Welcome to Litsy!

This is a coming of age story in upstate 1970s NY contrasted against main character Berie‘s struggling marriage later on. Parts I didn‘t enjoy as much, but Moore marvelously evoked a sense of place/time in NY so much that I could see it. A soft pick for me. Thanks again for gifting this to me, @squirrelbrain !

Helen, thank you so much for the book and your lovely note! I‘ve heard SO many writers just gush about Lorrie Moore, so I‘ve always meant to read her and now I will! I‘m absolutely delighted! Thank you so much for thinking of me for my birthday. ☺️

My husband has that look again, the look of how difficult the world is, life is, how sometimes you just want to go back to your house with the bushes around it and stay inside.... The idea of it: its lovely cheat and evasion; its capitulation to longing and rest. 'Home, home, home.'

Where, though I harbor secret wishes of its burning, our life in flames, the crazy, wicked freedom of it, our chipping house will still be standing, safe and whole

Probably a good job it's too far away to go regularly...

This received a “so-so” only because I listened to an audio copy and I needed something to pass the time. I would‘ve DNF ‘d in the text version as I was bored. 😐

Writing was wonderful, beautiful prose. But I just couldn‘t connect with the story or the MC at all. I‘m glad it was short because any longer and even the writing wouldn‘t have carried me through.

Brillant, unsettling and totally assured of its style and direction. Every good thing you've ever read about this book is true. Read it now.

#booksandshelfiesm18
#favbookquote

"...my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing: It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it can not swallow or chew."
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? - Lorrie Moore

#QuoteOfTheDay

This is a very poignant book about youth, friendship, and love; familial, platonic and romantic. Juxtaposing the current life of Berie and her rememberances of the summer she turned 15. The authors beautiful prose lures you into an upstate NY summer in the 60's and leads you around like a lazy summer creek. She winnows truths out of a very human experience in the most beautiful ways. It left me thinking, "Yes!! That is exactly how it is!!!" ❤❤

Next book club pick. I love "Bark" when I read it a few years before; most her story settings makes me long for the days I studied at UW-Madison. This one seems to be a total different story, reminding me the long gone girlhood and friendship.

Gosh, I just love her writing!

Corrections, corrections

Music, for us back then, evoked various exiling and confounded moods, states of hallucination, states of love. A song was the timeless truth beneath the surface of things. It was a standing-still trip to the sea! It was a blow to the chest, like a boy you liked suddenly entering the room. It filled you with excitement and shy, deep knowledge.

There are so many well-written, quotable sentences in this book, but it didn't hold together to make a beautiful book. I really wanted to like this more than I did, it the sentences make it a pick, rather than the so-so of the structure. The ending was so abrupt it felt like part of the book was just missing. I would have liked more. That being said, I would read other books by her for the sentences and metaphors she comes up with.

"Planted in large, gorgeous ovals are tulips so big they look as if they'd steal your jewelry."

"...to accept facts: I'd been bypassed by Mother Nature, the garlanded and white-robed figure whom I sometimes saw on margarine commercials, summoning thunderstorms. I'd been overlooked by her."

? Yep. Still relating!

On the second page and already I relate to the narrator. I'm going to like this book, I think. Thanks to @Lindy for recommending it!

Lots of poetry this month, and fewer nonfiction than usual. Lots of great reading in general, even though it felt like I was too busy studying Slovak to read as much as usual.

A significant event in a friendship between two 15-year-old girls changes their relationship and affects one of them years later when confronting the difficulties of her marriage. Beautiful and insightful prose.

After vespers we would sometimes walk through the woods together and he would talk about God, never Jesus, never the Son! Just God, and what God wanted—in ways that made God seem as gorgeous and enveloping as the violet dusk in which we roamed, and other times like a spoiled and faraway child vexing all his relations.

"I can't give my heart away to anyone but you," Daniel said to me in the hospital. "Not that I haven't tried, of course. It's just that when I do, the other organs start a letter-writing campaign."

"Also, why does everyone in the whole city have to touch the bread? You go to buy bread, and the baker touches it, the cashier touches it, the assistant hands it over to you, then finally you yourself just tuck it under your armpit and go out and bump into other people on the street with it. How can we have a medical conference in a town with such unsanitary bread?"

I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing: it pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.

