Some choice quotes from Ron Currie Jr.'s Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

I'm usually not very good at capturing passages that I really love while reading. I either don't have a pencil or pen on me or I'm not feeling patient enough to jot the quote on a scrap of paper or onto my phone.  But as I've been reading Ron Currie Jr.'s new novel, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, I've been making an effort to make note of the quotes I really loved.

Reading through them, I've noticed how the quotes that I picked really apply to my current life situation and I wonder that if things were different if I would have been as in love with these quotes. Which sort of begs the question, how much of our appreciation of a book (or any art, really) shaped by our life's events?

Anyway, on with the quotes.

Why is grief, when inspired by certain types of loss, considered something to surmount, to get over, while when inspired by other types of loss it’s given a pass, allowed and even encouraged to go on forever? 

And when you try to live there, to live in a place where you’re betraying yourself over and over, not only do you grow to resent the hell out of it, and resent the hell out of whomever you’re betraying and censoring yourself for, but the very idea of your self begins slowly and inexorably to erode. Until you realize one day out of the clear blue that you have no idea who yourself is, anymore. 

Aging was no longer the abstraction it had been a decade before. It was now a fact made concrete by every gray hair discovered in the mirror, every randomly sore knee and forgotten factoid and irregular, spotty period, every unbidden thought of where our parents were at our age and, moreover, how old they had seemed to us then.

...and I realized suddenly that at thirty-six my body couldn't hope to keep up with either my heart or my brain when it came to this woman, always this woman, only this woman, because with this woman I was forever going to need the ravenous coupling that only teenagers are capable of, and I had not been a teenager for a very long time.

When I looked at Emma and my heart leapt into my throat, as it always did when I looked at her, I sometimes realized that if I could figure out a way to see her as other people no doubt must—as human, in other words, pretty, certainly, but flawed, real, actual, doomed to expire like the rest of us—then I would be free, finally. But there seemed to be only one way that I could see her. 

You can buy Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles at Powell's.

Currently: May 19th 2013

Trying to find a way to get myself to post more often.  I'm going to borrow (steal?) this format from Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness.  Let's see how it goes.

Time // 9:42 a.m.

Place // My apartment 

Eating and Drinking // Nothing yet this morning. Had a lot of pizza from the place down the street yesterday and I think I'm still full?

Reading // I'm reading a book on my iPad (Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles by Ron Currie, Jr), reading another on my iPhone (The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson) and alternating between the library book I have checked out (God Is Dead by Ron Currie, Jr.) and a book given to me by a close friend (A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness).

After finishing Everything Matters!, I've gone on a Ron Currie, Jr. binge. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is really interesting stylistically, but it hasn't grabbed me as much as Everything Matters! I also got Currie's first collection of linked short stories from the library, God Is Dead, which examines what would happen if God actually died.  I'm not very far into it yet, but it looks promising.

I've had The Family Fang in Kindle format for months and I didn't start it until this week and I LOVE IT.

I'm reading A Discovery of Witches because a really wonderful person told me that I should read it. It's a big bulky book, so I often choose to read something else, but when I chose to pick it up, I enjoy the story and the history. It's not my usual thing, but I'm glad I'm reading it.

Watching //Watched my first episode of Adventure Time this week and it's just as weird and wonderful as promised.

Last night we struck out on two Netflix movies before we found one we liked.  DNF'd both Bachelorette and The Pill, but watched and enjoyed The Giant Mechanical Man.

On the TV front, finished and really enjoyed The New Girl (need to go back and watch season one)

Listening // I've really been into the new Waaves album:


Working // Work is crazy.  That's all I have to say.  At some point I'll catch up.  I hope.

Doing // Caught dinner with some old friends on Friday night and I met a lot of new people.  Yesterday went to Bark in the Park over at Forest Park.  Lots of dogs!

Today is going to be clean and catch up on work day.  I'm considering a walk in nearby Lafayette Park and maybe some reading before I come back here to work.

Book Acquired: Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.

Another book that's been on my TBR list for a long time is Ron Currie, Jr.'s Everything Matters!, published by Penguin in 2009. In a fit of book-buying that also included Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, I bought myself a brand new copy of this baby.

In this novel rich in character, Junior Thibodeau grows up in rural Maine in a time of Atari, baseball cards, pop Catholicism, and cocaine. He also knows something no one else knows-neither his exalted parents, nor his baseball-savant brother, nor the love of his life (she doesn't believe him anyway): The world will end when he is thirty-six. While Junior searches for meaning in a doomed world, his loved ones tell an all-American family saga of fathers and sons, blinding romance, lost love, and reconciliation-culminating in one final triumph that reconfigures the universe. A tour de force of storytelling, Everything Matters! is a genre-bending potpourri of alternative history, sci-fi, and the great American tale in the tradition of John Irving and Margaret Atwood.

Margaret Atwood and John Irving, y'all!  Sounds AWESOME, eh?

Ron Currie, Jr.'s most recent novel is Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, published by Viking last February.  The reviews were good, so maybe I'll read it after Everything Matters!

As you were...

Book Acquired: Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

And lo, a package arrived with mine name upon its face.  And I opened the package and out of it sprang forth a slim collection of short fiction.  The author is Denis Johnson.  The slim book is Jesus' Son. It is published by Picador.

Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of a spiraling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson's prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth-century American literature.

As I've mentioned before, "Emergency" was featured in The New Yorker's Fiction Podcast in 2009 (and read by Tobias Wolff).  I've been trolling used bookstores for years in search of a copy of this book.  I finally broke down and bought it.

So! Excited! I think I need to go lie down.

Some FREE e-Books for Thursday

Fiction Advocate, a micropress and literary website, is marking its fourth birthday and they're celebrating by giving away all four of their e-books.



For free.



The books include The Real Holden Caulfield by Michael Moats, Brothel by J. Boyett, A Post About a Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room by Andrew Mitchell, and Robert Repino Has a New Catchphrase by Brian Hurley



Do it.  Get some free quality books from some great people.  Go off and download. They're all available until the end of April.