Quote for the Day: July 26th, 2021

I survived because I was tougher than anybody else.
Bette Davis

Bette Davis was and remains one of the greatest actresses to ever grace the silver screen. In every performance she gave, she crackled with electricity, eliciting laughter as well as fury, and beauty as well as pain. Her career spanned more than fifty years and during that time, she took home two Academy Awards for Best Actress and racked up credits in more than one hundred films.

In every performance she gave, she crackled with electricity, eliciting laughter as well as fury, and beauty as well as pain.

Her work ethic was unparalleled and her wit unmatched. She was one of those rare beings on earth who are aware of their power and own it, wielding it to their advantage. It is my hope for my own life that I can live with the same level of courage, tenacity, and fearlessness that Bette Davis did. I feel like that would be a good start.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Almost to 800!!!

I just wanted to take a second here and thank everyone who has given my blog a chance. Thanks to all of you, my blog is almost at 800 views! That might not seem like a lot to some people but for me it’s incredibly validating. I’ve always loved sharing my opinions on books, movies, and more, and having a platform to do that brings me so much joy.

Book Review: The Tale of a Niggun by Elie Wiesel (Author) and Mark Podwal (Illustrator)

***Note: I received a free digital review copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***

If you’ve not yet read any of Elie Wiesel’s work, you’re doing yourself a great disservice. The Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate was a self-appointed chronicler of memory who made it his life’s work to never let the world forget the crimes of the Nazi regime and their supporters.

The Tale of a Niggun is based on factual events and tells the story of a rabbi who is given a dire ultimatum: either choose ten Jews from his community to be hanged on Purim to avenge the sons of Haman or else they will all perish. How does one begin to make such a decision? How does one retain their humanity in the face of such unspeakable violence?

The rabbi spends the night searching for guidance, for answers, and for clarity. In the end, he realizes he cannot condemn to death any of his people. Knowing their fate, everyone in the community begins singing a niggun—a song—that remains unbroken, that continues for all eternity, as long as human beings inhabit the earth. What the Nazis (the “enemy” in the book is unnamed but we can surmise that the amorphous “enemy” is meant to represent the Nazis) failed to realize is that you can take people’s lives, but you can’t take their spirit; you can extinguish their breath, but you can’t extinguish their memory.

The Tale of a Niggun is now available to purchase wherever books are sold.

Quote for the Day: July 25th, 2021

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.
Dave Eggers

One of my favorite things in the world is the feeling you get when you’re totally unguarded, immersed in a book, and you read a line or a passage that arrests you completely. In that moment, there are only two entities in the entire world: you and the author. Something clicks. It’s a spiritual connection made between two minds that validate each other through that silent acknowledgment, that yes, I feel that too.

In that moment, there are only two entities in the entire world: you and the author. Something clicks.

The last time that happened to me was while I was reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. Those books destroyed me completely. Starting with My Brilliant Friend, Ferrante follows two women, Elena and Lila, living in an impoverished neighborhood in Naples, Italy. Their friendship is really the story at the heart of the novels, and Ferrante follows them from around the time they’re eight years old in primary school to the time they’re in their fifties. The transformation of their friendship mirrors the transformation of Naples and Italy itself, with all the concomitant volatility, upheaval, violence, grace, and love.

The transformation of their friendship mirrors the transformation of Naples and Italy itself, with all the concomitant volatility, upheaval, violence, grace, and love.

There were times when I was reading I would actually forget Elena and Lila were fictional characters, and I would cry, and I would tense up from the sheer electricity of Ferrante’s prose. Their sorrows were my sorrows, their pain my pain, their love my love. If all prose writers were like Elena Ferrante, I don’t think my heart could handle it. For me, that’s the purpose of literature—to both transcend your personal understanding of the world at the same time your own experience is validated.

For me, that’s the purpose of literature—to both transcend your personal understanding of the world at the same time your own experience is validated.

Quote for the Day: July 24th, 2021

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver

One of the reasons I love Mary Oliver and her poetry so much is she gives you, me, all of us, permission to be the most authentic versions of ourselves. We can shed the artifice, the smoke and mirrors, the self-flagellation. We can allow ourselves to exist without imposing legalistic strictures on who we are and how we’re supposed to behave. We can be wild, in the purest sense. And how freeing that thought is.

We can shed the artifice, the smoke and mirrors, the self-flagellation. We can allow ourselves to exist without imposing legalistic strictures on who we are and how we’re supposed to behave. We can be wild, in the purest sense.

Sometimes I read Mary Oliver when I need a dose of self-forgiveness. The world teaches us to feel shame, to loathe and condemn, but that is not in our original design. It is okay to just be. For anyone looking for a good place to start reading Mary Oliver’s oeuvre, I’d personally recommend Devotions, because it includes work from all of her previous collections of poetry.

Quote for the Day: July 23rd, 2021

To survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it.

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey was arguably the best book I read last year. Like so many of the books I seem to be gravitating toward recently, it explores loss; specifically, the loss of the author’s mother. Trethewey’s mother was murdered by her stepfather when she was only 19 years old, and Memorial Drive both grounds and mythologizes her mother’s story, likening her to Persephone of Greek mythology, who was kidnapped by Hades and made Queen of the Underworld.

