An Overdue Visit

Hello! Is there anyone alive out there?

I kind of miss this cozy space. I remember sitting on the floor of my high school bedroom and sliding the patio door open all the way, the screen, too, so that I sat half-inside, half-outside. I remember stacking two memory boxes to fashion a desk and logging into Blogger, excited to add to this creaky site. I scoured Tumblr and Flickr for photos and paired them with quotes from my latest reads, and though at times I thought it was clever, more often I thought it was rather unoriginal, but I loved it anyway -- this post-reading ritual, this tidy exercise of closure -- so that insecurity, always ready with its insulting questions and comments, was readily silenced.

It has been five years since, and about two years since I moved from Blogger to Bookswept.com. Regardless of platform, so much of the blogging landscape has changed. I suspect that its long form expression is no longer tolerated; we prefer brevity, captions not paragraphs, and we prefer a continuous stream of new, skimming not reading. I kind of miss the old, messy intimacy of blogging; less likes, hearts, followers and hashtags, but also less rigid and urgent because of it.

We now shape our content to cater to platforms designed and controlled by private corporations, i.e. Instagram, Twitter, etc. If we are to create, we seem to prefer to follow rules and guidelines, to select from finite options, and to display our content in the same way as everyone else.

Of course, there is much to appreciate. I love how effortless it now feels to create, sometimes just a few taps. I love that my community expands to include people and places that are absent from my normal day-to-day, offering a peek into lifestyles, priorities and aesthetics that are not my own.

I offer no conclusion, except that I will keep writing, and reading, so I hope you will keep writing, too.

Cheers,
Yuri

Bookswept.com

Bookswept has finally moved into its own place. So long, Blogger. Thank you to all of the readers. I feel like I started Bookswept so long ago but I’m just now getting started. I hope to see you at the new place. Welcome!

Cheers, 

Yuri

i’m alive, again

I promise that this is the last of a short series (see the original i'm alive). Bookswept is in the midst of growing into something a little bit better than what it is now. Thank you for being such a patient bunch.

Into the Wild

"He wasn't antisocial — he always had friends, and everybody liked him — but he could go off and entertain himself for hours. He didn't seem to need toys or friends. He could be alone without being lonely."

Into the Wild, pg. 107
By Jon Krakauer
Published 1996

 

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

"He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America. He was like a person who had been somewhere that other people are not likely to go or had done something that others are not apt to do." 

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, p. 21
By Carson McCullers
Published 1940

 

Beatrice and Virgil

"Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapability to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, its shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar - the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved."

Beatrice and Virgil, p. 23
By Yann Martel
Published 2010

The Age of Miracles

"It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction." 

The Age of Miracles, p. 83
By Karen Thompson Walker
Published 2012

 

Looking for Alaska

"I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe 'the afterlife' is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled."

Looking for Alaska, pp. 219-20

By John Green

Published 2005

Sisterland

"On average, an earthquake of magnitude 6 or greater happens somewhere in the world every three days. Mostly, they happen underwater, and we hardly take notice. It is only when the earthquake comes to us, upending the streets and houses and trees we think of as ours, that they command our attention. But the earth...is always busy."

Sisterland, pp. 389-90
By Curtis Sittenfeld

Published 2013

Gone Girl

"The truth is malleable; you just need to pick the right expert."   

Gone Girl, p. 190

By Gillian Flynn
Published 2012

The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place

"We laughed, and I decided that we were the two most sophisticated people drinking lattes at a little round table on the pedestrian mall in all of Epiphany and possibly France."

The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place, p. 214
By E.L. Konigsburg
Published 2004

Girl, Interrupted

"It was my misfortune - or salvation - to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality... This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled."

Girl, Interrupted, p. 41-42

By Susanna Kaysen

Published 1993

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

"I've heard that theory of the Therapeutic Community enough times to repeat it forwards and backwards - how a guy has to learn to get along in a group before he'll be able to function in a normal society; how the group can help the guy by showing him where he's out of place; how society is what decides who's sane and who isn't, so you got to measure up. All that stuff." 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, p. 44

By Ken Kesey

Published 1962

J.D. Salinger: A Life

"When Salinger lived in Connecticut, unabashed Americanism and materialism were unquestioned values. His neighbors pursued those values religiously and weighed one another against a standard of conformity that often suffocated individuality. Salinger found such material irresistible. Having long exposed the phoniness of society, he now found himself living in a culture that not only esteemed this quality he so despised but also sought to infect all of its members with it."

J.D. Salinger: A Life, pp. 168-169

By Kenneth Slawenski 

Published 2011

The View from Saturday

"I am a passenger on Spaceship Earth." 

The View from Saturday, p. 73
By E. L. Konigsburg
Published 1996

The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

"I was a child of atheists, but I had an intuition of God. The days seemed created for our worship. There was grass and flowers and clouds. And then there were the words for these things: mare's tails and a mackerel sky, daylillies and lady's slippers and lilicas and hyacinth. There were words even for the weeds: goldenrod and ragweed and Queen Anne's lace. You could feed yourself on the grandeur of the sounds."

The Long Goodbye: A Memoir, p. 2

By Meghan O'Rourke 

Published 2012

The Abstinence Teacher

"I'm halfway through my life, and as far as I can tell, the real lesson of the past isn't that I made some mistakes, it's that I didn't make nearly enough of them." 

The Abstinence Teacher, p. 264
By Tom Perrotta
Published 2007

How to Buy a Love of Reading

 "'He's self-invented. Thinks he's self-contained. Drinks to ignore his seepage. I feel truly sorry for him. He's very young to be so lonely.' 

'Lonely? You know nothing. He's—' 

'People who make fiction of themselves can't be otherwise.'" 

How to Buy a Love of Reading, p. 124 

By Tanya Egan Gibson

Published 2006

The Fault in Our Stars

"I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed."

The Fault in Our Stars, p. 223
By John Green
Published 2012

Blue Nights

"Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember."

Blue Nights, p. 66
By Joan Didion
Published 2011