Curl Up: 5 Long Weekend Reads
Have you been looking forward to the May long weekend to relax, take a trip, visit with friends, or read a good book? Possibly a bit of everything? Whether you plan to curl up with a book at the cottage, in the city, or en route to a destination, BookThug has you covered. Here are five books that are sure to keep you entertained and inspired no matter what your long weekend brings.
By Alisha Piercy
When you open your good eye again it’s to meet a blazing, round sun. You’re lying in the ditch of a muddy road. Somehow, in your stupor, you made your way to the gate of one of the white mansions and buried yourself in the low-lying foliage that spreads over its tough, sandy lawn. Without thinking, you get up and start to jog away. In which direction? Not to the roads, no, the bastard would have driven night and day to cool his rage and to banish you or your ghost. You know few people in this neighbourhood. The gates are high and barbed. It’s not safe to knock on any doors. And what would you say? The bastard is king in these lands.
Anyhow, there is your body to attend to. Your crippling desire for water. It makes your movements erratic. So you limp and zigzag, careful to stay to the verge of the road.
—From Bunny and Shark
By Mike Steeves
The world is full of uplifting stories about extraordinary men and women who toiled away in obscurity for years and years, if not for their entire lives, before they were finally recognized, in some cases only in their afterlife, for achieving something great where so many others have failed. We constantly hear of how they stuck to their guns and defied all the odds when everyone was telling them to quit. It’s rare to go a full day without nodding along to an inspiring anecdote about someone who was able to shut out all those voices telling them that they weren’t good enough and that they were on the wrong path, so all they could hear was the little voice inside their head that told them they were destined for glory and that all they had to do was to stay the course.
—From Giving Up
By Bertrand Laverdure, translated by Oana Avasilichioaei
I’m resting.
Dozing off. Doing nothing, just resting.
All I want is to lie in bed, arms out like a cross, left cheek on the pillow, legs and chest flat on the mattress. I haven’t read anything today and won’t read anything before one in the afternoon. I am a reader—what publishing houses call “a member of the editorial board.”Yet there is no editorial board, no summit meeting, no secret gathering to formulate impartial, obvious decisions, ones that are democratic and positive. I am a reader because I have my own view of literature: what it should be; what buttons to sew on a novel’s sleeves; what zippers to place throughout a narrative; the ideal length of writers’ detestable pipe dreams.
—From Readopolis
By Joni Murphy
Girlhood is a stage. The desert is a stage. The landscape is as much an interior as it a place you can get to by flying Southwest. It’s cheap, but not easy. It will take all your modern courage.
If we can say the right words in the correct way, we can reorder the world. If we can reorganize our fragments we will begin to undersand one another. Redeeming shitty experience is the option. This is the only experience we have.
After the world of the stage, we must make our entrance into this stage of the world.
—From Double Teenage
By Leanne Dunic
Within me, a gaping crevice. The more I change my environment the more I lose track of myself, yet I traverse. Maybe that’s the point. Nothing is anchored. Today is unstable, easy for people and land to split. Minerals grind a geological dance, the balance of the earth’s axis shifts. Chile, Indonesia, New Zealand, Haiti, Japan. Where next? The unsure crust hectors the Pacific Northwest, evidence of instability buried under substrate. A story, mounds.
—From To Love the Coming End
