...unashamedly, honestly, with enough distance to be lucid and thoughtful, but enough heart still in it to hurt, and to matter.
Yeah. I've been waiting to hear your response to this book since I knew you had it in the cue. I was about thirteen when I found it; I can still remember reaching the end, the first time, and sitting in the library wanting it to go on. It's worked into a lot of the way I think about integrity and work and relationship. Harriet and Peter's conversation when he first reaches Oxford — he came into the quiet room as though he belonged there and had never belonged anywhere else — is one of the barest and most gripping I know.
I'm not at all unbiased about this book. Reading it still makes me quietly happy every time. It's one of the only love stories I know that make me believe in the love, in the friendship and the fear and the understanding behind it, and the desire in it. The idea that anything worth having is worth both working and waiting for seems to me vital, and the idea that you can love your work, and it will still be hard, but it can fill you all the same. I want to be able to talk about them half that well.
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momijizukamori and
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Date: 2006-09-12 08:43 pm (UTC)Yeah. I've been waiting to hear your response to this book since I knew you had it in the cue. I was about thirteen when I found it; I can still remember reaching the end, the first time, and sitting in the library wanting it to go on. It's worked into a lot of the way I think about integrity and work and relationship. Harriet and Peter's conversation when he first reaches Oxford — he came into the quiet room as though he belonged there and had never belonged anywhere else — is one of the barest and most gripping I know.
I'm not at all unbiased about this book. Reading it still makes me quietly happy every time. It's one of the only love stories I know that make me believe in the love, in the friendship and the fear and the understanding behind it, and the desire in it. The idea that anything worth having is worth both working and waiting for seems to me vital, and the idea that you can love your work, and it will still be hard, but it can fill you all the same. I want to be able to talk about them half that well.
Anyhow, yay. I'm glad it found you.