Tragedy Plus Time by Adam Cayton-Holland

 "Summers we took our road show to City Park, the crown jewel of the city. It was a mere three blocks from our house gowing up. Any iconic shot of Denver you've seen, it's taken from there: the lake, the boathouse, the downtown skyline, then the foothills rolling up into the mountains. Postcard City Park. And once we were old enough to cross busy Colorado Boulevard on our own, it was all ours. "

"We were making each other laugh, and that was all that mattered to us. It became how we related; every conversation between Lydia and I would quickly veer off into absurdity. It seemed more fun to laugh at the world then cry about it."

"Lydia was my go-to comedy collaborator. Not only did we share a sense of humor, but also a sense of mortification. And self-respect. We were never the drama geeks hyperventilating at their own hilarity...we were the cynical assholes watching those neckbeards and mocking them. ...Yet here we were staring down the barrel of a total comedy fucking disaster and Lydia's only response was to start an improv troupe. All we needed was a fat guy in a sweater."

Books Read in 2020

Flowers in the Attic - VC Andrews

Petals on the Wind - VC Andrews

And Still I Rise - Maya Angelou

Proof - David Auburn

I'm Still Here - Austin Channing Brown

Piece of Cake - Cupcake Brown

When No One Is Watching - Alyssa Cole

In at the Deep End - Kate Davies

All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

Dear Evan Hanson - Val Emmich

The Vagina Monologues - Eve Ensler

This Is How It Always Is - Laurie Frankel

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

There Are Things I Want You to Know (About Stieg Larrson and Me) - Eva Gabrielsson

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

Cold Cold Heart - Tami Hoag

Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby

Daisy Jones and the Six - Tara Jenkins Reid

The Sun and Her Flowers - Rupi Kaur

Ask Again, Yes - Mary Beth Keane

The Outsider - Stephen King

Revival - Stephen King

Orphan Train - Christina Baker Kline

The Blue Shoe - Anne Lamott

The Preservationist - David Maine

Carry On, Warrior - Glennon Doyle Melton

The Last House Guest - Megan Miranda

What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty

My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh

Sweat - Lynn Nottage

The Book with No Pictures - BJ Novak

Yours 'Till Niagra Falls, Abby - Jane O'Connor

Topics of Conversation - Miranda Popkey

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers - Max Porter

High School - Tegan & Sara Quin

Dog Sees God - Bert V. Royal

Look Again - Lisa Scottoline

Calypso - David Sedaris

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver 

More Happy Than Not - Adam Silvera 

Never Let You Go - Chevy Stevens

Sing, Unburied, Sing - Jessamyn Ward

The Death of Mrs. Westaway - Ruth Ware

Nothing to See Here - Kevin Wilson

Red at the Bone - Jacqueline Woodson

Sold by Patricia McCormick

A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult

"True, she believed all artists were restless, but they weren't always running in pursuit of something. Sometimes they were reunning away from where they had been."

"(This other woman) believed the polar opposite of what she believed, yet with the same strength of conviction. She wondered if the only way any of us can find what we stand for is by first locating what we stand against."

"Plus, federal funds already were legally prohibited from being used for abortions. They covered gynecological care; abortions were self-funding. In fact, they were the only procedure reproductive health clinics offered that didn't operate at a loss. If Planned parenthood was defunded, it wouldn't stop abortions. Abortions would literally be the only things they could afford to do." 

The Light We Lost by Jill Santopolo

Goodbye Days by Jeff Zentner

"Lack of sleep has lowered my inhibitions such that I'm asking questions that might lead to answers I'm unready to hear."

That's the only quote I have marked in all 399 pages of this book. I read it in one sitting. It was delightful. And heartwrenching. Somewhere around the 200 page mark, I knew I wasn't going to sleep as a plot turn caused me to say, "Oh, F@CK!" aloud to myself.

From the epigraph, by Jim Harrison: "Death steals everything but our stories." This book tells a memorable one.

Life in a Fishbowl by Len Vlahos

"It was forty minutes of uninterrupted lack of interruptions three times a week." 

"Glio leaped a metaphorical chasm. Until this point in his short life, he had been singularly occupied with the internal destruction of Jared's brain. Of course, Glio didn't think of it as destruction. He was merely fulfilling his preordained purpose in the world. he had no more choice in the matter than does the tide in the ocean. had Glio stopped to consider the arguments for and against free will, he would have come down heavily on the side of determinism." 

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi M. Durrow

"I always know when they start talking about me or white folks because they start to talk real low. Sometimes I think that I can hear better because I have one good ear. No matter how softly they whisper I can hear them."

"At school everything about black history you learn in one month. I already learned about most of the things in my other school. The main ones are slavery and how Lincoln made the slaves free...I hear the stories different no though. Whatever those things had to do with each other, I know now that they also had something to do with me." 

"I like it when people give me clues to how I should respond."

"I am a good student if not a good girl. Those are the things I will make count. The other things won't count. I can make things not count by writing them down any way I want....It's not a true story, but I tell it to myself. What difference does it make anyway? I tell myself that story because it could be true. i could have happened that way. If there's no on else to tell another side -- the only story that can be told is the story that becomes true."

Where I Live by Eileen Spinelli

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

"I had no plans as to my future financial sustainability: I never wanted to earn money for doing anything. ...I knew that I would eventually have to enter full-time employment, I certainly never fantasized about a radiant future where I was paid to perform an economic role. Sometimes this felt like a failure to take an interest in my own life, which depressed me. On the other hand, I felt that my disinterest in wealth was ideologically healthy."

"I liked to sit in the library...allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve as the light dimmed outside the windows. I would open fifteen tabs on my web browser while producing phrases like 'epistemic rearticulation' and 'operant discursive practices.' I mostly forgot to eat on days like this and emerged in the eveing with a fine, shrill headache." (It could be noted that I am currently typing in a library. Granola bag in my bag. Having eaten a handful of cashews with my dark roast this morning.)

"Actors learn to communicate things without feeling them, I thought."

"I looked at her like she was something very far away from me, a friend I used to have, or someone whose name I didn't remember."

"Was I kind to others? Did I only worry about this question becaase as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was 'kindness' just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone."

"If there's one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets."

"Physically I felt almost nothing, just a mild discomfort. I let myself become rigid and silent, waiting for him to notice my rigidity and stop what he was doing, but he didn't. I considered asking him to stop, but the idea that he might ignore me felt more serious than the situation needed to be. Don't get yourself into a big legal thing, I thought. Just lay there and let him continue. He asked me if I liked it rough and I told him I didn't think so, but he pulled my hair anyway. I wanted to laugh, and after that I hated myself for feeling superior." 


"I realized my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer would't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would." 

"The time moved past visibly on the illuminated onscreen clock and yet I still felt as though I didn't notice it passing. Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen." 

Lena Dunham is a liar. I wanted to hate this book so I could earnestly type that sentence in regards to literary endorsements. However, after months of picking up Rooney's much-lauded debut and putting it down, uninterested, it was Dunham's Instagram post that made me take a fourteenth look at this book. AND I LOVED IT. 

"She never seemed to be either fully serious or fully joking. As a result I had learned to adopt a kind of zen acceptance of the weird things she said."