I love the quote I chose from the book today because I have experienced its truth in my own life. There are some things I have experienced I’m unsure I would have survived had I not been able to create narratives around them; the stories of how I came so very close to the edge, could in fact hear the wind whistling in the canyon below, and how Something always pulled me back.

All Aboard the ARC: A Fine Yellow Dust: Poems by Laura Apol

***Note: I received a free digital review copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***

Expected Release Date: August 1st, 2021

Publisher: Michigan State University Press

Review

Losing someone you love is hard. Losing a child is arguably the worst thing that can happen to a person during their lifetime. Losing a child to suicide is nearly unimaginable, at least until it happens to you.

In A Fine Yellow Dust, Laura Apol has given us a chronicle in verse of her first grief-year, filled with staccato bursts of anguish, confusion, longing, and finally, a tacit acceptance. She shows us that grief is not a process that ever really reaches completion, but instead is something that you learn to carry with you, and how writing through your pain can be both a deliberate act of remembering as well as a testament to what you’ve lost. Reading Apol’s collection brought to my mind people I’ve lost over the years, and in remembering them through her words, I became a little lighter, a little freer, myself. Please read this.

She [Apol] shows us that grief is not a process that ever really reaches completion, but instead is something that you learn to carry with you, and how writing through your pain can be both a deliberate act of remembering as well as a testament to what you’ve lost.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A Fine Yellow Dust: Poems is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.

Quote for the Day: July 22nd, 2021

here is my hand. i am not afraid of the night.
Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems by Sonia Sanchez

When I first read the collection from which today’s quote is taken, I had a hard time getting through it. Some of the poems, some of the lines, made no sense to me. I do not like the feeling of grappling for purchase in the dark. I prefer spotlights lighting my path, illuminating the forest floor—guiding me home. I didn’t get it.

I do not like the feeling of grappling for purchase in the dark. I prefer spotlights lighting my path, illuminating the forest floor—guiding me home.

I mined the depths of the page, demanding it to reveal its secrets to me. But you can’t make demands of poetry any more than you can make demands of God. I had to be patient. I had to listen, utilizing sound when sight proved elusive. There is nothing more satisfying in the entire world than allowing a poem to reveal to you its truths. Some poems I have read dozens of times, over handfuls of years, before they have deigned to speak to me. It’s always worth the wait.

…you can’t make demands of poetry any more than you can make demands of God.

Quote for the Day: July 21st, 2021

BY EMILY BERL/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX.
MYLES PHOTOGRAPHED IN WEST HOLLYWOOD IN 2016.

Movies have caused me to become / an artist. I guess I simply / believe that life is not / enough. I spin dreams / of the quotidian out of words I / could not help but choose.
I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems by Eileen Myles

Myles has always, ever since they first came on the scene, been a master of language. I love the way the artist’s prerogative is characterized here, as something that cannot be chosen, that some other force outside one’s consciousness does the choosing for them.

I love the way the artist’s prerogative is characterized here, as something that cannot be chosen, that some other force outside one’s consciousness does the choosing for them.

I remember reading years ago about someone asking Stephen King why he wrote such horrific stories, and his reply being something along the lines of questioning them as to why they thought he would be able to choose what he wrote.

There is something magical about writing, about any creative outlet really, and also something grueling—fierce and terrible and insistent. Sometimes there’s something you just have to get on paper or you know you’ll combust. A character or a line or an image, something fleeting yet enormous, that demands to be made flesh. So you obey. You commit to memory the thing that lives inside you and hope that eventually it will be sated.

Sometimes there’s something you just have to get on paper or you know you’ll combust. A character or a line or an image, something fleeting yet enormous, that demands to be made flesh. So you obey. You commit to memory the thing that lives inside you and hope that eventually it will be sated.

All Hail Halsey: New Baby, New Beats

Ashley Frangipane, otherwise known as global superstar Halsey, has been quite busy lately. They dropped their third full-length LP Manic in January of last year. 2020 also brought us collaborations between Halsey and Kelsea Ballerini (the other girl), Juice WRLD (Life’s a Mess; R.I.P.), and Marshmello (Be Kind).

As if this wasn’t already a bountiful Halsey harvest, she also released her first collection of poetry, I Would Leave Me If I Could, in November.

Now, Halsey has welcomed their first child with boyfriend Alev Aydin, named Ender Ridley Aydin. Emergent motherhood must bolster creativity in some way, because shortly after giving birth, Halsey also surprised us with news of the release date for their new album, due out on August 27th, titled If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power. Just from the title alone, we can probably anticipate fare we’ve come to expect (and adore) from Halsey: angst tinged with tenderness, stories of survival, and declarations of love steeped in her own mythos.

Just from the title alone, we can probably anticipate fare we’ve come to expect (and adore) from Halsey: angst tinged with tenderness, stories of survival, and declarations of love steeped in her own mythos.

How are we supposed to handle all of this? I know 2020 gave a lot of us more time to create, but I don’t know if I can emotionally process new bodies of work by Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and now Halsey all in one year. This isn’t even mentioning Red (Taylor’s Version) due out in the fall, which is sure to make mincemeat of our hearts. If only I could get someone to fall in love with me and break my heart before then, so I could really appreciate the album the way it was meant to be appreciated.

I guess I’ll have to find a way to cope. It looks like Adele and Rihanna are hell-bent on making us wait for new material, and at this point I can only say thank God, because that would really be too much.