Sunday, June 21, 2015

48-Hour Book Challenge Finish Line

For this year's challenge, I read 20 hours and 30 minutes total. This included:
  • 3 complete novels (Voyage of the Basilisk, I'll Give You the Sun, Portrait in Sepia)
  • 2 non-fiction books partially (Darwin and the Barnacle, Quack This Way)
  • 3 hours and 45 minutes of an audio book (Furies of Calderon)
  • Half an hour of social media time
Quack This Way, by David Foster Wallace and Bryan A. Garner

DFW: ... You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers--not all of whom are modern...I mean, if you are willing to make allowances for the way English has changed, you can go way, way back with this--becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It's like eating candy for the soul.
"Mr Arthrobalanus" by Simon Carnell (from Darwin and the Barnacle)

Distinctively deviant,
you're an angel
dancing on the pinhead of yourself,
I'll Give You The Sun, by Jandy Nelson

Because what if it's Jude who has it? Why wouldn't that be the case? She surfs waves as big as houses and jumps off anything. She has skin that fits and friends and Dad and The Sweetwine Gift and gills and fins in addition to lungs and feet.

She gives off light. I give off dark.

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Twins: The Flashlight and the Flashdark)

*****
I wish I hadn't done a lot of things I did back then.

I wish going into that closet with Brian was the worst of it.

The right-handed twin tells the truth, the left-handed twin tells lies.
(Noah and I are both left-handed.)
Portrait in Sepia, by Isabel Allende

In our family we serve tea when a situation is slightly uncomfortable, and since I feel self-conscious almost all the time, I serve a lot of it.

Friday, June 19, 2015

The Voyage of the Basilisk, by Marie Brennan

(After all, it has been so very long since there was any satisfying scandal about me. I find that respectability grows wearisome after a time, when one is accustomed to being a disgrace.)

48-Hour Book Challenge Starting Line

Starting now, at 7:45 AM with The Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan!