Beautiful, amusing, thought-arresting passages from books I’ve enjoyed over the past month. I’m not one for full on reviews, but I will readily track down a book based on nothing more than a couple of sentences if they strike a chord with me. Do comment below if you’ve read any of these, and share with me your favourite excerpts or any recommendations you have!
I felt a growing sense of dread, a thin and physical dread that began in my shoulders, as I listened. At first I couldn’t figure out what it was. It felt like dizziness, or the strange blurry sensation that precedes being violently ill. I tried to think of what might be causing it, things I had eaten, or the car journey earlier. It was only when I remembered the night before that I knew what it was. I felt guilty.
Salley Rooney, Conversations With Friends
Picked up in Time Out Bookstore, after watching the BBC adaptation of Normal People
These days are perfect. The clear untroubled light picks out each berry shimmering in a hedge.
Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
The Sequel to Wolf Hall – I could have selected a beautiful passage of words from almost any page… I’ve yet to read the final book in the trilogy, but these first two were such a joy
March. It can be pretty hard going. Lion and lamb. The cold shoulder of spring. Month of the kind of blossom that could still be snow, month of the papery unsheathing of the heads of the daffodils. The soldiers’ month, it takes its name from Mars, the Roman war god; in Gaelic it’s the winter-spring, and in Old Saxon the rough month, because of the roughness of its winds.
Ali Smith, Spring
Picked up because of its cover (and probably also my longing for Spring) – this sat on my desk for a while because the first time I opened it I just couldn’t get through the tone of the very first couple of pages, but the beauty of the cover and the intriguing comment ‘The Virginia Woolf of our times’ (Observer) on the inner-jacket were enough to make me try again; so glad I did… it was so good that I’m now hunting down all the other seasons
I know this stretch of highway that cuts through the Virginia mountains; I know how the road rises, sheer rock on one side, how in places the kudzu takes over and seems to hold up a hillside, and how, in the early afternoon, the sun glares directly into the windshield.
Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story
A last minute find in The Open Book, picked up both because of the setting (the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee) and the content (the unfolding of the AIDS pandemic, as told by an infectious diseases physician)
Neither moth showed up, but there was no lack of excitement to punctuate the calm of the evening. Every now and again an onlooker from the shadows would have seen our little circle erupt into activity. A net might be waved about in the darkness, or some innocent new winged visitor pounced upon and imprisoned for a short while in a small Perspex pillbox in which it could be minutely examined and identified. Positive ID often involved a good deal of discussion, and reference to two key books by the lamplight. ‘Let’s see what the Bible has to say about this,’ Joe would say as they all peered at a tricky specimen in the jar, or ‘Goater should settle this one for us.’ […] ‘Barry Goater taught me botany at school, and most of the natural history I know,’ I said. The Essex Moth Group were visibly impressed.
Roger Deakin, Wildwood – A Journey Through Trees
I was introduced to Roger Deakin by Robert Macfarlane and I loved Waterlog – I knew this would be just as good
Mad to Live 