In progress - Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Frøken Smillas Fornemmelse for Sne. English translation copyright 1993. This book takes me right back.

In 1993 I turned 15. This book reminds me of how I used to read. I was a total immersion reader, barely surfacing for meals. I wish I could share that feeling with anyone who doesn't have that experience with good books.

But I also read to define myself. To find out who I was, who I wanted to be. I drifted through months of reading only existentialist literature. I dove headlong into Anne Rice. I forgot my own name when I found The Mists of Avalon.

But I definitely wanted to be Smilla. She is hard, fierce, uncannily intelligent, well dressed, and gifted with several extra senses.

The sense of presence, that someone or something is there before she can see or hear anything. The sense of timing, always asking the exact right question when there's no time to dilly dally. And the sense of snow, the one she is most known for.

I still adore Smilla. And I worship the way Peter Høeg has with his storytelling. From one paragraph to the next, we might be reading about a mathematical principle, a memory of time spent in boarding school, or a bitter discourse on colonialism. No matter what it's about, each sentence flawlessly advances the story -- one of the most fascinating and gripping stories I know of.

I watch the sunset, which lasts three hours at this time of year. As if the sun, on the verge of leaving, had discovered qualities in the world that are now causing it to have second thoughts about departing. (13)

In this century the Inuit's life has been a tightrope dance on a cord fastened at one end to the world's least hospitable land with the world's most severe and fluctuating climate, and fastened at the other end to the Danish colonial administration. (79)

I've thrown a little cold water on my face. The possibility of my having brushed my hair can not be ruled out. (99)

One of the signs that your life needs tidying up is when your possessions gradually have come to consist mainly of things that you borrowed a long time ago but which it's now too late to give back (104)

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Passages from Sexing the Cherry

I've always loved copying favorite passages from books. Here are a few I'd like to share from a recent read:

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson.


I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt. (21)

I have noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other. (31)

I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever. (35)

He asked me if I knew the story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. I said I had heard it, and he told me they were still living just down the road, though of course they were quite a bit older now. Why didn't I go and see them? (43)

She is like a mathematical equation, always there and impossible to disprove. (79)

Above me the gulls burst in white battalions, and ahead of me the tall rocks loom. To the north of this tiny island is a tract of sand where the sea cuts through like a tongue. I will pull up my boat at this deep divided shore and see what signs of life there are. Islands are metaphors for the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise. (80)

Now the future is wild and waits for us as a beast in a lair. (83)



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Passages from Middlemarch

I've always loved copying favorite passages from books. Here are a few I'd like to share from my current read:

Middlemarch by George Eliot.


Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets. (100)

She herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's intentions about families. (109)

Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not in sight -- that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin. (205)

A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having intended greatness for men. But nature has sometimes made sad oversights in carrying out her intentions... (411)

The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama. (553)

New words:

• nonce
• chyle
• nidus
• guimp

Do you have any favorite quotes from Middlemarch?

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Passages from The Road

I've always loved copying favorite passages from books. Here are a few I'd like to share from my current read:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy.


The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. (10)

They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. (54)

The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. Like a dawn before battle. (137)

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early (193)

Some good words:

• rachitic
• siwash
• claggy
• catamite
• kerf
• dentil
• chary
• illucid
• mendicant
• travois
• loess
• torsional

Do you have any favorite passages from this book?

Photo by J. Steuben

Passages from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

From A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland by Samuel Johnson.


I had now travelled two hundred miles in Scotland, and seen only one tree not younger than myself. (18)

Early in the afternoon we came to Anoch, a village... of three huts, one of which is distinguished by a chimney. (31)

[Describing the mountains] An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by nature from her care and disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened only with one sullen power of useless vegetation. (35)

Their native bread is made of oats, or barley. Of oatmeal they spread very thin cakes, coarse and hard, to which unaccustomed palates are not easily reconciled. (49)

Their weather is not pleasing. Half the year is deluged with rain. From the autumnal to the vernal equinox, a dry day is hardly known, except when the showers are suspended by a tempest. (70)


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Passages from Face

I've always loved copying favorite passages from books. Here are a few I'd like to share from my current read:

Face by Sherman Alexie.


I said a prayer
To the Snake God,

And wondered if such a God exists.
That's theology.

If the Snake God does exist,
Then it is likely the same

As every other God:
Unreachable.

(from "The Sum of His Parts," 52)



... This is grief, obscene
And malodorous, sticky to the touch.
This is grief, the city where blowflies feast
And lay eggs. This is grief, one shovel punch

To my teeth, one punch to my mother's neck,
One punch each to my brothers' sparrow chests,
The fifth and sixth to snap my sisters' backs.

(from "The Blood Sonnets," 50)



My tribe tried to murder me--
And I don't mean that metaphorically.
I've been to dozens of funerals and wakes;
I've poured dirt into one hundred graves;

And if you study what separates me,
The survivor, from the dead and car-wrecked,
Then you'll learn that my literacy
Saved my ass. It was all those goddamn texts

By all those damn dead white male and female writers
That first taught me how to be a fighter

(from "Tuxedo with Eagle Feathers," 80)



I hope that I stay
Alive in the bones
Of hunter and prey.

I hope that my soul,
Masculine and vain,
Becomes oxygen
Or a good hard rain.

(from "Crow Boom," 106)

Photo by J. Steuben

Passages from The Diamond Age

I've always loved copying favorite passages from books. Here are a few I'd like to share from my current read:

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.


Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it. (31)


It was always foggy in the Leased Territories, because all of the immunocules in the air served as nuclei for the condensation of water vapor. If you stared carefully into the fog and focused on a point inches in front of your nose, you could see it sparkling, like so many microscopic searchlights, as the immunocules swept space with lidar beams... The sparkling of tiny lights was the evidence of microscopic dreadnoughts hunting each other implacably through the fog, like U-boats and destroyers in the black water of the North Atlantic. (52)


The trees were giants, rising branchless to far above their heads, the trunks aglow with moss... They passed through the remains of an abandoned timber town, half small clapboard buildings and half moss-covered and rust-streaked mobile homes. Through their dirty windows, faded signs were dimly visible, stenciled THIS HOUSEHOLD DEPENDS ON TIMBER MONEY. Ten-foot saplings grew up through cracks in the streets. Narrow hedges of blueberry shrubs and blackberry canes sprouted from the rain gutters of houses, and gigantic old cars, resting askew on flat and cracked tires, had become trellises for morning glories and vine maples. (340)


It is their view that one day, instead of Feeds terminating in matter compilers, we will have Seeds that, sown on the earth, will sprout up into houses, hamburgers, spaceships, and books -- that the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed, and that upon it will be founded a more highly evolved society. (348)

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