Books

A collection of some of my favorite books and essays along with some quotes from them.

• The End of Eddy (Édouard Louis)

  L'impossibilité de le faire empêchait la possibilité de le vouloir, qui à son tour fermait les possibles.

• Notes on Camp (Susan Sontag)

  Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.

  One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that ‘sincerity’ is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness.

• Giovanni’s Room (James Baldwin)

  People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

• Returning to Reims (Didier Eribon)

  To use an insult is to cite the past. It only has meaning because it has been used by so many earlier speakers: “a dizzying word that rises from the depths of time immemorial,” as one of Genet’s verses puts it. Yet, for those at whom it is aimed, it also represents a projection into the future: the dreadful presentiment that such words, and the violence they carry, will accompany you for the rest of your days.

• Beyond the Beautiful Forevers (Katherine Boo)

  It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.

• To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

  But before I can live with other folks, I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

  I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.