Super Mo, our Needle and Thread: Stitching for Literacy 2011 Bookmark Challenge Super Model, shows us what happens when you can’t decide which bookmark you want to wear. Love that look!
Today’s first line comes from Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska
p. 60 In the spring, winter’s carbonated sky went flat as the darkness leaked out of the night, making stars lose their luster.
“…carbonated sky went flat…” Zing! And completely true.
Now, let’s try this again: I’ll pick a random line from the many I marked in Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never
p. 230 A novel works its magic by putting a reader inside another person’s life. The pace is as slow as life. It’s as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid pictures drawn subconsciously from your own life, so that the story feels more personal than the sets designed by someone else and handed over via TV or movies. Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own.
It’s as though I’m reading that for the first time, and I gasp and love it all over again. I always wonder what makes stories in books different from stories on TV or in movies. I know in my bones they’re different, but I don’t really know why. I can make some general guesses, but Barbara presents here a clearer image of my own ideas.
I can draw two connections off the top of my head:
- Presenting us with all the images along with a story makes a carbonated novel go flat, leaking all the personalized imagination out of it.
- What makes a line resonate with us depends on how it meshes with our own experiences and imagination. Lines We Love duplicate our experiences.
Sigh. Oh, I like that. That’s fun!
Do those lines work for you? Did you come across any Lines You Love in your reading this week?
Categories: Reading
