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Kindle Notes & Highlights
It is like all good independent bookstores should be, owned and staffed by people who love books, read them, think about them, and sell them to other people who feel the same way.
There is reading hour for little kids. There are visiting authors. There are free bookmarks. It’s really a paradise on earth, if paradise for you smells of paper and paste.
It also meant she thought of books as medication and sanctuary and the source of all good things. Nothing yet had proven her wrong.
It was basically one big room, with a tiny kitchenette and bathroom, but what it had in abundance was light and bookshelves, and really, what else does anyone need?
but she had a niggling suspicion she was underperforming in some way. Surely her purpose in life wasn’t simply to read as many books as possible?
Nina worried she liked being alone too much; it was the only time she ever fully relaxed. People were . . . exhausting. They made her anxious. Leaving her apartment every morning was the turning over of a giant hourglass, the mental energy she’d stored up overnight eroding grain by grain. She refueled during the day by grabbing
moments of solitude and sometimes felt her life was a long-distance swim between islands of silence. She enjoyed people—she really did—she just needed to take them in homeopathic doses; a little of the poison was the cure.
In public Nina was a quiet, reserved person; in private she was an all-singing, all-dancing cavalcade of light and motion. Unless she was a quivering ball of anxiety, because that was also a frequently selected option.
She was very good at hiding it, but anxiety was like her anti-superpower, the one that came out unbidden in a crisis.
Life will throw you major curveballs, but it’s rare you can do much more than duck.
They unapologetically and voraciously read books about fairies and witches and female heroines who didn’t need rescuing, and would open a book to check it out and then still be standing there reading an hour later when their parents reappeared. It was wonderful to watch a kid get tugged ineluctably into a different world.
