Our Quiet Growing Time

Poppy almost has it all: she loves her job, she's about to marry a semi-famous scholar, and she's wearing the family heirloom mega-emerald engagement ring he gave her. In one afternoon, Poppy's life is nearly derailed: at a luncheon at a hotel, she loses the mega ring! The ring is officially missing and Poppy is officially in deep trouble. It only gets worse when she dashes outside to search for cell service (oh sorry, she's a Brit. I mean mobile (moe-bile) service) and she's mugged. Her attacker makes off with her phone, leaving her ring-less and mobile-less and despondent. But her luck quickly shifts when she discovers a high-tech discarded mobile in a wastebasket (British: a bin) in the hotel lobby. She scoops it out and claims it as hers... after all, disposed articles are public property, right? Turns out that the phone she's swiped is the phone of businessman Sam Roxton's former personal assistant. Confronted by the handsome Sam to return the phone,

  Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created by The Broke and the Bookish . For some sick reason, my heart craves tragedy. This is a list of just some of the books that have broken my heart and made me cry: 1. Me Before You by Jojo Moyes . An unconventional story of friendship and love, life and death. Will once lived the good life until an accident left him a quadriplegic, planning his own death via assisted suicide. That's when Louisa -- eccentric, vibrant, and lively -- comes into Will's life to try to convince him to choose life . I bawled for the last 50 pages of this book, prompting my husband to look up from his video game and say, "Why do you do this to yourself? 2.  We the Living by Ayn Rand. A girl alone against the world. What could break your heart more than that? 3 . Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte . A little girl alone against the world. What can be sadder than that? 4. What is the What by Dave Eggers . The story of one of th

On Fridays, I celebrate words . That means that I either share a new vocabulary word that I've recently learned or a passage of particularly beautiful prose that I've encountered in past or present literary sojourns. Did you learn a new SAT word this week? Did you read a passage eight times over and dab tears from your eyes at the beauty of it? Then, please, do share! In my excitement over Maggie Stiefvater's announcement of her upcoming book, The Raven Boys (start the countdown: it's out September 18!), I've chosen two of my favorite lyrical Maggie passages. These ones are in honor of Valentine's Day.   There is no better taste than this: someone else's laughter in your mouth. ...he walks over to me, dark and silent. He's looking at me like he looked at me at the festival, and I know I'm looking back. Something wild and old spins inside me, but I don't have any words.

Two magicians in a feud that has lasted for decades each select a pupil to engage in a magical duel. The setting is the night circus, a mysterious circus that opens after sunset and closes just before dawn. The pupils are Celia and Marco and they enchant the circus with their magic. What Celia and Marco don't know: the identity of their competitor and the ultimate cost of this magical contest. The Night Circus is vividly imagined. This is mainly a novel of atmosphere and mood. Le Cirque des Reves (The Circus of Dreams) -- as it is called -- is described in ways that make the reader feel dreamlike, pleasantly wrapped in a fog of magic and dreams. The prose is carefully worded and sometimes beautiful, but it wasn't smooth. It was as if each word was weighed and carefully selected for proper effect. This, combined with the short sentences, short paragraphs, and short choppy chapters, disrupted the flow. I am a reader who loves plot development and even more than that,

On Fridays, I celebrate words . That means that I either share a new vocabulary word that I've recently learned or a passage of particularly beautiful prose that I've encountered in past or present literary sojourns. Did you learn a new SAT word this week? Did you read a passage eight times over and dab tears from your eyes at the beauty of it? Then, please, do share! This week's excerpt is from The Night Circus and needs no introduction. Anyone with an ounce of romance in her heart will appreciate this moment of flirtation:    "Do you remember all of your audiences?" Marco asks.    "Not all of them," Celia says. "But I remember the people who look at me the way you do."    "What way might that be?"    "As though they cannot decide if they are afraid of me or they want to kiss me."    "I am not afraid of you," Marco says. 

This is the second post for a readalong of Stephen King's 11/22/63 hosted by Grace . Today we are posting about the last three sections of the book. My previous post on sections 1-3 is here . SPOILERS! King knows how to write some good foreshadowing:           1. Jake is not a crying man.           2. Sadie is accident-prone.        3. As Jake writes his memoir, he has on the loafers Sadie gave him because "some things are meant to keep." My eyes popped open at 4:00 a.m. one morning when I was half-way through 11/22/63 and it all came together in one lucid moment. I knew Sadie was destined to have an accident and that Jake would become a crying man. He'd be forced to return to the future, leaving behind his One True Love in the smoky Sixties. In 2011, he'd travel to a Texas nursing home or a hospital to visit an elderly--yet still beautiful--woman who he had once loved--still loves--but who won't remember him. And that's exactly what