Read it

I just finished a wonderful book: Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr. It was such a treat, but more like an elegant chocolate mousse in a crystal flute than a candy bar. His writing is spare and beautiful and his observations about his baby boys and his day-to-day experiences in Rome ring true. I wish I could write like that.

Here's a bit that I especially liked:

"...over time, we stop perceiving familiar things - words, friends, apartments - as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience - buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello - become new all over again."