I Know This Much is True

We sat there for a minute or so, watching the ocean, saying nothing. Ordinarily, with a girl, I would have panicked at the amount of dead airtime. But with Dessa, the silence felt comfortable.

I have other book posts to do, but I have this strange orderly obsession and I have to post them in the order they were read. So I am finally getting around to posting about I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb. I read this book a month or more ago, but I keep putting off posting about it. I don't know why. I am pretty sure it has something to do with my mixed feelings about the book.

And without the hope of her ever coming back, I was already a dead man. Breathing was just a technicality.

The book is very well written, don't get me wrong. And it is really interesting to read about a man's struggle through life with a schizophrenic twin brother. The whole thing is interesting for sure. But for some reason, the entire time I was reading it - I just wanted to hurry up and finish it. Not because I had to find out what was going to happen on the next page, but just because I wanted to be done with it.

'It is all connected, Dominick,' she said, 'Life is not a series of isolated ponds and puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on its way to the future. That is not something I have always understood; it is something I have come to a gradual understanding of, through my work as both an anthropologist and a psychologist.' I looked out, again, at the rushing water. 'Life is a river,' she repeated, 'Only in the most literal sense are we born on the day we leave our mother's womb. In the larger, truer snese, we are born of the past - connected to its fluidity, both genetically and experientially.'

So yeah, this book - I would definitely recommend reading it. It's a great look at society and different struggles people live through.