logged: simple passion by annie ernaux
3: and book lovers by emily henry
Book 1 of 2025:
Started the book in December of last year out of boredom. I wanted to try something light again but realised after putting the book down that my taste has changed drastically from my teenage years (romcoms galore!) to now (I’m so fucking serious.).
Book Lovers read like a hallmark film, which was, proclaimed by the author herself, the point and inspiration for the story. I’m a sucker for clichés, believe it or not. But how do I say this… I think an attempt of enemies to lovers was there but in a setting like this one, it is quite hard to accomplish proper enemies... you get me. It was a very easy and quick read otherwise. It would have made a fine summer read, instead of winter, but it wasn’t quite my cup of tea anyway.
Quotes:
“Life in New York was like being in a giant bookstore: all these trillions of paths and possibilities drawing dreamers into the city's beating heart, saying, I make no promises but I offer many doors.”
“The last-page ache. The deep breath in after you’ve set the book aside.”
“All those years spent thinking that I had superhuman self-control, and now I realize I just never put anything I wanted too badly in front of myself.”
“Those were the endings I found solace in. The ones that said, Yes, you have lost something, but maybe, someday, you’ll find something too.”
“She wonders whether what comes next could ever live up to the expectations. She doesn’t know. You never can. She turns the page anyway.”
Book 2 of 2025:
Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux
Strong short read, finished in a day. It is so difficult not to emerge from this one drenched from the intimacy of it. A vulnerable look on passion, stripped from shame and sanity. Simple Passion is a simple story, a recollection of an affair, and the emotions and lessons left at its wake. But it’s not about the story. Ernaux writes with such brilliance, it’s hard for me to skim any passage or line.
Quotes:
“I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it.”
“Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.”
“I experienced pleasure like a future pain.”
“From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.”
“Yet it is that surreal, almost non-existent last visit that gives my passion its true meaning, which is precisely to be meaningless, and to have been for two years the most violent and unaccountable reality ever.”
“When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.”
“I discovered what people are capable of, in other words, anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myself turned to them. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world.”
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