QOTW: George Saunders
Well said.
“Reading is a form of prayer,
a guided meditation
that briefly makes us believe
we’re someone else.”
Quote of the Week
The news is bad, folks. Prayer and meditation are necessary for my heart and head. Here is a prayer for peace from My Jewish Learning. I haven’t read Lincoln in the Bardo (or any other George Saunders books) yet, but this quote jumped out at me this week.
Here’s the blurb:
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body.
From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.
I keep finding great quotes and then finding out they were originally published in O. Some very cool readers and writers have contributed book lists to the magazine.
Who are your favorite authors? What are their favorite books?
