"Broken Harbor" Tana French

"Nights last longer, when you're outside on your own.  You get to thinking strange things.  I could see other lights, in other houses across the estate...I started thinking about all the other people living there.  All those different lives.  Even if they were just cooking dinner, one guy could be making his kid's favorite to cheer her up after a bad day at school, some couple could be celebrating finding out she was pregnant...Every one of them, making dinner out there, every one of them was thinking something all their own.  Loving someone all their own.  Every time I was up there, it hit me harder.  That kind of life:  it's beautiful, after all."

"The Dressmaker" Kate Alcott

Given to me by my SIL, left at the cottage as it's a perfect beach read.

"Beatrice and Virgil" Yann Martel

"Henry preferred the latter.  He liked the personal art of each writer's handwriting, some nearly robotic in appearance and ultra-legible, others jagged scrawls that nearly defined comprehension.  It always astonished him how twenty-six highly conventionalized glyphs could find such varied expressoin once a living hand set to write them down.  Was it Gertrude Stein who said language was alaphabet in disorder?"

This book had potential, but it just lacked something.

"We Need to Talk about Kevin" By Lionel Shriver

This book was recommended to me by an acquaintance who I hoped would become a friend.  Although it's about a boy who commits an act of violence at school, I found it to be more of a love story to the narrators husband.  It's incredibly sad, yet somehow not.  

"I was destined to settle down with a string cerebral type whose skittering metabolism burns chickpea concoctions at a feocious rate...A strict vegetarian.  An anguished sort who read Nietzsche and wears spectacles, alienated from his time and contemptuous of the automobile.  An avid cyclist and hill walker.  Professional marginalia- perhaps a potter, with a love of hardwoods and herb gardens, whose aspirations to an unpretentious life of physical toil and lingering sunsets on a a porch are somewhat belied by a steely, repressed rage with which he pitches disappointing vases into an oil drum...Back massages.  Recycling.  Sitar music and a flirtation with Buddhism that is mercifully behind him.  Vitamins and cribbage, water filters and French films.  A pacifistic with three guitars but no tv, and unpleasant associations with team sports from a picked on childhood....An over-educated man, my fantasy partner would still root about the soil of our idyll for seed for his own discontent [of course in a foreign land].

Are you chuckling yet?  Because then you came along.  A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach.  A bundle of appetites.  A full, boisterous guffaw; a man who tells knock-knock jokes.  Hot Dogs- not even East 86th Street bratwurst, but mealy, greasy pig guys of that terrifying pink.  Baseball.  Gimme caps.  Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six packs.  A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives.  A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup who thinks bicycles are for nerds.  Fucks hard and talks dirty...Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf.  Delights in crappy snack foods of every description....And, my lord, a Republican. A belief in a strong defense but otherwise small government and low taxes...

But the biggest surprise of all was that I married an American."

"Talking to the Dead" Harry Bingham

"Good night Fiona."  The gun is still on the kitchen table, and he pushes it toward me.  He knows that I'll be sleeping with it.  "If you get into a situation, remember you have trauma.  Your instinct will tell you to do too much or too little.  Both are bad.  Use your head, not this."  He points to his heart.
I nod.  I know what he means.  I've got a slogan for it.  "Fuck feelings, trust reason," I say."

"Raising Boys without Men" Peggy Drexler

"We live in a culture where we want mothers to do everything and whenever something goes wrong, it's the mother's fault," Mary Becker told the NYT."

"The maverick mother's sons I studied, clearly showed that a boy's morality and masculinity could be cultivated without a live-in father.  I found there were no differences in the boys in terms of their conceptions about what they considered fair or their reasoning about moral issues."

"I have come to take a stand against the recent tide of opinion and the rash of books asserting that boys must have a father in the home to in order to to grow to full manhood.  Instead, I have found that loving, growth-encouraging parenting is what boys need.  A good parent, whether mother or father, will enable a boy to develop to his full potential as a young man, as long as his individuality, his manliness, his courage, and his developing conscience are respectfully and and fully supported."

"Listening for Madeleine" Leonard Marcus

Despite sometimes long narratives by friends, it her own words that spoke to me in this book:
"My books are not bad books to die with...What I mean is that when you read a book, if it makes me feel more alive, then it's a good book to die with."

Also, this description:  "For most of her adult life, Madeleine L'Engle enjoyed a stage actor's fine powers of recall and too casual pride in the manner of well-read men and women of own and earlier generations, in seasoning her writing and conversation with lines from the immortals."