"Love in the Time of Cholera" from My Library

A few years ago, my husband and I decided to finish our home and added a library in an unfinished corner of the ground floor. It's a small room, a nook really, with a glass door, a large window, and floor to ceiling built-in maple bookcases. I am sitting in this room now and I have just finished re-organizing it. Our books primarily deal with the following topics: religion, home improvement, children's chapter books, children's picture books, health, science, history, academic review course materials, travel, arts and crafts, accounting and business, foreign language, atlases, coffee table books, yearbooks/scrapbooks, and literature, which is the largest collection by far.

Most likely because of my background as an English major, I always mark passages in the books I read. I started doing this originally so that I could recall significant events for tests and essays. Today I do it so that I can thumb through books I read and recall exactly why I liked them so much, how they affected me and why.

For this entry I will share some significant passages from "Love in the Time of Cholera," the first book I read by the author Gabriel Garcia-Marquez:

...she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love. p.66

He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past....He had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia. p. 106

...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. p.165

The only convincing document he could write was a love letter. p.171

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children, but because of the friendship formed while raising them. p.207

She would visit with new friends or some old ones from school or the painting classes: an innocent substitute for infidelity. p.212

She had barely turned the corner into maturity, free at last of illusions, when she began to detect the disillusionment of never having been what she had dreamed of being when she was young....Instead, she was something she never dared admit even to herself: a deluxe servant. p.221

Men blossomed in a kind of autumnal youth, they seemed more dignified with their first gray hairs, they became witty and seductive, above all in the eyes of young women, while their withered wives had to clutch at their arms so as not to trip over their own shadows. A few years later, however, the husbands fell without warning down the precipice of a humiliating aging in body and soul, and then it was their wives who recovered and had to lead them by the arm as if they were blind men, whispering in their ear, as if not to wound their masculine pride, that they should be careful, that there were three steps, not two, that there was a puddle in the middle of the street...p.257

For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death. p.345

Movie Review: License to Wed

While most of my family members sat reading "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" this afternoon, I went to the movies to see License to Wed. Some of the comic elements were juvenile, yes, but I went in knowing that this was not going to be great cinema. It was exactly what it purported to be: an entertaining diversion and a chic flick.

John Krasinski and Mandy Moore play an engaged couple who are very much in love. This requires a chemistry that is difficult to project, but they made a convincingly adoreable couple. I was familiar with Krasinski's ability as an actor, but Mandy Moore was a pleasant surprise. Robin Williams, in his role as Father Frank, was typically over-the-top in his performance. He was somewhat unpredictable, nonetheless, which is always welcome in chic flicks. He looked older in this film than I had seen him before, and I liked his more mature appearance. He reminded me of an older Mickey Rooney.

Call me old-fashioned, but the only truly offensive aspect of the film to me was its repeated assumption that all couples engage in premarital sex. While the vast majority of couples may sleep together before marriage, there are thousands of couples who observe more traditional standards, and their numbers are on the rise again after decades of decline. I suppose in Hollywood it would have been considered grossly unrealistic to expect the couple to be in love without having sex -- they are probably not even aware that anyone in the real world ever waits. I was pleased that the film did at least point out that statistically couples who live together before marriage are much more likely to divorce. The film's oddly averse attitude toward divorce (one character's divorce was treated as a great moral failing) seemed at odds with its anti-abstinence position.

So if you are a) female, b) not expecting high drama, and c) not severely offended by the assumption that there is no such thing as wedding night consummation anymore, I can recommend this movie to you. *** (out of 5)

Starting Over at Hello

I am starting over at hello with this blog, because I just accidentally deleted it -- and I already had two whole entries. Oh, well. I am still learning. At least I was able to recoup my title before someone else claimed it.

I am titling this blog "Writer @ Home" because that is what I am or, rather, what I aspire to be: a productive, publishing writer working from home. I am currently blogging from my kitchen table, where I am staring into the screen of my laptop as words appear magically on a synthetic page. (A real page would not have deleted itself, so technology is not always preferable - that may become a recurring theme if I do not learn quickly how to avoid such mishaps.)

Now, why I am blogging?

a) to express myself. I may be an intellectual exhibitionist, though I had never thought of it in those terms before. (The intellectual part is also open for debate. I welcome your comments.) -

b) to have daily practice writing on a variety of topics.

c) to analyze myself, though in my case self-analysis often leads to paralysis.

d) to provide a forum for posting photographs, book reviews, etc.

e) to serve as a journal.

No one knows about this blog, its address, etc. but if you have stumbled upon it, or if I have invited you to read it, please know that you are welcome here. I must consider you a friend, so imagine yourself stopping by for a chat and make yourself at home. I'll make the cocoa.