"The Beautiful Mystery" Louise Penny

"What pleasure there must be, Beaviour  thought, in doing the same thing over and over.  In the past the very idea had revolted him.  Routine, repetition.  It was death, or at least deadly dull.  To lead a predictable life.

But now Beavious wasn't so sure...All he longed to do was sit down with Annie and share the Saturday papers.  To do what they did every weekend.  Over and Over. Over and over.  Until he died."

"Hollow City" Ransom Riggs

A good story, but no quotes

"The Affairs of Others" Amy Grace Loyd

Didn't really care for this book-- no quotes even

"A Trick of the Light" Louise Penny

"'She sounds like an emotional vampire,' said Myrna, at last.'
'A what?'
'I ran into quite a few in my practice.  People who sucked others dry.  We all know them.  We're in their company and we come away drained, for no apparent reason...I saw it with my clients who'd been abused either physically or emotionally.  The relationship never starts with a fist to the face or an insult.  If it did there'd be no second date.  It always starts gently.  Kindly.  The other person draw you in.  To trust them.  To need them.  And then they slowly turn.  Little by littlle, increasing the heat.  Until you're trapped."
'But, Lillian wasn't a lover, or a husband.  She was just a friend.'
'Friends can be abusive.  Friendships can turn, become foul...She fed on your graditude.  Fed on your insecurites, on your love for her.  But you did something she never expected...

You stood up for yourself.  For your art.  You left.'"

"Miss Pergrine's Home for Peculiar Children" Ransom Riggs

"I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but life never was ordinary.  I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.  Likewise, I never imagined that home would be something I would miss.  Yet as we stood loading our boats in the breaking dawn, on a brand new precipice of Before & After, I thought of everything I was about to leave behind...and I realized that leaving wouldn't be like I had imagined, like casting off a weight.  Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.  And yet my old life was as impossible to return to as the children's bombed house.  The doors had been blown off out cages."

"I'll Be Seeing You" Suzanne Hayes & Loretta Nyhan

"Glory if you intend to speak before sensible women and expect to give power to your words, you must be as free of moral ambiguity as you can.  I'm not a big believer in fire and brimstone, but I do think a certain purity of heart and intention is necessary when we expect to be heard.  We often realize too late that passion only lasts when it is married to truth...But for a marriage to work you both need the ability to see all the possible outcomes of a moment's weakness.  Most of them are less than satisfying.  And none of them end with 'happily ever after.'"

*Finished in 2013

"Mary Coin" Marisa Silver

This is a story that has stayed with me.  One in which I keep thinking about the characters, even weeks after I finished reading it.

"'You're missing your future, boy,' George pronounced when Walker was eighteen and told his father he wanted no part of farming but that he preferred to study history.  'History?' George said, his mouth twisting into an expression of disbelief.

'Understanding the mistakes of the past so we don't repeat them,' Walked answered in a tone that, twenty-three years later, he cringes to recall.  Such arrogance.  A right of youth, he supposes, a necessity...

'History will get you nowhere,' George said."

*Read in 2013.

Books

By my record keeping, I've read about 3 books per month in 2013.  This does not include the hours & hours I've spent reading Harry Potter & Percy Jackson books to the boy.  We finished all 5 Jackson books and really loved them.  I've been in a reading rut the past few months-- I even have piles of unread New Yorkers laying around.  Here's to going new places in 2014!

"Transatlantic" Colum McCann

“They were pouring down their winnowed bitterness, and in his silence he just kept thrashing, spluttering, pushing the words away.  A refusal to drown.  What nobody noticed, not even himself, was that the grain kept rising, and the silo filled, but he kept rising with it, and the sounds grew different, word upon word, falling around him, building beneath him.  And now-at the top of the silo- he has clawed himself up and dusted himself off and he stands there equal with the pourers who are astounded by the language that lies below them.  They glance at each other.  Three ways down…They can fall into the grain and drown, they can jump off the edge and abandon it, or they can learn to sow it very slowly at their feet.”

"Sun Storm" Asa Larsson

"I really haven't got anything to complain about, she thinks, turning to someone out there in the universe.  A wonderful family and a good life.  I've already had more that anyone has a right to ask for.  "Thank you," she says out loud."

(I'm attempting to read all of Larsson's books; there will be several more posts.)

