“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
Written by Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (2020) tells of a magical library where Nora Seed is able to see out different versions of her life had she made different decisions.
You think the dead we loved truly ever leave us? You think that we don’t recall them more clearly in times of great trouble?
As said by the wise and benevolent Professor Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), the third of the series, and my favourite. You can find another example of Dumbledore’s knowledge here, and my tour of Harry Potter Studios here.
I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.
The novella masterpiece We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) by Gothic writer Shirley Jackson, who also wrote one of the finest short stories with The Lottery (1948). As told by the unreliable narrator Mary Katherine ‘Merrikat’ Blackwood, it tells of a family’s ostracising in a small town after a poisoning incident that killed four members of the family.
Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.
The hugely missed Sir Terry Pratchett (1945 – 2015), author of nearly 100 published works and 85 million sales. The highly prolific English writer was long recognised for his wit and imagination and later, his brave fight against Alzheimer’s.
It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Arguably the most famous lines from Three Men in a Boat (1889), the charming book by Jerome K. Jerome. Filled with amusing and irreverent anecdotes, the story tells of three friends (and the fox terrier Montmorency) who decide to take a trip along the River Thames for a fortnight.
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.
The opening lines of the fantastically enchanting debut novel The Night Circus (2011) by Erin Morgenstern. I was spoiled for choice for which line to use, but I like that even from the very beginning the uniqueness and mystery of the circus has been set. Something completely pivotal to the story.
“Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right – I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.”
The rebellious, lost soul that is Hayden Caulfield in the seminal book Catcher in the Rye (1951) by JD Salinger,which has sold over 65 million copies to date.
Zoe, Natasha and Kim have all done this very cool A – Z feature based on reading. Literature has been a big part of the blog and has always meant a lot to me, so there was no way I wasn’t going to get in on the fun.
Author you’ve read the most books from:
Roald Dahl. He had such a wonderful imagination and was one of the writers who got me into reading from a very early age.
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.”
If we happen to be walking along a street at night, and a man, visible already from afar — because the street inclines gently uphill in front of us, and there’s a full moon — comes running towards us, then we will not grab hold of him, even if he’s feeble and ragged, even if someone is running after him, yelling, but rather we will let him run on unmolested.
For it is night, and it is not our fault that the street in front of us in the moonlit night is on an incline and, moreover, it is possible that the two men have devised their chase for their own amusement, perhaps they are both in pursuit of a third man, perhaps the first of them is being unjustly pursued, perhaps the second means to kill him and we would become accessory to his murder, perhaps the two of them don’t know the first thing about one another and each one is just running home to bed on his own account, perhaps they are two somnambulists, perhaps the first of them is carrying a weapon.
And finally, may we not be tired, and have we not had a lot of wine to drink? We are relieved not to see the second man.
The full story of ‘The Men Running Past’ by Czechoslovakian (now known as the Czech Republic) Franz Kafka, from the collection Contemplation (1913)
Alex Raphael 