Booked All Summer

This blog was created the day I sat down and looked at the all the books on my bookshelf still left to be read, thinking of all the time that had passed without me picking one up. The day that I obtained a smartphone deterred me from reading much more, and it saddened me to realize this. I started this blog in hopes of rekindling love for the novels I once cherished and the words I used to hold dear to myself as well as discovering new treasures. To enjoy a book should always be one of life's great pleasures. Summer is a great time to indulge, but I hope to be booked for the rest of my life. CURRENTLY READING To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

[bookedallsummer]

"... Too often we don't appreciate the value of something until it has slipped our grasp." "Sometimes that's the only way we learn," said Kira. She paused, struck by her own words. "So it seems. The benighted tragedy of our species." "And yet, ignoring the future and/or wallowing in regret can be equally harmful." "Indeed. The important thing is to try and, by trying, to improve ourselves. Otherwise we might as well have never come down from the trees..."

Christopher Paolini, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

[bookedallsummer]

Christopher Paolini, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

[bookedallsummer]

Christopher Paolini, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

[bookedallsummer]

“Sara," I ask finally, "what do you want from me?" "I want to look at you and remember what it used to be like," she says thickly. "I want to go back, Brian. I want you to take me back." But she is not the woman I used to know, the woman who traveled a countryside counting prairie dog holes, who read aloud the classifieds of lonely cowboys seeking women and told me, in the darkest crease of the night, that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky. To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her.”

Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

[bookedallsummer]

If there was a religion of Annaism, and I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: In the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears. Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder... But mostly it didn't, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn't tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they'd never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness. The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn't fall. She spent the rest of her time holding onto whatever scraps she had left.

Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

[bookedallsummer]

Ellen Hopkins, Impulse

[itscindynodoubt]

… It’s not even about sex so much, is my guess. It’s about something you’ve experienced plenty of times, which is just how good it can feel when a person puts their arm around you now and then. Particularly when you’re having a hard time. The simple ordinary comfort of having this other warm body lying in the bed next to you… Sometimes you just want someone to put their arms around you… Sometimes I think a person could give up food more easily than affection. Maybe that’s why cactuses have prickers all over them and people don’t.

The Usual Rules by Joyce Maynard (via itscindynodoubt)

[bookedallsummer]

Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl

[bookedallsummer]

Ann Brashares, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

[bookedallsummer]

Life sometimes gets so bogged down in the details, you forget you are living it. There is always another appointment to be met, another bill to pay, another symptom presenting, another uneventful day to be notched onto the wooden wall. We have synchronized our watches, studied our calendars, existed in minutes, and completely forgotten to step back and see what we've accomplished.

Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

[bookedallsummer]

Sara Zarr, Sweethearts

[bookedallsummer]

Julie Gonzalez, Imaginary Enemy

[bookedallsummer]

Matthew Quick, Sorta Like a Rock Star

[itscindynodoubt]

Smoke You stand in front of me, pretending to be solid, but you are nothing more than smoke and mirrors. You said you’d never leave, that you would care for us forever. But now you claim you cannot stay, that you’ve been called away. When you go, who will I turn to when it all crashes down? Tell me who. Then tell me how I can believe in anyone again, if all your promises have been lies.

Tricks by Ellen Hopkins (via itscindynodoubt)

[bookedallsummer]

Do you ever wonder how we all got here? On Earth, I mean. Forget the song and dance about Adam and Eve, which I know is a load of crap. My father likes the myth of the Pawnee Indians, who say that the star deities populated the world: Evening Star and Morning Star hooked up and gave birth to the first female. The first boy came from the Sun and the Moon. Humans rode in on the back of a tornado. Mr. Hume, my science teacher, taught us about this primordial soup full of natural gases and muddy slop and carbon matter that somehow solidified into one-celled organisms called choanoflagellates... which sound a lot more like a sexually transmitted disease than the start of the evolutionary chain, in my opinion. But even once you get there, it's a huge leap from an amoeba to a monkey to a whole thinking person. The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what you believe, it took some doing to get from a point where there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions. More amazing is how even though that's become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.

Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

[bookedallsummer]

Lisa Ann Sandell, A Map of the Known World

[bookedallsummer]

Cameron Dokey, The Storyteller’s Daughter