The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen

"Have you seen the Snow Leopard?"
"No! Isn't that wonderful."

On this re-reading, what jumps out to me most are the aspects of zen and how that can interweave with journeys mental, physical, geographic, and emotional. Matthiessen and Schaller's journey with their sherpas and porters into the Dolpo(a) region of Nepal are a reminder of the space for adventure in this world and that travel and exploration can (also) be ways of turning inwards. Peace of mind, as Pirsig reminds us, is not attained at the mountain, nor is it given by the mountain. It is either brought with us to the mountain or cannot be achieved at all. In striving we hope to learn that all we really needed was right here all along. Everything is already present, as it has ever been.

"Better tea and wind pictures, the Crystal Mountain, and blue sheep dancing on the snow--it's quite enough!"

High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

Back with Rob, Dick, and Barry. This time I was struck by the parallels between Rob's life - recently adrift at the age of 35 - and my own. While these three always felt like contemporaries, only as I have gotten older can I begin to understand the creeping germs of hopelessness that come with age. It helps make sense of Barry's motivation to join his 'hip young gunslingers,' and Dick's monomania for new music. Rob looks around his apartment, his store, and his emotional life and begins to recognize a dustiness; a clutter to things that have been kept too long. Laura recognizes his inability to put one foot in front of the other and how the comfort of routine simultaneously keeps him grounded and unhappy. Rob's revisiting of his top-five, desert-island, most memorable split ups (in chronological order) are a rare case where his dwelling on the past actually catalyzes his freedom from it. Throughout the book Laura is really the only catalytic force. She moves Rob to confront himself and in doing so the possibility that they might have a life together. Laura is movement and action; Rob, Dick, and Barry are comfort and routine. Our lives need both.

Rebel Yell - S.C. Gwynne

Gwynne’s storytelling of the life of Stonewall Jackson gets better and sharper as this history goes along. Chancellorsville is particularly animated and thorough and in this ultimate moment Jackson’s actions and responses mesh well with Gwynne’s evocation of the character throughout. The biography peels back the legend. The difficulty in treating Jackson, or any Confederate, in our modern moment, is how to treat the cause; perhaps those difficulties are given too short shrift. Gwynne does show that, while the conflict tore the country apart, a type of camaraderie existed across the lines. 

“Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy

Sad and evocative in a variety of ways. The story moves with a liveliness that I had missed on previous readings. The language and dialogue is seamlessly constructed and moves with the narrative between people, the landscape, and horses. Action also becomes a slowly-emerging form of understanding a person’s character.

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

Third time in less than a year and I feel like I am starting to get it. The extent of the driftlessness and suffering cannot be overlooked. The judge, whether right or wrong, targets the Kid because he alone kept himself removed from the cleanliness of pure violence the others partook in. If war is god, then to withhold pieces of oneself is a type of defiance akin to Lucifer. Non serviam. Yet the judge, in his worldliness is a type of violence personified. And, therefore, he fits; is equipped for each situation. God as recognizable to the uninitiated, is dead. The judge, even in his seeming immortality which makes any claim dubious, may be the manifestation of an entirely material cosmology. One either blissfully or dangerously without arbiter. There is a trace of right and wrong in the Kid (though what are his actions on the raids?). It seems the judge cannot abide this. Finally, even the Kid is swallowed by the embrace of war as god.

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

On the back cover of The God of Small Things is a review by John Updike, in which the author says (paraphrase) that great novels need to invent their own language and in so doing create their own world. Roy creates new ways of talking and writing and thus thinking and experiencing the world in her novel. This starts slowly but grows throughout the book in a way that becomes seamless - transporting the reader into the world of Roy's creation. The book in complicated, complex, and nuanced. Deserving of all the praise it has received.

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

A sparse story about violence in 1840s Mexico. Populated by memorable, terrible characters. McCarthy pushes the edge of how a reader identifies with the wretched and the violent. Above all else stands the judge. And they are dancing.