The Bite of the Mango,
Oh, dear--did I forget to mention that you can, indeed, have it all, but you need a lot of help!
Not feeling well is no excuse for forgetting that there are other people in the world.
No one in the family has ever really gotten over Bob’s death. We talk of him daily, recounting stories and imagining what his reactions would be to new books and recent events. He remains for my famil...
John Irving reading A Prayer for Owen Meany,
It's not that I liked lunacy for the sake of lunacy, but if a writer can truly surprise me without throwing logic completely out the window, then that writer has me for good. Most book surprises aren'...
Ishmael Beah’s memoir of his life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone.
I gave people who didn’t know what to say the best advice I could muster, which was that it was better to say anything rather than pretend that nothing was wrong.
I become influenced while I'm reading. I'm not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started. Brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life.
He remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no...
Feasting the Heart by Reynolds Price,
Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind,
There’s something you can always tell people who want to learn more about the world and who don’t know how to find a cause to support. You can always tell them to read.
Throughout her life, whenever Mom was sad or confuse or disoriented, she could never concentrate on television, she said, but always sought refuge in a book. Books focused her mind, calmed her, took h...
The Uncommon Reader,
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel by a thirty-seven-year-old author, Mohsin Hamid,
Everyone doesn't have to do everything... People forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. I've had so much pleasure from beautiful and challenging things created...
The book, Lamott says the two best prayers are Help me, Help me, Help me and Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.
A thank-you note isn’t the price you pay for receiving a gift, as so many children think it is, a kind of minimum tribute or toll, but an opportunity to count your blessings. And gratitude isn’t what...
We’d both already read several novels by Tóibín: The Master and The Story of Night and The Blackwater Lightship.