming from, the look sad. Anyway, it took two to flirt.”
“La masa no reflexiona, no piensa, no enjuicia realmente. No se trata de justicia, sino de la fantasía grupal de ejercerla. Una justicia malentendida, donde la ley no existe y la verdad mucho menos: aquí sólo prevalece el ajusticiamiento de brutalidad con más brutalidad y amplias dosis de cinismo renegado”
“Porque hay momentos limpios, en los que el aire parece realmente una materia dócil que nos permite comprender el mundo, y hay momentos sucios o ruidosos en los que cualquier grado de lucidez será inmediatamente refrenado por la insulsa materia de las cosas, que se imponen como síntomas de una enfermedad gravísima a la cual todos coincidimos en llamar “mundo”, “mundo cruel” si somos trágicos. ”
“The things you do in your twenties are just things you do. But as you approach thirty what you do starts to become who you are. And there are some things you do not want to be forever. ”
“The sweetest little song:
You go your way
I’ll go your way too”
“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep”
“I wake to sleep, and take my walking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear
I learn by going where I have to go.”
“It nearly every facet of life, New York promises something more, something better for those with the means to pay - better Central Park views, better meals, and of course better schools. We may question the logic, even the ethics, but never the right of that commodification, and as a result, it’s ebbed its way into the corners if our society where t least belong. ”
“If I’m honest, I don’t really now what any of this means or why I told it to you. The truth is I like my life. I like the people in it. And in spite of myself, I still love this desperate city”
“The implication sank in smoothly as a knife through butter. ”
“The habit of loneliness perssits. Leonard tells me that if I do not convert the loneliness into useful solitude, I’ll be my mother’s daughter forever. One is lonely for the absent idealized other, but in useful solitude I am there, keeping myself imaginative company, breathing life into the silence, filling the room with proof of my own silent being. ”
“This was another of our fears: that life wouldn’t turn out to be like literature”
“Writing about New York is hard. Not because memories intersect and overlap, because of course they do. Not because incidents and times mix with others, because that happens too. Not because I didn’t fell in love with New York because even though I was lonely and poor, no place had ever made me feel more at home. It is because knowing what I know now, it’s hard to write a love story with a broken heart. ”
“Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something– survived it, experienced it– is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living through something. Though hard to grasp, nostalgia is elating to bask in– temporarily restoring color to the past. It creates a sense memory that momentarily simulates context. Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited; it doesn’t require the difficult task of negotiation, the heartache and uncertainty that the present does.”
“Error fear, and suffering are the mothers of invention. The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.”
“El asfalto de las ciudades ha hecho que no sea posible voltear a ver nuestros pasos, así se vueve fácil olvidar el campo. ”
“Quizás nada nos enceguece más que la esperanza. ¿Por qué se hacen más prepotentes en nosotros precisamente os deseos que se fundan en errores?”