#22 ~ The Interestings

#22 for the year was a recommended summer read.  The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer was a well told tale about 5 kids who met at summer camp as young teenagers.  They met each summer for a fairy tale life & continued the friendship during college & beyond.  There was betrayal, love, marriage, depression, job anxiety, parenthood, rape, love, the Moonies, drugs, the rich & powerful, longing, jealousy, regret, pain...

I actually had to check out the book THREE times to get it read.  Granted, my life is full & crazy these days without much time for reading...but over 6 weeks...not a favorite book by any means.  

There were lots of quotes, however, that stuck with me:

p63 ~ But clearly life too people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once know them well.  Still, there was power in once having known someone.

p72 ~ Both of their bodies were still perfect, or perfect enough; they would come to see this later on, though they couldn't see it at the time.

p75 ~ He crashed quietly through the world. {What a great description}

p122 ~ The fish tank threw carbonated light... {another great description}

p131 ~ they wanted the summer not to be over, but it was.  {been there}

p214 ~ It was like an extremely stressful game show, called Say the Right Think, You Idiot."

p235 ~ ...stand together, silently shaking with laughter, both teenaged and fully grown all at once, knowing that you would never have to choose between those different states of maturity, because you contained them both inside yourself.

p347 ~ And the child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.

p388 ~ "Your parents shit you not."

fl: On a warm night in early July of that long-evaporated year, the Interestings gathered for the very first time.  ll: And didn't it always go like that--body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.