I was going to do a small review of Erica Jong’s How to Save Your Own Life, a book I finished a couple of weekends ago but thought it weird to discuss a sequel without mention of the previous book, Fear of Flying. I read Fear of Flying (published in 1973) in 2006 and never typed up a book review for it. I’m a little fuzzy on the details but I do remember really loving it. So much so that I wrote 14 pages of quotes in my reading journal from the book. Since I am home without any pressing task or appointment (the laundry can wait!) I recorded a short video of the Fear of Flying pages in my journal.
I know I’m a little fanatical about themed journals but if you’re a reader, I think keeping a reading journal has some perks. If you’re anything like me, my memory fails me when it comes to movies and books if I don’t rewatch or reread two or three times, and even then, if a significant amount of years have passed, I’m completely useless in a conversation about the book or movie.
Benefits of keeping reading journals:
- You’ll have your own version of cliff notes for the book or a collection of great quotations you enjoyed at your finger tips for perusal years later!
- Keeping notes or jotting down quotations from your books also serves as a window to who you are. The quotations you pull at a certain time of your life correlate to whatever your circumstances and point of view may be at that time. For instance, the quotations I’m about to share that were jotted down in 2006 are a little more cynical than I am now. It’s indicative to who I was 4 years ago. At least 1/3 of these quotations I wouldn’t have jotted down if I were to read FoF for the first time now. A reading journal provides subtle clues to who you were when you read each book.
- If you date all your entries, it gives you a tidy timeline and log of all the books you’ve read.
Excerpts from Fear of Flying I originally chose and transcribed in 2006
“How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don’t want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don’t want to fuck while pretending he’s the one you do. That’s called fidelity. That’s called civilization and its discontents.”
“All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely seductive to know the extent of your own powerlessness.”
“Because if you reduce everything to that level of indifference, everything becomes meaningless. It’s not existentialism, it’s numbness. It just ends by making everything meaningless.”
“All the problems of love are problems of maldistribution, goddamn it. There’s plenty to go around, but it always goes to the wrong people, the wrong times, in the wrong places.”
“But it would pass in time. It always did, unfortunately. The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns in all the shades of the rainbow and stop aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then, when it happens again we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think: ‘this one is stronger, this one is better…’ because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.”
“It’s easy to be an intellectual with a mute wife.”
“And it all comes out so lame. I love your mouth. I love your hair. I love your ears. I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying, I love you. Because this is almost too good to be love. Too yummy and delicious to be anything as serious and sober as love.”
“Maybe marriages are best in middle age – when all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.”
“There’s no such thing as security. Even if you go home to your safe little husband – there’s no telling that he won’t drop dead of a heart attach tomorrow or piss off with another bird or just plain stop loving you. can you read the future? Can you predict fate? What makes you think your security is so secure? All that’s sure is that if you pass up this experience, you’ll never get another chance at it.”
“It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it with men, with books, with food, with gingerbread cookies shaped like men, and poems shaped like men, and men shaped like poems – it refused to be still. Unfillable- that’s what it was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart.”
Tell me, what was the last good book you read?
Related reading: Peek through all my journals