M TRAIN * TWICE A STRANGER

I spent a week with a couple of tough ones, but thankfully, the book I'm reading now is wonderful and I can't put it down. It's been an indoor few days for me - Saturday we had a rare sticking November snow and it got unseasonably cold, so I just stayed in and got stuff done. It doesn't show yet, but I'm working toward getting to a place where after Thanksgiving I'll do nothing but Christmas until Christmas. We'll see.

M Train by Patti Smith - This is a group of essays about Patti's life during a solitary time when she was attempting to write about nothing. I like her voice, and the entire work grew on me as I read, but the feeling was quite flat, unlike Just Kids where the stories were more populated with people rather than lone experiences. I'll still read Patti Smith because her raw artistic honesty and Polaroids are so appealing to me. She aches for her husband and the past but wanders into her future around the world to keep busy, keep moving, keep creating. She watches detective shows and reads. These are the sentences that spoke loudest. There was another one, but the torn kleenex that I'd used as a bookmark fell out and I lost it.
     "- Reading Ibsen?
     - Yes, The Master Builder
     - Hmmm, lovely plot but fraught with symbolism.
    - I Hadn't noticed, I said.
    He stood before the fire for a moment then shook his head and left. Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass......." 

 I'm in complete agreement with Patti on this. It's why I'm not in a bookclub and why I write small words about my reading so that I'll remember what I read. I just read the rest of my kleenexed marked pages, but none of them made the journey over to this page. They're best left in the pages of M Train where you will find them if you read it. 

Twice a Stranger How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey by Burce Clark - How many different ways can you say and explain population exchange? You will find out here where the same idea is repeated over and over again then over and over again but with slightly different words and short new stories from different people who experienced its effects. The pictures are nice, but the print is small, and the sentences are long. The best quote from this book came from another book, Farewell Anatolia by Dido Sotiriou.
"If only it could all be a lie, if only we could go back to our land, to our gardens, to our forests with their songbirds, sparrows and tiny owls, to our orchards with their tangerine trees and flowering cherries, to our beautiful festivals........give my regards to the earth that gave us birth!......Farewell Anatolia!"