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Kindle Notes & Highlights
You’re looking for a book that reminds you why you read in the first place. One written well and that will feel like it was written just for you—one that will make you think about things in a new way, or feel things you didn’t expect a book to make you feel, or see things in a new light. A book you won’t want to put down, whose characters you don’t want to tell good-bye. A book you will close feeling satisfied and grateful, thinking, Now, that was a good one.
focus on the books themselves, but so much of the reading life is about the reader as an active participant.
To hand you a great book, I don’t just need to know about books; I need to know you.
Sometimes we’ll read a perfectly good book, but the timing’s all wrong; the same book means different things to different people, or in different seasons of life. Since reading is personal, it can be tricky.
Screenwriters have a name for it. They call it the comedy gap, that gap between what we expect to happen and what actually happens. Or, in this case, what we expect a person’s reading life to be like and what it’s truly like.
it’s time to spill it. I’ll take your confession, but the absolution is unnecessary. These secrets aren’t sins; they’re just secrets. No need to repent.
The book may seem random when I choose it, but halfway through I realize, I need this right now.
Word got back to me later that she was newly hopeful about the younger generations because I spoke intelligently about a subject dear to her heart. (Thank goodness I happened to read that book when I did.)
The best books move you, drawing out the full range of emotions from the reader, and sometimes that includes breaking your heart. Not every reader enjoys this experience.
Sometimes a great book makes us feel the loss of what could have been—a dream, a baby, a future.
I didn’t expect her history to make me weep, but it did—because Goodwin made me feel its weight.
I don’t relish crying over a book, but I’ll say this: it’s not easy to earn a reader’s tears—and if an author writes well enough to earn mine, I’m in.
Can every devoted reader point back to the book that hooked them on the story? I’d like to think so.
I don't think i have such a book. I could never, as far as i remember, put sny book down till I finished it. And i often went back to reread soon after
I can tell you why I inhale books like oxygen: I’m grateful for my one life, but I’d prefer to live a thousand—and my favorite books allow me to experience more on the page than I ever could in my actual life.
And when we get to that point in our real life when it’s happening to us, it’s not so unfamiliar. We’ve been there before, in a book.
“So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
Our books frame the scenes for us so we can better understand and experience what’s happening when it happens to us—whether
With apologies to Kathleen Kelly, what I’ve come to learn is this: if my real life reminds me of something I read in a book, I’m reading well—and I’m probably living well, too.
Should is a dangerous word, a warning sign that we’re crossing an important boundary and veering into book bossiness. Should is tangled up with guilt, frustration, and regret; we use it all the time, many of us to speak of the ways we wish we could be more, do more, or just be different. Or that we wish our friends could be different, and they would if they knew what was good for them. Should is bossy.
Readers want to discover what they want to read, and they want to discover it for themselves.
Your TBR list is unquestionably too long to finish before you die. Your TBR list is longer than your arm, but you still can’t decide what to read next.
You have countless unread books at home, but you can’t resist buying one more.
You’re at a killer used book sale and can’t remember if you already own a certain title. You decide you do and come home. You were wrong and regret your lost chance. You decide you don’t and come home and shelve your newly purchased third copy.
As happened with me and Telling Tales
“The great thing about getting older is you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.” She writes in The Irrational Season, “I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology.”
“I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.”
Every reader goes through this rite of passage: the transition from having books chosen for us to choosing books for ourselves. When given the choice, some choose not to read.
