'I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.'
― Annie Dillard

'I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty - to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom...The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he most dreaded, that I most desired.' 
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick 
Douglass

I bought books, only books, unless you count the candy and the harmonicas I bought for five grandchildren, this year for holiday gifts for immediate family and extended family members. In addition to those books, I gave bookstore gift certificates to my three daughters and their kids. For one daughter I went to Three Lives, in the photo, in the West Village. The store was her old haunt when she lived right by it before she moved to Brooklyn. For my daughter uptown with two kids I went to The Corner Bookstore which is near them. For my Wyoming daughter and husband and their three daughters I called and got gift certificates sent to them from the Valley Bookstore that's right by them. All of that was great fun for me. When I was in the stores I thought about how lucky I was and the other customers I saw were to have such good stores in their neighborhoods. And I thought about how many neighborhoods don't have a bookstore and don't even have good library hours in this big lucky-for-some city. 

                                                                   Amos Oz.  RIP.

Have I ever seen a better movie than 'Roma'? Have I ever cared for a character more than I cared for Cleo? I saw it at the IFC theater in Greenwich Village last night. Place was filled. See it in a theater. It's on Netflix, but don't. You'll pause it. You can't pause it in front of the big screen. At the end, people stayed in their seats watching long credits in Spanish. 

 

'My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn't, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I'd be found in a corner. That was who I was...that was what I did. I was the kid with the book.'
                     ― Neil Gaiman 

'It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.' 
                 ― Richard Wright, Black Boy