I’ve been reading a ton this spring, which is a welcome change from last year, when I read close to a decade-low number of both books and pages. I heard Junot Diaz on the radio a few weeks ago during a BBC Overnight segment and he claimed that everyone wants to be a writer now, but no one wants to be a reader. This seems baffling to me, but I guess he knows the industry. Of course, as he pointed out, readers are pretty much the only people who become writers and one is practice for the other. I don’t know what would motivate you to want to write if you didn’t read a lot. I guess “a lot” is a relative term here, of course, because as a very slow reader (for someone who loves reading, at least), I’ve maybe never read a lot by the standards of some.

Regardless, I’m clipping along at about a (short) book a week, with plane flights helping out in donating long blocks of otherwise unscheduled time to the cause. And the last three books have all been good – two of them great – and each crystallized in one key passage that captures something meaningful that I want to keep with me. I’m not a write-in-the-margins kind of guy, in part because desecration bad and in part because I don’t particularly re-read, but I want these filed away for safe-keeping / future use.

So, in their possibly unrelated glory, here are the quotations:

“Without memory, there are no debts: a debt is something owing for a transaction that’s taken place in the past, and if neither debtor nor creditor can remember it, the debt is effectively extinguished. ‘Forgive and forget,’ we say; and, in fact, we may not be able to forgive totally unless we forget.”
-Margaret Atwood, Payback

“But soon enough I banished this nonsense; some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.”
-Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality – call it an alternate reality – to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to revitalize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist. But something can happen to sever that chain, and we are at a loss. What is real? Is reality on this side of the break in the chain? Or over there, on the other side?”
-Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

Oh look. Turns out they are all related after all.