Nancy Pearl > Quotes

“If you're 50 years old or younger, give every book about 50 pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up.

If you're over 50, which is when time gets shorter, subtract your age from 100 - the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding whether or not to quit. If you're 100 or over you get to judge the book by its cover, despite the dangers in doing so.”
― Nancy Pearl

“I have for a long time felt that our society is becoming more and more fractured and divisive and that you could go a whole day without really talking to another person. If you give people a good book to talk about, you can build a community out of a diverse group. A common language grows out of it.”
― Nancy Pearl

“I just said, 'Well, the real people performing miracles every day are librarians,' and we all laughed ourselves off our chairs.”
― Nancy Pearl

“Reading has always brought me pure joy. I read to encounter new worlds and new ways of looking at the world. I read to enlarge my horizons, to gain wisdom, to experience beauty, to understand myself better, and for the pure wonderment of it all. I read and marvel over how writers use language in ways I never thought of. I read for company, and for escape. Because I am incurably interested in the lives of other people, both friends and strangers, I read to meet myriad folks and enter their lives- for me, a way of vanquishing the “otherness” we all experience.”
― Nancy Pearl

“Book lust forever!”
― Nancy Pearl

“Whenever I begin reading a new book, I am embarking on a new, uncharted journey with an unmarked destination. I never know where a particular book will take me, toward what other books I will be led.”
― Nancy Pearl

“If you still don't like a book after slogging through the first 50 pages, set it aside. If you're more than 50 years old, subtract your age from 100 and only grant it that many pages.”
― Nancy Pearl

“I can relate to the novelist Carrie Brown...who described herself as being 'a promiscuous reader.' I'll give almost any book a chance to have its way with me.”
― Nancy Pearl, The Man in the Window

“Girl discovers reading, then discovers life.”
― Nancy Pearl

“One of my top ten favorite novels in any category is Stephanie Plowman’s The Road to Sardis, a heartbreaking retelling of the events of the Peloponnesian War, which broke out in 431 B.C. between longtime rivals Athens and Sparta, and lasted for twenty-seven years.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“I believe reading is about experiencing joy, and that we learn something about ourselves, and the world, with every book we read, whether a romance, biography, mass-market thriller, or a literary novel. ...We may agree, or we may not, on what's a good book; readers differ all the time on the quality of a book. When it comes to reading, the only opinion that should matter is our own.”
― Nancy Pearl

“One of the most intricate Cold War spy novels I’ve ever read is David Quammen’s The Soul of Viktor Tronko, based on the real-life case of a Cold War–era Russian defector who tells his debriefers that a Russian agent has infiltrated the upper echelons of the CIA.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“To read Hotel Angeline is to celebrate how this diverse group of writers (and readers, all of them) can pool their talents and expertise to come up with such an entertaining and soul-satisfying novel.”
― Nancy Pearl, Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices

“If you read no other work of what’s known as “cyberpunk” (which looks at the ever-thinner line between humans and machines), at least read the novel that began it all: William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which won every major science fiction award (the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick award) in 1984, the year it was published. Gibson introduced words (including “cyberpunk” itself), themes, and a dystopic vision of the future that have been liberally reworked in the writings of many other authors.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Give a book 50 pages. When you get to the bottom of Page 50, ask yourself if you're really liking the book.... And if, at the bottom of Page 50, all you are really interested in is who marries whom, or who the murderer is, then turn to the last page and find out. If it's not on the last page, turn to the penultimate page, or the antepenultimate page, or however far back you have to go to discover what you want to know… When you are 51 years of age or older, subtract your age from 100, and the resulting number (which, of course, gets smaller every year) is the number of pages you should read before you can guiltlessly give up on a book…When you turn 100, you are authorized (by the Rule of 50) to judge a book by its cover.”
― Nancy Pearl

“The Last Canyon by John Vernon is a beautiful retelling of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 exploration of the Grand Canyon and his and his men’s inevitable and tragic clash with a tribe of Paiute Indians who lived on the canyon’s northern edge.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward, edited by Isaac Metzker.)”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata, the first of Japan’s two Nobel laureates, describes the sad and sorry love affair of a geisha from the country and an intellectual from the city. It’s”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Other good reading from Japan includes Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, with its heroine who finds whatever comfort she can in food; Miyuki”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Wild Life by Molly Gloss Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, the bloody violence sweeping India after partition has not yet touched Mano Majra, a small village of Muslims and Sikhs on the India-Pakistan border. But in the summer of 1947, the murder of a Hindu moneylender and the arrival of a trainful of dead Sikhs set off a tragic chain of events.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Food played a major role in the lives of both Ruth Reichl (longtime New York Times restaurant critic and editor-in-chief of Gourmet, who wrote about her lifelong interest in food in two memoirs, the best of which is the first, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table) and Patricia Volk (who wrote about her life in Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family).”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In his dark story collection Poachers, Tom Franklin, who once worked in a grit factory, offers the sad and sorry lives of people stuck in the back-waters of the Alabama River, who tend to subsist on a steady diet of moon-shine and stale crackers.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In its descriptions of a family trying to find suitable mates for three sisters, The Makioka Sisters by Junichir ō Tanizaki brings to mind the novels of Jane Austen and Anton Chekhov.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“The Killer Inside Me is a chilling first-person story of an evil lawman, while Pop. 1280 is a strangely funny version of the same plot. Of all the noir writers, Thompson is the most popular today, in part because several of his novels, including The Grifters, were successfully adapted for film.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“The three grand old men of Cuban literature are Alejo Carpentier (his masterpiece is The Lost Steps); José Lezama Lima (whose autobiographical novel Paradiso infuriated Castro); and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (the setting of his novel Three Trapped Tigers—pre-Castro Havana—reminded me of Oscar Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody From When the World Was Good).”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Before David McCullough went on to fame, fortune, and literary awards with books like John Adams and Mornings on Horseback, he wrote a tragic and riveting account of the great 1889 flood in Pennsylvania, The Johnstown Flood. Kathleen Cambor describes the same disaster in a novel, In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Amitav Ghosh’s multigenerational saga The Glass Palace, set in colonial Burma, India, and Malaya, tells the story of Rajkumar, once a poor Indian boy, who becomes a wealthy teak trader in Burma, and lovely Dolly, former child-maid to the queen and second princess of Burma.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Undoubtedly, the place to start with Chinese fiction is with Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century classic, A Dream of Red Mansions, a sweeping epic about family life and Confucian practices in feudal China, including numerous subplots, a gazillion characters, and a touching love story.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“A. B. Guthrie’s 1947 novel The Big Sky (even better than its sequel, The Way West, which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1940), and Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949) were all made into well-regarded movies, but these three classics of Western fiction continue to make for wonderful reading.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason