Book-y ramblings.

I’ve decided I’m going to spend the entire day at Starbucks tomorrow, curled up with a good book. I’m rather looking forward to it. I have not decided what I will be reading yet.

I started Wicked a couple days ago. It seems interesting so far. I think I will like the way he writes. The first sentence of the prologue is really great.

A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the wind’s forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent wheeling away by the turbulant air.

I don’t know why, I just like that. She balanced on the wind’s forward edge.

I’ve been browsing around WordPress, and I stumbled across a few blogs about children’s books. You know how that excites me. One had separate lists of the most poetic, memorable, and funny passages in children’s literature, as submitted by the blog’s readers. It was really great.  One I especially liked, submitted in the most poetic category, was this one:

Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?…As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you, like a pressed flower… both strange and familiar.

It’s from a book called Inkspell, by Cornelia Funke. It’s currently checked out from our library.

Others I enjoyed and perhaps will check out their sources-

In the end, I’m just a girl on a sleeping bag in the middle of nowhere, at the starting line of every mistake she’ll ever make. -The Geography of Girlhood by Kirsten Smith

When the cool autumn winds would come puff-puffing through the clouds, and the hold-on-tight leaves would finally let go and float-flutter to the ground, we’d go out into the eye-blinking blue air with Mama leading in a leaf kicking

leg lifting

hand-clapping

hello autumn ballet.                                                                                                      -My Mama had a Dancing Heart by Libby Gray

…but when a house is empty, then it’s the house’s turn. It holds all the emptiness and all the fullness of all the years it has known, the footprints of all the people who have ever walked its rooms gather themselves. The air is expectant, waiting. Hushed. Hush. Listen to the house. What is it telling you?  – All Rivers Flow to the Sea by Alison McGhee

~ by ambiguouslyexact on March 18, 2007.