The Book That Wouldn’t Burn (The Library Trilogy, #1)

by Mark Lawrence

. similarly impermanent. All books, no matter their binding, will fall to dust. The stories they carry may last longer. They might outlive the paper, the library, even the language in which they were first written. The greatest story can reach the stars .

They said livira would grow in places where rocks wouldn’t. Which never made sense to Livira because rocks don’t grow.

I am in kove with the tone already

You could put Livira down but you couldn’t keep her there.

<3

“There are no useless skills, girl. Only talents that have yet to find an application.”

And sometimes, in the dark of the night with the hollow sounds of the Dust all around and the bright stars cold in their heaven, sometimes what scared Livira more than the water running out was that the water would not run out and that this would be her life. Dust, and beans, and dry-wheat, and the wind, and the little huddle of huts like stones gathered in the vastness of the empty plain, until she ran out rather than the water, and she joined the dust, and the wind carried her away as if she had never even drawn breath.

The dust made strangers of everyone.

Among the many ways she had dreamed of leaving her home and escaping into the wideness of the world, none had been as sudden, violent, real, and final as this.

“You should have had a helmet, like the captain,” Livira said. “Shut the fuck up or I’ll find a helmet and make you eat it.”

I love this dude haha

Livira dived in headfirst. The teeth, all inward pointing to prevent escape, offered no resistance. She got about rib deep before she could get no further, and in the damp, stinking, darkness she started slashing. She found a direction her arms could move in and hauled the dagger downwards in a long slicing motion, sawing at the obdurate flesh. Dust-bears, it turned out, had mastered the art of projectile vomiting just for such occasions.

Livira is so brave. What a solid character so far!

Livira could feel that loss like a pit in her chest, but she had put it in a box of her own making. She planned to open it when she could do something about it.

Poetic

There was no breakfast or even breakthirst: the water had gone.

“Knowledge. That’s what they pay with. Whole city’s here for one reason. This is where King Oanold’s great-grandfather built the library.”

Eeeeeeee! I'm so excited !!

Without guilt we would all be monsters. And memory is the ink with which we list our crimes.

Okaaaaay no one told me how poetic Lawrence's writing could be

what Evar truly feared was that he would die here in this chamber, not beneath the talons of a monster but of old age. That he would wither and die within a stone’s throw of the place he had been born, and in the company of the same three faces he saw every day. That he would see nothing, do nothing, spend his days in the same cage, and even his remains would wait out eternity in the same chamber.

She’d never even shown them this alphabet, a flowing fourteen-letter script reminiscent of old Etrusian.

“How long before they do?” muttered Jons, now dismounted. “Do what?” Malar didn’t look at him. “Come through those gates.” Jons said it so quietly that Livira almost didn’t hear him over the clatter of hooves and voice of the crowd. “Ten years?” Malar shrugged and spat. “Tops.”

“Share three hundred and seventy-three beans fairly among eight people. How—” “Forty-six each with five left over.”

I love this.

“This is Crunian. How do you possibly know Crunian?” “Crunian Four, if I’m not mistaken,” said a softer voice.

“I’ve got a job for you,” Yute said over his shoulder. “At the library.”

“Gods below! We’ll have to burn those! And where are your shoes?” “In the future.” Livira was tired of being judged.

Kindness carries a weight; it’s a burden all its own when you have nothing. Some undeniable part of Livira wanted to bite the hands that offered so much so freely. Pride is stupid, pride is blind, but pride is also the backbone that runs through us: without pride there’s no spring-back, no resilience.

We humans are herd animals. When several gather to browse in one spot, more will come. Few places offer more eloquent testimony to this fact than does a library, wherein our focus ensures some few books scarcely touch the shelves from the moment of their binding until the day they fall apart from overuse. Whilst all around, in sullen silence, the unloved show their spines in endless rows, aching for the touch that never comes.

A prism can divide white light into an infinity of shades. The colours of the rainbow are simply a taxonomy applied reductively for convenience of use. Where indigo ends and violet begins is a debate that might be substituted for any shelving argument amongst librarians seeking to place a novel. Even fact and fiction can bleed into one another.

“I . . . also want . . . to find her.” The ivory hand changed course, grasping the front of Evar’s jerkin and dragging him down until his face was level with the Soldier’s. “I’ve lost her. I’ve lost myself . . .” He looked into Evar’s eyes, his own shading darker still. His voice, which had been sterile and without inflection Evar’s whole life, now took on tone and character. “Know this . . . if you hurt her, no army will save you from me.”

