Monthly Archives: July 2008

Frankly my dear…that wasn’t the last line of the book

Posted on July 31, 2008 by | 1 Comment

This week’s Booking Through Thursday: What are your favourite final sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its last sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the last line?

What immediately came to mind was the last line from James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead,” which is in his collection Dubliners.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last land, upon all the living and the dead.

However, I think it’s more because of the movie by the same name, directed by the great John Huston and starring his daughter, Anjelica Huston.

As for others, I’ll be honest I’m horrible at remembering lines from movies, let alone books. I tried skimming through a few in my library, but I’ll be honest, nothing jumped out at me.

Instead, I’ll leave you with a couple of links I found while doing a search for the last line of Gone With The Wind, the book, which I never read. Having never read the book, I was surprised that it wasn’t “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” If you haven’t read it, like me, I’ll let you discover it within the first link:

This post was cross-posted on Just A (Reading) Fool.

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Booking Through Thursday: Frankly, my dear…isn't the last line in the book

Posted on July 31, 2008 by | 4 Comments

This week’s Booking Through Thursday: What are your favourite final sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its last sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the last line?

What immediately came to mind was the last line from James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead,” which is in his collection Dubliners.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last land, upon all the living and the dead.

However, I think it’s more because of the movie by the same name, directed by the great John Huston and starring his daughter, Anjelica Huston.

As for others, I’ll be honest I’m horrible at remembering lines from movies, let alone books. I tried skimming through a few in my library, but I’ll be honest, nothing jumped out at me.

Instead, I’ll leave you with a couple of links I found while doing a search for the last line of Gone With The Wind, the book, which I never read. Having never read the book, I was surprised that it wasn’t “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” If you haven’t read it, like me, I’ll let you discover it within the first link:

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A poem for a cousin going into rehab upstate

Posted on July 30, 2008 by | Comments Off

For today’s Wordsmith Wednesday, I return to a poem I composed for another of my cousins. Earlier, I shared a different kind of poem for another cousin. This one is a lot more direct, maybe even to the point of cliche, but at the time, it captured what I was thinking about my cousin and maybe about my own life.

For A Cousin Going Into Rehab Upstate

Listen, even in the silence the secondhand

keeps moving, the rat-a-tat of a keyboard,
one hand clapping 
in the wind.
 
Where do we go from here?
Upward mobility is a fancy name for 
the dream we dream.
I can't promise you 
the cruelty of the world 
won't try to crush you.
To put it in perspective, 
at least 300 are feared
dead in a Moroccan earthquake,
there are larger headlines to be written
than cousin goes into rehab upstate,
to be sure,
but none so personal to me than to know
what the world needs now
is to see you in it
breathing
in
out
in 
out,
the clock can be your friend,
not your enemy.
 
Listen, even in the silence 
the secondhand keeps moving, 
the rat-a-tat of the keyboard 
keeps rat-a-tatting along
 
like some jazz song from
years gone by.
It makes no sense
what we do
but we continue:
to live.

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Where I be this Tuesday

Posted on July 29, 2008 by | 5 Comments

In keeping with It’s Tuesday, Where are You? as asked by raidergirl3 at an adventure in reading– even though I’m a little behind on this today, I’m going to tell y’all where I be in my reading this Tuesday

This morning I started in a monastery in France with a Carmelite monk named Brother Lawrence, as I mentioned in an earlier post.

I then traveled this afternoon at lunch to Pakistan, where I have been spending some time with Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin in Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations…One School at A Time. I’ve spent a little bit more time than there than I have wanted, and I really must admit I want to leave, although I think Greg’s been doing a great job there and all. Maybe it’s the Taliban and the impending Sept. 11th storyline that’s making me want to leave, I don’t know.

So this evening, I think I’m going to end my day in Sicily with Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano as he investigates one man being stabbed to death in an elevator and another being machine-gunned by a patrol boat off the coast of Sicily. Doesn’t that sound like that will be much more fun than getting involved with fundamentalist Muslim sects in Pakistan? Methinks it might be — because even if it’s death, at least, it’s fictional death, right?

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