Buried In Print

"The purpose of writing is not competitive suffering. The making of art is always both privilege and necessity, always dependent on other people doing other work in the kitchen and in the nursery and in the library, in the fields and the factories." Sarah Moss, My Good Bright Wolf

"Writing is not that much different than eating. No one can survive as a closed system, and everyone needs to find what nourishes them. Writers need to eat, drink read, travel. They need to try and taste. Writers need to get outside of themselves. Most of all, writers need to listen to the stories around them." Aaron Schneider

"There was a certain pride to be found in having different literary tastes, in maintaining our two individual reading spaces, but it was also true that we were so close that what one of us read seemed to pass to the other by osmosis. We told each other everything, even the endings; if I summarized a book, Dalia commented on it and vice versa. Very occasionally we did read the same things, and when we both liked them, it was marvelous. I’d never met anyone with whom it was such a pleasure to talk literature, quote extracts, discuss authors."

"So they loved each other reading and exchanging books, surrounded by them in bed, until it was dawn, reading and discussing each other’s handwritten notes in the margins, what was and was not underlined, the ache of words, breath on wings, ache that ruptured the difference in their ages, professional status, the branched histories of skin."

Loved so many of this book's qualities but I especially related to the idea of typing out passages that resonate for me. Thanks to the Thunder Bay public library for the interlibrary-loan copy. "The words appeared in the middle of study on mushrooms by Anna Tsing, an anthropologist I’ve come to admire very much. That this academic study might provide the words my heart so needed seemed improbable, but they were there on the page, and then in my fingers as I diligently typed them up. I needed to take them with me."

"Some nights, when he couldn’t sleep, instead of reading comics or Billy 7 Adventures, Perry would get out his flashlight and his trusty Phantom Tollbooth and read under the covers in a fort made of pillows and blankets, Well, what he did couldn’t quite be called reading. He would hold his flashlight like a telephone receiver between his chin and shoulder and thumb through the pages, running his finger over the letters without sounding the words inside his head. He didn’t need to. He knew them all better than if he’d written the book himself." Alex Jennings' The Ballad of Perilous Graves

(via StuckinaBook's Weekend Miscellany)

"I think you come in for one thing with a book often. You come in for the subject matter. You come in for the prose. You come in because you know the author. Then if it’s a good book, you discover other things that you like, and then hopefully you kind of swing from vine to vine by doing that." Writer Mat Johnson interviewed by Marita Golden

“She climbs the grey steps of the Museum, walks past the ticket-takers, hurries up the stairs to the Hall of Vertebrate Evolution, tracing again her daily path: the human skull, the saber-toothed cat in its tar pit, the illuminated scenes of undersea life, with their hungry mosasaurs and doomed ammonites. The door that leads to her office is reached through this portion of the ancient sea floor.” Life Before Man (1979) Margaret Atwood Reading Month November 2022

“Anything that might get between me and my book had to be kept ruthlessly to the perimeter. Unnecessary socializing with co-workers was out, save the occasional hockey venting; lunch I could eat at my desk, or balanced on my lap at a park bench, my hands occupied by a fork and a paperback.“

In J.C. Sutcliffe’s translation of Stéfanie Clermont’s debut novel, The Music Game, the travails of a certain age and temperament are perfectly realized. Published by Biblioasis. #readindies “I regretted all my bad choices, all my days wasted wandering all over and lounging around that had brought me here, to the job centre, forced to present proof of my poverty and to ‘try to lift myself out of it,’ forced to admit that I was getting older without becoming anything, forced to take off the rose-coloured glasses that had allowed me to interpret my meanderings as life-enriching experiences, forced to see these meanderings for what they were, detours off the right path, excuses for not simply putting one foot in front of the other and getting ahead in life, idiotic self-sabotage.”

“You regularly mismanage your small amount of money and end up buying a $14.99 notebook at Strand Bookstore even though you have a stack of cheap $2.99 ones at home because, presumably, this is the one that will finally make you a real writer.” Ben Philippe’s Sure, I’ll Be Your Black Friend: Notes from the Other Side of the Fistbump (2021)

“We laughed and kissed and made love and read books in bed. We read through years of books, decades of books. There were never enough books for us. Read, partially read, and unread, our books filled the house, stacked on shelves and counters, piled into corners and closets. Our marriage became an eccentric and disorganized library.” “Do You Know Where I Am?” http://www.buriedinprint.com/quarterly-stories-summer-2021/

“Rage mounted in me as I devoured these books. A certain fire is sparked when you realize that you’ve been deceived. All my life I’d believe that Black scholars didn’t exist.” 

This book has changed the way that I think. The combination of individuals’ personal experiences (as reported by the author) with historical and contemporary documentation and statistics (sooo many pages of end notes and sourcing) makes it an exceptionally powerful work.