The Nightingale – Kristin Hannah

A story about the strength of the women left behind to survive the Nazi occupation of France. I enjoyed the development of the main characters and the way they each grappled with the terrible circumstances they found themselves in. (4 stars)

The Hours – Michael Cunningham

Warning: This book contains suicide, terminal illness and depression, so it is not a cheerful romp. A Pulitzer Prize winner, this book concerns three women living in different times (the 1920s, 1940s and 2000s) linked by the book Mrs Dalloway. The story chops between characters, with each having their own story of desperate longing. The way Cunningham captures their inner life is powerful. (3 stars)

Some lines of note (All from the one chapter featuring Mrs Brown):

“She’d never imagined it like this—when she’d thought of someone (a woman like herself) losing her mind, she’d imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.” (Page 142) – Mrs Brown. Captures the real desperation of her depression.

“She wants to have produced something marvellous; something that would be marvellous even to those who do not love her” (Page 144) In insightful voicing of that inner desire to do something special, to be acknowledged as having done something outstanding and the acknowledgement that our loved ones appreciate our efforts because they are our efforts not necessarily because they are anything special.

“She has never lied like that before, not to someone she doesn’t know or love.” (Page 147) I thought this was an interesting observation. You would hope that the people we love would be the ones that we can be most open with, but they are also the people whose opinions we most care about.

Imagination in an Age of Crisis: Soundings from the Arts and Theology – ed Jason Goroncy and Rob Pattendon

This is edited by the lecturer from several of the the subjects I chose during my Masters. It is a collection of essays, poems and short reflections on the contribution the arts can make to complex contempory problems. As with any collection across multiple topics and authors, there were some that resonated with my own personal experience and interests more than others. I’ve made a lot of highlights that I want to think further on.

The introduction by Jason Goroncy was densely populated by little treasures that intersected with some of my current obsessions like paying attention: “paying attention involves the determined work of keeping alive what people and societies willingly choose to forget, or ignore, or deny, or bury.” and the kind of hope that can underpin continuing resistance: “Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

Trevor Hart’s essay “Why Imagination Matters” digs into the important human ability of imagination. Much in this essay helped me pin down my thinking on why the current AI chatbots are a poor imitation of human intelligence. Without imagination, how can you rise above the banal and prescriptive?

There’s a lot more in my highlights but too much to dig into here. (4 stars)