OTHERS OF MY KIND BY JAMES SALLIS

I'm reading the above book at the moment, it's written by a man but from the perspective of a girl that was abducted aged eight and kept in a box under her captor's bed for two years before escaping and living in a mall for two years; she was then taken into care and at sixteen emancipates herself and embarks on a career in journalism, becoming the editor in chief of a news channel. She doesn't remember her name or her parents and the police can't find them...hmm, a bit unbelievable, but that's not why I'm writing about it here. In amongst all that there are a number of little gems in this book, things well worth noting down and remembering:

'Ever watch a bird build its nest? It's got part of a vine, a clump of matted hair, maybe a piece of cloth, some twigs and grass, God knows what else. But somehow it all gets plaited together, turns into this place she lives. That's what we all do - it's no different'

'We think we're communicating, we insist that in our culture we're communicting continuously, but for all the constant noise and the clamor of media in our lives it's still mostly smoke and mirrors. We have all these special vocabularies, professional, ethic, personal - with just enough overlap to allow us to convince ourselves we share a common language. We talk and talk, make shadows on the wall with our hands, when all wer're really doing is bouncing the ball from flipper to flipper, trying to keep it in play as long as we can.'

'At some point we realise that it's not going to just happen, that we're going to have to make the decision to become human and put some effort into it. Most start young as a matter of course. Other have good reason for being late starters. But the struggle's the same. We work at making a self for most of a lifetime only to find that the self we've created is inseparable from the struggle.'

'There is no better educator than pain, no better leveler.'

'A glass wall's come up between myself and the world I used to live in, I can see what goes on out there, the sounds reach me, but all I'm able to feel when I put my hand against the glass is the simple heat of it.'

It's quite a 'deep' book, a challenge, that's what I like.