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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Anne Bogel
Read between
March 19 - March 25, 2024
When we talk about reading, we often 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.
the same book means different things to different people, or in different seasons of life.
Since reading is personal, it can be tricky.
the comedy gap, that gap between what we expect to happen and what actually happens.
literary matchmaker,
the Book Police
“Friendship . . . is born at the moment when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’”
when only the best will do, you’re in trouble.)
The best thing I might have read EVER and which fits in so beautifully to each and every situation
if the right book has almost magically appeared in your life at the right time to hold your hand for the journey—you know it feels like a special kind of grace.
a book provoked a visceral, gut-wrenching, puddle-of-tears reaction.
I didn’t know I could care so much about events that happened on the page.
these shelves I’ve gathered my own inner circle: the books I feel closest to, the people who matter to me.
Books provide a safe space to encounter new and unfamiliar situations, to practice living in unfamiliar environments, to test-drive encounters with new people and new experiences.
if my real life reminds me of something I read in a book, I’m reading well—and I’m probably living well, too.
You’re a book lover; you don’t have enough shelves to begin with. Ignore the decorators.
esteem satisfactory advice :)
longtime believers in bibliotherapy.
Book bossy.
Should is bossy.
You pile the stack in your passenger seat, and your car yells at you because it thinks you have an unbuckled passenger.
full of bookish joy, but still woefully short on shelf space.
Just as I’m all the ages I have been, I’m all the readers I have been.
I’m the sum of all these bookish memories.
if you’re looking for a great book, going old is never a terrible idea.)
a bookstore is full of nothing if not possibility.
As a devoted reader, I know what it means for books to shape you—the person you are, the person you were then. For readers, the great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other readers you’ve been. Sometimes you think fondly of the readers you used to be; sometimes looking back makes you cringe a little. But they’re still here. They’re still you.
always make time to read a few more pages of behind-the-scenes scoop—especially when it’s coming straight from the author.
It’s a truism that early reading shapes the reader you become.
Every reader goes through this rite of passage: the transition from having books chosen for us to choosing books for ourselves.
When it comes to our reading lives, place matters, whether metaphorical or literal. I was in a place of transition and in a physical place where good books were easy to come by. And so I read.
Book Twins
I’m constantly surprised at how difficult it is to articulate my thoughts on what I’ve read in a way that is coherent, useful, and enjoyable,
Old books, like old friends, are good for the soul.
As Italo Calvino wrote, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
When we revisit a book we’ve read before, we see how life has woken us up to understand passages that previously went over our heads. The book itself highlights the gap between who I am and who I used to be.
Rereading helps us see how we have changed.
A good book, when we return to it, will always have something new to say. It’s not the same book, and we’re not the same reader.
Reading is personal and never more so than when we’re sharing why we connect with certain books.
reading is also a social act: readers love to connect over good books.
Record your books as a gift to your future self, a travelogue you’ll be able to pull off the shelf years from now, to remember the journey.
Good reading journals provide glimpses of how we’ve spent our days, and they tell the story of our lives.
