Literary Quote of the Day, Good Books, and Other Thoughts

"She understood the world and her place in it.  She understood nothing.  The world and her place in it were nothing and she understood that."
--Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, from Welcome to Night Vale (Harper Collins, 2015, p. 5)

While reading "Welcome to Night Vale," I was struck by the three-sentence paragraph above with simultaneous mirth and depression.  It was clever, well-written, and ringing with ominous truth.

I highly recommend "Welcome to Night Vale," if you haven't already read it or heard the original pod cast upon which it is based.  My dear friend and colleague whose birthday is the same day as mine bought it for me, suspecting that I would LOVE it, and she was right!  I bought her "The Passage," by Justin Cronin.  I hope she relishes it (and the other two books of the trilogy) as much as I. For you Trekkies/Trekkers out there, you know where that last expression comes from.

Anyway, living in a country being torn apart by an insane president and in a world being torn apart by a climate crisis, it is easy to feel small, helpless, and depressed.  That is why I am trying hard to maintain a positive attitude and do good works in my small corner of the world. 

For me, part of maintaining a positive attitude includes laughing out loud, and "Welcome To Night Vale" makes me do that.  Authors David Sedaris and Augustin Burroughs also make me do that--and a long time ago, Douglas Adams made me do that with his "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."  I remember when reading Adam's book for the first time, I was absolutely shocked at how funny it was, and now, I am getting that same feeling again, over 30 years later, from "...Night Vale!"