Back in the swing of things

Finished two books last week.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a beautiful book about the course of love from inception, through denial, to final redemption over half a century. I love this author. And although Cholera did not affect me on the same level as One Hundred Years of Solitude, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The worlds that Garcia Marquez creates are gorgeous and somewhat magical.

Favorite passages:
He was awakened by sadness. Not the sadness he had felt that morning when he stood before the corpse of his friend, but the invisible cloud that would saturate his soul after his siesta and which he interpreted as divine notification that he was living his final afternoons. Until the age of fifty he had not been conscious of the size and weight and condition of his organs. Little by little, as he lay with his eyes closed after his daily siesta, he had begun to feel them, one by one, inside his body, feel the shape of his insomniac heart, his mysterious liver, his hermetic pancreas, and he had slowly discovered that even the oldest people were younger than he was and that he had become the only survivor of his generation's legendary group portraits.

But his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.

...they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. 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.

And now for something completely different...

In my head, David Cross will forever be synonymous with Tobias, the never nude from my favorite TV show, Arrested Development. I've seen him one or two times on Bill Maher's show and decided to check out his first book, I Drink For a Reason. There were a few things that I didn't agree with him about, and didn't even like reading, but I totally respect his honesty, intelligence and straight-up balls for saying what he believes. There were definitely funny parts of the book - my favorite included the section "Things to Do When You're Bored" which included this gem:

"Next time (and every time) you are in a hotel/motel/Holiday Inn (say what?!), take the Bible and inscribe, 'Best Wishes, [Your Name Here].' Then make notes randomly throughout the book, circling passages and writing things like, "WTF?! Is this for real? Bullshit!" etc."

Other really funny parts included his full-disclosure of his hatred for Jim Belushi and "Ideas for T-Shirts to be Sold at Urban Outfitters" (I would buy 'Look at what I think is interesting!').

Favorite Passage:
I would even say that maybe, just maybe, I love America. Much like the conflicted love one might have for an abusive parent or caretaker with a bipolar condition making them capable of true empathy and magnanimous compassion while meeting out cold, unsympathetic, financial "tough love" lessions. My feelings about my country are in the spirit of caring about a fucked-up friend whose condition you hope doesn't get so bad that they end up on A&E's Intervention.