Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Reading log: The Bone People

I just started The Bone People (thanks for the recommendation, Tank!), and Hulme's prose is so beautiful that each page makes me stop and read it a second time. It might take me a month to read this book, but that's not a complaint.




I really like the use of blockquote formatting to indicate the internal monologue (dialogue?) that is so present in our narrator.

13: "     Who cares? That's the way things are now. (I care.)       "
13: " and lights a cigarillo to smoke away more time."
14: " she begins to stalk, mind in her hands,"
15:" there is just about everything in her library."
21:" twisted and still like a small evil budda."
22:" and two mugs of coffee like a line of truce in the middle."
36:"Between waking and being awake there is a moment full of doubt and dream, when you struggle to remember what the place and when the time and whether you really are.
A peevish moment of wonderment as to where the real world lies."
39:"Despite herself, she becomes involved in a conspiracy of smiles."
90:" Ex-family?"
"O, we rowed irreparably..."
          We wounded each other too deep for the rifts to be healed.
90:". . . all these to scry and ferret and vex the smokethick future."
92:" Until then, Kerewin drinks her way into a kind of cold and uncaring sobriety."
97:"Librarians' smiles look like bookends."
189:"The air is still, waiting on the wind."
198:"It's a bloody kind of love that has violence as a silent partner."
320:"The moon is up, and inching its way around the world."
330:"On the other hand, my cardinal virtue is hope. Forlorn hope, hope in extremity. Not Christian hope, but an inmate rebellion against the inevitable dooms of suffering, death, and despair. A senseless hope."