Thursday, March 12, 2015

THROWBACK THURSDAY :: Leif Enger

I am such a book/word nerd I actually have been keeping notebooks the past few years with my favorite passages from whatever I happen to be reading.  Sometimes there are many, sometimes few, often none. If I like the passage, it goes in the notebook whether I ended up liking the book or not. I was recently wondering what the hell I was going to do with these notebooks of gold. I'm still alive, thus the Smithsonian hasn't called yet. So I figured I would share each week for Throwback Thursday.

First up is Leif Enger's So Brave, Young, and Handsome. I adore Enger's work and this one was no exception.  Below are a few of my favorite entries:

He talked and he laughed; he talked himself hoarse; he talked like a former mute distrustful of the cure.

In times of dread it's good to have an old man along. An old man has seen worse.

Sometimes heroism is nothing more than patience, curiosity, and a refusal to panic.

This week, I recommend the book wholeheartedly. Enger is a beautiful writer.


2 comments:

Chris La Tray said...

I keep track of stuff like this too. I dog-ear the page, then come back later and throw it into an evernote file I'm keeping. Sometimes I read through that file just for the hell of it. I even bought a notebook to move them into, again, just for the hell of it. Does one need a better reason?

Malcolm Avenue Review said...

Word nerds unite! I wish I had been better about it sooner because I also love to go back and revisit great passages. And I rarely need a better reason than just for the hell of it. I wish more folks did this and we could all sit around and share notebook passages around a fire pit. A girl can dream.

About Malcolm Avenue Review

I was lucky enough to be born and raised in a nifty, oak-shaded ranch house on Malcolm Avenue, a wide-laned residential street with little through traffic, located amid the foothills of Northern California. It was on that street and in that house I learned most of my adolescent life lessons, and many grown-up ones to boot. Malcolm Avenue was "home" for more than thirty years.

It was on Malcolm Avenue, through and with my family and the other families that made up our neighborhood of characters, that I first learned about and gained an appreciation for the things I continue to love the most to this day: music, animals, photography, sports, television/movies and, of course, books.

I owe a debt of gratitude to that life on Malcolm Avenue. It gave me a sense of community and friendship, support and adventure. For better and worse, life on that street likely had the biggest impact on the person I've become. So this blog, and the things I write here, are all, at their base level, a little bit of a love letter to Malcolm Avenue.

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