Polly

I didn't love these nine stories as much as I did the collections "Bark" and "Birds of America", but they still radiate with her brilliance, depth, and wit. I am in awe of her mind, her creativity, and a the ways she connects, dissects, and reassembles human experiences. These were darker stories, heavy hitters, about death, infidelity, lonelines, mental and physical illness. Somehow she allows us to love and have compassion for all her characters, much like Richard Yates does—you can't hate any of them, only feel a sinking and yearning pity.

I wasn't as much a fan of the second person narratives, which there were several, but I appreciate seeing how she used this perspective and the ways to make it work.

DNF
It's not “bad,” exactly, but for me, this book is agonizingly boring. The pacing is off, and the narration/perspective is awkward. Maybe it's a wrong-place-wrong-time kind of thing. Who knows.

This collection is full of delightful gems. Some could be considered poems rather than stories, others microfiction. A few favourites are:
Revenge Of The Lawn
1/3, 1/3, 1/3
Pacific Fire Radio
Coffee
Lint

___________

LINT

I'm haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabularies and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.
I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning.
They are things that just happened like lint.

Reading Eagleman's forty vignette-style tales, imaginings of what the afterlife could be like, I felt claustrophobic and bored. Much of the time he seemed to be trapped in the conventional ideas of a male God or gods as clumsy, aloof creators (only twice were they a female), traditional love between men and women as the centre of human connection, and the overused, stale concept of heaven and Hell. He also has a bad habit of anthropomorphizing everything from human cells to a solitary particle that created then un-created the entire universe. It felt juvenile and mostly silly, but not in a funny or clever way. I'm curious to read his nonfiction work in neuroscience. Maybe he shines a little brighter in this genre.
I like the concept of this book, which I thought had a lot of potential, but his execution was a chore to get through.

Pure, luminescent brilliance.
I feel as though I could immediately turn back to the first page and start all over again. A novel, but so much more than that. At times, Bennett holds a megaphone and announces relevant epiphanies and astute observations out into the universe, and at others, she whispers heartbreaking secrets directly into your ear. I look forward to experiencing this transcendental opus again some day.
Warning: not for readers seeking convention.

‘We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.'

One can count on Annie Dillard for Spiritual/metaphysical recalibration and a heavy dose of stepping back and seeing reality for what it is, or isn't—'reality checks' abound in her work.

‘How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.
What can any artist set on fire but his world?'

This was my second reading of this petite poetic novella. I am positive I'll be reading it again someday.

‘There was this funny thing that anything could happen now that we realized everything had.'

As far as books on motherhood go, this was perfection. If you are not a new parent, like myself, it is a fresh and lively reminder of the dark and challenging times that comes with raising a baby. If you're not raising a child, it's a glimpse into another dimension—the surreal, alternate universe that a new parent must traverse. It is the first I have read of Rachel Cusk, despite having many of her books on my to-read-soon list, and I am ever more eager to read her fiction. She is witty and brutally honest. Her imagery is delightfully colourful and at times, laugh-out-loud funny.

With my daughter's sixth birthday quickly approaching, this was the exact book I needed to remind myself of the remarkably difficult stage early parenthood was; it provided me a chance to reflect on the trauma of birth, the ostensible endlessness of sleep deprivation, and the frenzy of keeping a little creature alive. I also recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand what it would be like to be a new parent, even if one doesn't plan on raising a child—the insight will provide enlightenment as well as compassion for what all parents experience in one way or another.