I started Bluets on the train the other week, or at least that’s how I remember it. Where was I going that taking the train was the best option? I don’t know, but that’s when I tend to reach for the Kindle, as at home I have the luxury of carrying a book from room to room, leaving it in this stack or the other, picking up again and taking it into the bath, setting it down for the night after reading under the covers in my cool room.

But Bluets was on the Kindle, and so it was read in passing, a few sections on the train to wherever it was, then forty-five minutes on a misty commute to work, and finally on Amtrak headed home from Champaign, another weekend spent between home and home. And I finished it with a gasp for breath, hot tears in my eyes, as the Nicolas Jaar mix unfolded in my ears and the miles slipped by in the darkness.

I don’t know how to write about this book. I don’t even know where to begin. As I think about it, I keep coming back to the idea of a tone poem, a single extended meditation on a single theme – in this case, the idea of blue. Blue of lapis lazuli, of sadness, of pornography. A love affair with a color, an exploration of the sensation of perceiving color, of the experience of feeling, of the feeling of loss, of the loss of a love.

203. I remember, in the eighties, when crack first hit the scene, hearing all kinds of horror stories about how if you smoked it even once, the memory of its unbelievable high would live on in your system forever, and you would thus never again be able to be content without it. I have no idea if this is true, but I will admit that it scared me off the drug. n the years since, I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms-  if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably  just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?

I don’t know how to express how deeply parts of this book resonated with me. I have pages and pages of highlights and bookmarks, of passages that caught my breath, that I will no doubt return to when my heart is aching and I need to remember that what I’m feeling isn’t unique in the world, that others have experienced and thought and felt these same things, and have moreover been able to put them into words more eloquent than anything I could hope to write.

193. I will admit, however, upon considering the matter further, that writing does do something to one’s memory – that at times it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs  in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve. Perhaps that is why I am avoiding writing about too many specific blue things – I don’t want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing could empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things.

I can’t promise you’ll like this book. I make no such offers. Perhaps you should start here first.

This is the twelfth of at least 15 books that I plan to read in the next year for my friend Mark’s 2/3 Challenge.

Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke – stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper. Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.

So opens Let the Great World Spin.

I heard about the book from a Diane Rehm Show podcast in 2009. It was a hot summer day, and I was walking around Foggy Bottom transfixed by the author reading his fictionalized account of Philippe Petit‘s walk between the Twin Towers.

In some ways, this book reminded me of Netherland, and in others, A Visit from the Goon Squad. The interwoven stories hinge on two events: Petit’s 1974 walk, and the trial of a prostitute. These events dance around the periphery of the life of an uptown Jewish doctor’s wife grieving for the death of her son. An African-American woman who has also lost her sons takes in the children of the prostitute, dead in a car accident shortly after her trial. A woman tangentially involved in the accident feels responsibility for the death of the priest who had befriended the prostitute, and seeks out his brother, the one-time john of the prostitute’s mother, left behind in prison. It’s a complex and emotional book, wonderfully written, and deserving of the National Book Award, though I’m not sure what makes a book National Book Award worthy.

I copied these lines down weeks ago when I first finished the novel on a hot Sunday when I needed a laugh more than a cry on my friend’s couch, her cat next to me, feeling absolutely alone, gutted in the same ways that I was when I finished The Wild Palms:

I walked in the woods, around the lake, out onto the dirt roads. Gather all around the things that you love, I thought, and prepare to lose them.

This is the seventh of at least 15 books that I plan to read in the next year for my friend Mark’s 2/3 Challenge.

Runaway has lingered on my nightstand since November, and I can’t rightly explain why. I’m an avid reader, but I read in cycles – a hundred pages in the bathtub, then nothing for a week or two. Two thick magazines on the plane, but no more than one short story a month. It’s easy to lose the subtlety and flow of a story, particularly when spread over a few months.

That is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don’t think about it at all.

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don’t think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.

That is what happens.

And Runaway is subtle. This review by Jonathan Franzen captures the beauty and challenge of Munro’s writing – it focuses on small but compellingly human stories. Nothing happens on a historically momentous scale, but the stories she tells are full of those small events that feel historically momentous: meeting a stranger, deciding to leave, making a promise, learning the truth, falling in love, remembering.

The thing about life, Harry had told Lauren, was to live in the world with interest. To keep your eyes open and see the possibilities – see the humanity – in everybody you met. To be aware. If he had anything at all to teach her it was that. Be aware.

This is the sixth of at least 15 books that I plan to read in the next year for my friend Mark’s 2/3 Challenge.