It's a Hardback Life

I haven’t posted in a while, as I took a staycation from work to get my house in order before I went insane. With all of our financial issues this year, I really let things just slide while I worried about other things; the sheer volume of cleaning, clearing, and organizing that needed to be done left me with zero energy to do anything but veg on the couch at the end of each day, staring mindlessly at Facebook and watching TV I didn’t really care about. But it is done, and it is a tremendous relief. But now I'm back and ready to talk bookish goodness!

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Quotes I Loved From Books I Read In The Past Year Or So

This is a tough one, as I don’t always underline or write down when something grabs me. I’m going to pull these from my kindle notes for the last year or two, and hopefully they will still seem as relevant now as they did at the time. (This will probably skew heavily toward non-fiction, as I don’t generally pause in fiction to admire lines unless they are just the cat’s pajamas, and I haven’t been reading a lot of pajama prose lately.) Most of these probably aren’t “quotes,” so much as fascinating bits of information or opinions I happen to share with the author.

“So with great power comes great shitheadedness.” Chris Gavaler, On the Origin of Superheroes (ARC)

“But I didn’t care: I didn’t feel I owed him beauty.” Naomi Novik, Uprooted (ARC)

“I cannot understand antiabortion arguments that center on the sanctity of life. As a species, we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain, and lifelong, grinding poverty show us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.” Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“The best thing you can possibly do with your life is tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.” Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things

[Peeta texting Katniss] “I told you what I was gonna name my bakery if we ever get out of here, right?”…”I’m gonna name it The Hunger Grains.” Mallory Ortberg, Texts from Jane Eyre

“At just about any moment in its modern history, criticism is in a state of paradoxical crisis, in danger of disappearing because there is just too damn much of it.” A.O Scott, Better Living Through Criticism (ARC)

“Descended from Celtic horned gods and Teutonic folklore, Pan’s distant ancestor the devil was not yet on the scene. He arrived with the New Testament, a volume notably free of witches. Nothing in the Bible connects the two, a job that fell, much later, to the church.” Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

I actually couldn’t come up with any more. I’ve read a lot of great stuff this year, so I’m sure if I was a more meticulous note taker, this would be a longer list.