March 19-26, 2008

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Karen Russell
Hardcover
11 cards

Thank you to Claire for pointing me towards this book, even though the cover of the version I read differed from the one she read even though I forgot to take a picture of the book I read. Beautiful writing with words known and created, beautiful ideas and heartbreaking ones too, close attention paid to the oridinary in an extraordinaryly revealing way.

Brief excerpts and notes of interest:
-3 "...a tin roof that hums with the memory of rain..."
-6 Swamplandia!
-names, palindromes
-10 "Alligators talk to one another, and to the moon..."
-12 "I'm lonely and I want to have a secret with somebody."
-16 library books
-28 bird watching
-35- G-L-O-W-W-O-R-M G-R-O-T-T-O
-"Olivia was a cartographer of imaginary places."
-36- "But I left you a map!"
-40 shooting stars, lemmings
-41- x- map- places where someone is not
-46 "To enter the grotto, you have to slide on your back, like a letter through a mail slot."
-50- "Being unconscious with somebody, that's a big deal."
-53- "sleep is the heat that melts time..."
-"We just want to provide you with a safe place to lie awake together. And maybe even," she beams at the crowd, "to dream."
-55 "My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly."
-"our worshipful respect for the hobo."
-"But we are sleep twins...He is the first and only person I have ever met who is also a prophet of the past."
-56- saving
-57 dirigible
-58 Our Storied Past!
-"The table of contents was like an index to my dreams..."
-70- forgetting
-74 tin foil
-76- "In the moonlight, he looks like he's made of liquid silver."
-78 "Do not interfere with the moon!"
-84- "ifs" to "whens"
-85- "1 Mr. Goodbar=187 sick children's wishes"
-97- "...thinks the ocean's actually erasing his foot."
-99- "They seem so old and so young all at once."
-106 "I was startled by this, the speed with which one apocryphal watercolor was transforming our future."
-'...that fiery alchemy, whereby "raw" becomes "food."'
-108- "Our necessities...are now burdensome luxuries."
-116- Acres of lightning!
-120 "Everyone wants to go home, and no one can agree on where that is anymore."
-142 wondercould
-145 "It looked like she caught a bad dream from somebody."
-156 The City of Shells
-157 skitterclatter
-159 pickle sticks
-163 "...it felt like being parenthesized."
-170 (Houdini) "She knows that he was all the time just searching for a box that could hold him."
-176 "The world swells into an apocalyptic howl, as if the world can't keep its secrets any longer."
-180- measuring time
-246 dill pickles