my favorite book quote from 2014.
I didn’t make any lists this year, and who knows, maybe I still will make a book list or two from my 2014 reading. I at least wanted to share my very favorite quote from a book I read this year. Riffing a bit on the line from William Nicholson’s Shadowlands, “We read to know we’re not alone.”
From The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry
The words you can’t find, you borrow.
We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.
My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart. We are not quite novels. The analogy he is looking for is almost there. We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that.
In the end, we are collected works.”
Even more meaningful in context. One of my favorite books from the year.
before midnight.
I’m pretty sure the trilogy of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight is the greatest love story ever told in film. I would need to think about this for a while to confirm I’m not forgetting about some glaring omission, but at the moment, that’s my opinion on the matter.
It’s just so real, so brilliant, and cuts so closely to the heart of romantic love and what it really means to be a person in the world. I think what I love the most about these films is that it is first and foremost about being human, about all of our own ideas and doubts and passions and contradictions. The love story is central, but somehow also very secondary. First comes each of these characters as fully realized individuals, then comes their relationship.
These are interesting characters in their own right who also happen to come into one another’s lives. They make each other better, with the way they encourage and challenge one another. Yet, they are two people who choose to share some of their life with the other, not one weird amalgam where neither can be fully herself/himself and both are sucked into a weird enmeshed rat king.
I wish there were more relationships like this in media, instead of the plethora of nauseating variations of unhealthy nonsense that normally gets perpetuated as true love, but is really just some degree of either naive wish-fulfillment or poorly disguised cynicism pretending to be a family sitcom.
some of my favorite music videos growing up. [88 mph.]
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s stuff off the top of my head that I remember being in love with at some point during my childhood. I’m sure that I’ve forgotten some big ones, but if the list had been exhaustive it would have gone on for weeks worth of video. When huge ones come to mind, maybe I will do a part two or something.
Some pretty awesome stuff on here, and some pretty embarrassing stuff on here. Don’t judge me… okay, judge me a little bit.
They are in no particular order. Not even chronological.
What were your favorite music videos?
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Watch closely, and you will see that this video features another Philly icon who would someday become my favorite Philadelphian… Mr. ?uestlove.
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/ a lifetime of memories / goin’ down the drain / i’d like to keep stepping, but i can’t get past the pain! /
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I was five when this came out, and it’s the first video I can remember being my favorite music video.
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In due time, “Thriller” would become my favorite video of all time. Yet, when I was a little kid it scared the living shit out of me. These were my favorite Michael Jackson videos, instead. So many of them.