the Best Lines really "Shine"

sharing the best lines from books i've read has become my favorite thing to do here on the blog.

today, i have some "bests" from the fabulous SHINE by Lauren Myracle.


I listened to her yap some more about how upset she was. She just liked tragedy, that's what I thought.
~

...by turning a blind eye in high school, I'd said, Go on and hurt him. I don't care. And by doing that, I'd opened the door to more hurt, because when a person did something wrong and got away with it, he tended to do it again.
~

He said it to shame me, and it did. It slammed me down on the rough grit of my shortcomings and held me there.
~

"...Sheriff Doyle isn't going to do squat."
"Hey. He's doing what he can."
I rolled my eyes. Sheriff Doyle wouldn't know it if his butt was on fire.
~

I felt bad for him, because it wasn't his fault. His mama drank too much when he was in the womb. These things happened.


i love each of these lines, but what Myracle really does best in SHINE is evoke a sense of place. and one line can't quite show you how she does it, so i highly recommend picking this one up to see for yourself!

books to read before you die

one of the reasons i still love paper books over e-readers is this:


bookmarks! i got this pile of beauties for christmas, and i particularly love the one in the middle.
it's engraved with a list of 50 books to read before you die.

here they are, with the ones i've read in bold:

The Lord of the Rings trilogy - J.R.R. Tolkien
1984 - George Orwell
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
The Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Diary of Anne Frank - Anne Frank
Don Quixote - Miquel de Cervantes
The Bible - various authors
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Quiet American - Graham Greene
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Money - Martin Amis
Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
His Dark Materials trilogy - Philip Pullman
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
One the Road - Jack Kerouac
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
The Outsider - Albert Camus
The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells
Men Without Women - Ernest Hemingway
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Divine Comedy - Alighieri Dante
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

only 17 out of 50 for me. a pretty sorry showing.
some of the books, like To Kill a Mockingbird, have been on my bookshelf for years and just never make it into the to-be-read pile.
others, like The Lord of the Flies, i gave up on reading after seeing the movie. (shame on me.)
several, like The Bell Jar, i read for class in high school or college and can't remember very well.
i'm ashamed to admit there are a few i've never even heard of, like A Bend in the River.
but more than a handful of these are among my all-time favorites, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

personally, I would add a few titles to this list:
The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

how many have you read? and which titles do you think are missing?

black friday books

hello shoppers!

i hope you have a grand time today working off that turkey dinner with your mall walking. just one thing before you head out. when you are making your list and checking it twice, can you consider adding a few items? i know flat screen TV deals are top priority and that the food processor is more than 50% off (or so my black-friday obsessed BF tells me. hi Bec!) - but there are some always-low-cost, always-available products that are too often left off shopping lists.

i'm talking about books, naturally.
and i want to recommend a few.

TEENS:
For the teenage girl who loved Twilight: Matched, by Ally Condie or Divergent, by Veronica Roth

For teenage boys: The Maze Runner, by James Dashner or Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi

For the middle-grader reader, who is reading up for his/her age: When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead

For the reluctant teen reader: The Line, by Teri Hall

ADULTS:
For people who "don't have time to read" (fast reads): The Road, by Cormac McCarthy or The Children of Men, by PD James

For fans of Dan Brown: The Rule of Four, by Caldwell & Thomason or The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl

For children of the 1980s: Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

For women who like historicals: Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden

disclaimer: all links are to Am*zon for easy one-clickability. but i highly suggest buying books directly from your local independent bookseller or online from IndieBound.

full disclosure: i have read all of the above books, with the exception of Ready Player One. some are among my favorites, and some were not my cup of tea, but i see how they would appeal to others.

happy shopping!!