[...] unlike the time I ran under a truck stopped for a red light, rather than walk all the way around it [...] 😳

Our mothers let us do this-wear makeup & stockings & garter belts & go off-because they had other concerns. Mine was at a meeting or church or some fair for foreign students, & at home, when she wasn't mimeographing committee memos from a metal box of brownish jelly heated on the stove (pages & pages of purple lettering produced this way from a single typed sheet) she was chatting with Mrs Leblanc, or curled on the couch napping off a depression.

And in the long shadows of his neglect, we fashioned our own selves, quietly improvised our own rules, as kids did in America, in the fatherless fifties and sixties. Which was probably why children of that time, when they grew up, turned out to be such a shock to their parents.

The thick pelts of our eyebrows shrieked across our faces, some legacy of the Quebec fur trade.

My childhood had no narrative; it was all just a combination of air and no air: waiting for life to happen, the body to get big, the mind to grow fearless. There were no stories, no ideas, not really, not yet. Just things unearthed from elsewhere and propped up later to help the mind get around. At the time, however, it was liquid, like a song - nothing much. It was just a space with some people in it.

The house of my childhood is etched in my memory like the shape of the mind itself: a house-shaped mind - why not? It was this particular mind out of which I ventured - for any wild danger or sentimental stance or lunge at something faraway. But it housed every seedling act. I floated above it, but close, like a figure in a Chagall.

I suppose we felt less bullied by [our father's] neglect than by his attentions, which tended to take the form of correcting us when we hit a wrong note on a Brahms piano intermezzo. "Aow!" he would yowl. "C-sharp, C-sharp, C-sharp!"
If we cried, he would say firmly, "Stanch and starch the mush!"

In some ways my childhood consisted of a kind of wasting away, a wandering dreamily through woods and illegally in the concrete sewer pipes, crawling, or pleasantly alone in the house (everyone gone FOR AN HOUR!) chewing the salt out of paper bits, or hiding under quilts in the afternoon to form a new place somehow, a new space that had never existed before in the bed, like a rehearsal for love.

"If in La Bohème you gave everyone wristwatches, you'd have a happy ending."
"You would?"
"Sure," I say. "You wouldn't have that guy singing about his coat. He'd look at his watch and go 'Yikes!'"
"Now that's what I'd like to hear. A nice aria with the word 'yikes' in it."

The way we invent ourselves, feeling like we will never understand our own selves, never mind other people; the weight of our formative years on our adult selves; the way a perfect moment can sustain us through all the tougher daily grind of living: Moore puts it so well in this melancholy and enchanting novel. It reminded me of Barker's O Caledonia, and there's even a sad stairway incident.

I attend my friend's Vancouver book club once or twice a year. They graciously time their meetings to my visits and call me an honorary member. They are a splinter from a larger one, because the original group became too much about socializing and most of them didn't read the books. Yesterday, we enjoyed the glorious sunshine on a garden walk, then talked for 2 hours about Who Will Run the Frog Hospital. My idea of heaven.

Planted in large, gorgeous ovals are tulips so big they look as if they'd steal your jewelry.

Four pages from the end, I've found a quote suitable for #inagalaxyfarfaraway :

"I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sends out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do!"

@RealLifeReading

There were soft tall weeds growing up from the lake bottom, and they would do a charming kind of hula and then wind around your legs in a death grip.

My grandmother always gazed down upon her cello, like the Holy Mother upon the Holy Child, or perhaps like one woman beholding another at her knees.

[photo shamelessly stolen from Internet.]

Opening lines: "In Paris we eat brains every night. My husband likes the vaporous, fishy mousse of them. They are a kind of seafood, he thinks, locked tightly in the skull, like shelled creatures in the dark caves of the ocean [...]"

Airport reading. And a glimpse of my shoes, chosen because I only wanted to have one pair for a 5-day trip to the opera festival in Vancouver, and I'll be wearing either black or pale gray trousers. Pink goes with everything!

I feel like my recent #libraryhaul has some contenders for #thistitleequalsgreatbandname 😆 #marchintoreading

Rory Gilmore, Daria Morgendorffer, and basically any character in Lorrie Moore's oeuvre, especially Berie from Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? #threefictionalcharacters

Meet Jeremiah Franklin Fisher (alias: Froggy Fisher). Does anyone know anything about having a frog as a pet? My family and I have become rather attached to him and are worried about what will happen when the pool closes and it gets colder.

Pink and green spines for #augustofpages! (By the way, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is an all-time favorite of mine!) #augustphotochallenge

Lorrie Moore writes sentences that I underline in pencil. She writes about intimacy in friendship and growing up and looking for thrills and disappointment. She does all this in a slim novel that made me laugh and cry sometimes in the same paragraph.