"Until Thy Wrath Be Past" Asa Larsson

"He tried to convince himself that love is about giving, not taking.  It should be okay to simply be a giver.  To love without expecting anything in return.  But he finds that difficult.  He wants her.  He wants her for himself.  'I think I love her,' he says to Tintin. 'How the hell did that happen?'"

I've discovered that I'm on a Scandinavian Kick, and Asa Larsson is a great writer.  The library has requested her other books for me on inter-library loan. 

"Blackwater" Kerstin Ekman

"He decided to ask some people to dinner because he realized he was drifting into something he would have jokingly diagnosed as paranoia in anyone else."

"He himself could not have borne to see Annie.  But he had to.  And, he thought to himself afterward, 'bear' is an empty word.  Just a kind of exclamation.  You bear it.  You put two fingers on what has happened and feel it."

"It's true I walk in the forest every day and I am the only woman here who goes walking outside the berry-picking season.  And who dares to walk alone.  But that does not make me feel at home in the forest.  I think the timber company's men or the Brandberg men on their road-making machines feel much more at home. I walk her as Rosseau did in the woods of St. Germain, dazed by fantasies, scents, and visions of beauty.  The point is, my visions are the opposite of the civilization I live in.  I'm seeking an alternative...You know quite a few bachelors and lumberjacks have ended up like him in a cabin or surplus company hut...The difference between the loner in his cabin and me is that I always go back to school on Monday morning.  I know my attempts at finding an alternative are imperfect, and that my job is to teach schoolchildren to think."  (pg 343-344)

The above is from a long passage that is one of the most beautiful passages I have ever read, and something we should all discover.

"Say Nice Things About Detroit" Scott Lasser

" "Look," he said, "I've got a white family, and I've got a black family, so I can tell you this:  black people are pretty much like white people, except for one thing- black people got to deal with white people.  And that changes you." "

"The Interestings" By Meg Wolitzer

“Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn’t necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.”

-Had to quickly return this book to the library, but really enjoyed it. 

"A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" By Anthony Marra

""You're here," Sonja said, surprised.  "Yes," Havaa agreed.  "I'm here.  This is the waiting room."  Sonja glanced down to the floor, to the chairs, puzzling over this and then nodding.  "You're right.  This is the waiting room," she said, and sat in the folding chair beside Havaa.""

"We Need New Names" NoViolet Bulawayo

"Come, Ethiopia, move, move, move; Israel, Kazakhstan, Niger, brothers, let's go!  The others spoke languages, worshiped different gods, ate what we would not dare touch.  But like us, they had left their homelands behind.  They flipped open their wallets to show us faded photographs of mothers whose faces bore the same creases of worry as our very own mothers, siblings bleak-eyed with dreams unfilled like those of our own, fathers forlorn and defeated like ours.  We had never seen their countries buy we knew about everything in those pictures; we were not altogether strangers."

As an aside:  A well-written & good read, but seemed, perhaps, over-worked.  Every piece of "African plight" seemed contained in these pages (which may be how it is in Zimbabwe), and ended up not really saying enough about any of it.  Also, the main character illegally immigrates to the US, and all I could think was, "This is why his dad couldn't be here when he was born.  Why he wasn't given a tourist visa.  The choice of the one affects many. 

"The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells" Andrew Sean Greer

Quick read, no dog-ear quotes

"Good Kids" Benjamin Nugent

"Only now did I realize that I had probably been looking as tense as she did.  The words, 'I'm Republican' had triggered a fight-or-flight instinct.  The knowledge that somebody who was even sort of a Republican might kiss me was enchanting and noxious at the same time, cocaine-like."

"Elders" Ryan McIlvain"

"Seth, there's nothing special about doubting.  Some of my colleagues at the office are devout atheists...they go on and on about the 'courage to question.'  But do you know what I think?  I think the real courage is in trying to believe.  Doubt comes easy for a lot of people.  It comes easy for people like you and me, Seth.  But do you know what doesn't come easy?  Faith.  Faithfulness.  Obedience.  Humility.  Self-denial.  Self-sacrifice.  There's your courage.  It's not easy to confirm your life to a worldview that makes demands, that is not morally relative...There's your courage."

For the Boy

"There is a mystery surrounding this man who is so central to my life in so many ways, but who I'll never know."  (Maybe from a New Yorker article??)