To listen to some of her older classmates, if a spine got broken the librarians would rather it belonged to a trainee than to a book.

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you that if you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all?” Livira shook her head. “She died when I was little, but I’d remember if she’d said something that stupid.”

And the magic was that just by running her eyes over those squiggled letters the thoughts of some long-dead author would wake within her head.

“So, you being here and learning to read and write better in one month than most manage in their first three years at school . . .” Arpix shook his head. “That’s reason enough for Lord Algar to want you to fail. As far as he’s concerned, you’ll serve the king’s aims far better in the sewers or the mines than you will in the library, no matter how clever you are.”

“Rediscovered,” the taller boy agreed. “Don’t say that outside though—only in here. But yes, some savage wrapped in animal skins rediscovered this place less time ago than you might think, and all the books were here already, waiting on the shelves, without any apparent order to them. And we’ve been working at cataloguing and organizing ever since. Spreading out from where we’re standing while a city grew up outside.”

The mechanism must have died long ago, and this was his immutable corpse, standing down the long march of years as a marker of his demise.

read. There must be diamonds out there, the best book in a thousand, the best book in a million, and surely he didn’t want to waste his time reading one that was merely adequate when he could be reading one of those diamonds? So instead, he often wasted his time hunting for a read instead of reading.

“. . . the Exchange . . . is for . . . bidden . .

“In any case, maybe I don’t have any choices at all.” Livira’s pool had refused him. Maybe

“The pool? They came from the pool . . .”

She knew about his daughter now. Also a trainee in the library. Lost nearly a decade ago on a book search. Her remains still out there somewhere, still undiscovered.

Ask yourself in the face of the remarkable speed of progress: where did we come from, where are we going, and—most importantly—have we walked this path before?”

“In you I see a spark like no other, and when you’re grown, I hope it will become such a light that it will show us a way out.” He steepled his pale fingers, then interlaced them. “And make no mistake, child, we are trapped.”

Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die—take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it’s grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That’s how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce. Prince of Fools, by Mark Lawrence

Oooh a quote from Prince of Fools.

“Why are we here?” The Assistant sounded confused, as if she’d woken from a long sleep. “I said we’d wait until the children came back out.”

I'm so curious about what these two are and what their motivations truely are

She looked back at Evar, seeing him clearly. “There’s nothing for you here.” The door swallowed her, cutting off any more words.

Would it really take a vengeful god to bring them all to ruin, or was it simply a case of handing sharp knives to toddlers and waiting for the bleeding to start?

This writing is so poetic and highly quotable. I wonder if that's on purpose to fit the theme or if this is how Lawrence always writes.

Livira had come to appreciate that an ocean of knowledge is apt to drown you long before it educates you. The art of learning was in selection, and while generations of librarians had ostensibly been cataloguing the collection to make it accessible, they had in fact been turning it into a vast puzzle, a lock whose key was held by those in power. A lock that kept them in power.

It seemed to Livira that there was a message in the way librarians demonstrated their rank with a shade of grey, white for juniors, shading darker with seniority. A symbolism concerning the way the fortress of facts that seemed so dependable, rather than being reinforced by the library’s endless knowledge, was in reality eroded by it, a sandcastle before the waves. The black and white of truth blurred into grey under the relentless assault of an infinity of context, interpretation, perspectives, and opinion.

“What does nostalgia mean to a child? An abstraction. A standing stone waiting for them in the mist. Walk a path across some decades, any path you like, and the word will gather weight. It will come to you trailing maybes and might-have-beens. Nostalgia is a drug, a knife. Against young skin it carries a dull edge, but time will teach you that nostalgia cuts—and that it’s a blade we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.”

“I need to know the Raven’s name.” She held the feather between them. The guide opened his mouth and for a long moment there was nothing more. Livira feared that the life Volente had put into him had run back out, but just as she was about to say so, he spoke. “Edgarallen.”

Lol

She saw them everywhere. She saw them dancing on fence-tops, along old gutters, between the pegs on the washing line. She called them the “dancers,” but then “angels” because Mam said that was proper if she couldn’t stop talking about them. “During the Dance,” by Mark Lawrence

“It’s always the books you don’t have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones already on your shelf. They can wait.”

Truuuue

Like the Escapes in service to Jaspeth we stand with one foot outside time.

Sabbers . . . She would have to find another word for them. Perhaps “canith,” the sabbertine word for “people.”