The Apothecary (Maile Meloy)

Read with Laura. OK, not amazing (to me). Laura liked it. Interesting use of Andrei Sakharov as a fictional character.

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Speaking from Among the Bones: A Flavia de Luce Novel (Alan Bradley)

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Quotes:

One thing I have learned about organists is that they have absolutely no sense of humor.

Once out of sight, I trudged upward, recalling that ancient stairs in castles and churches wind in a clockwise direction as you ascend, so that an attacker, climbing the stairs, is forced to hold his sword in his left hand, while the defender, fighting downward, is able to use his right, and usually superior, hand.

That, of course, had been before my dishonorable discharge from the troop. Still, even after all this time, I couldn’t help thinking of Delorna Higginson, and how long it had taken them to make her stop screaming and foaming at the mouth.

I was the eighth dwarf. Sneaky.

WHENEVER I’M A LITTLE blue I think about cyanide, whose color so perfectly reflects my mood.

One aspect of poisons that is often overlooked is the pleasure one takes in gloating over them.

“As was your mother, you have been given the fatal gift of genius. Because of it, your life will not be an easy one—nor must you expect it to be. You must remember always that great gifts come at great cost. Are there any questions?”

“No, sir,” I said, as if I were a sapper being charged with blowing up the enemy lines. “No questions.”

“Please don’t condescend to me, Mr. Sowerby, I’m not a child. Well, actually—strictly speaking, and in the eyes of the law—I suppose I am a child, but still, I resent being treated like one.”

“Funny old thing, isn’t it,” Alf asked, “ ’ow every village has its secrets? Some things just not talked about. Ever noticed that? I ’ave.”

“ ‘The successful organist,’ ” she quoted, “ ‘must have fingers long enough to reach the stops, legs long enough to reach the pedal board, and ears long enough to reach into the lives of every choir member.’ Whanley on the Organ and Its Amenities, chapter thirteen, ‘Management of the Choristers.’

The word “actually,” like its cousin “frankly,” should, by itself, be a tip-off to most people that what is to follow is a blatant lie—but it isn’t.

Why do people always quote Hamlet when they want to seem clever?

“Dangerous killers on the loose!” The words which every amateur sleuth lives in eternal hope of hearing.

I’ll pop in later for tea and questioning.”

In death, split seconds could make the difference between the gallows and a slap on the hand.

President Barack Obama: The Kindle Singles Interview (Kindle Single) (David Blum)

There isn't much interesting here except for the quotes below.

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Quotes:

One of the advantages we have is that we still have family members who are not only middle class, but we've got some family members who are poor. Malia and Sasha have cousins who know what it's like to struggle and know what it's like to have to scrape by

I enjoy teaching. I taught for 10 years. Not full-time, but part-time at the University of Chicago Law School. I could picture myself being a good teacher.

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)

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Quotes:

If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.

    ‘She abandoned them under a delusion,’ he answered; ‘picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion.

Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself.

I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?’

I noticed on that occasion how much selfishness there is even in a love like Mr. Linton’s,

    ‘Hush, hush! He’s a human being,’

praying like a Methodist:

Yet, who knows how long you’ll be a stranger? You’re too young to rest always contented, living by yourself; and I some way fancy no one could see Catherine Linton and not love her.

    ‘It is a poor conclusion, is it not?’ he observed, having brooded awhile on the scene he had just witnessed: ‘an absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don’t care for striking: I can’t take the trouble to raise my hand!

I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.

and, as he had no surname, and we could not tell his age, we were obliged to content ourselves with the single word, ‘Heathcliff.’ That came true: we were. If you enter the kirkyard, you’ll read, on his headstone, only that, and the date of his death.

I’ve done no injustice, and I repent of nothing. I’m too happy; and yet I’m not happy enough. My soul’s bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself.’

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows: A Flavia de Luce Novel (Alan Bradley)

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Quotes:

Tendrils of raw fog floated up from the ice like agonized spirits departing their bodies.

Johann Rudolf Glauber,

Why, just yesterday I had a thimbleful of arsenic in my hand, and I put it down somewhere. I can’t for the life of me think what I could have done with it.” “I found it in the butter dish,” Dogger said. “I took the liberty of setting it out for the mice in the coach house.” “Butter and all?” I asked. “Butter and all.” “But not the dish.” “But not the dish,” said Dogger. Why aren’t there more people like Dogger in the world?

“Why do you do it, Flavia?” the Inspector asked in a suddenly different voice, his eyes on the mess I had made of the carpet. I don’t think I had ever seen him look so pained. “Do what?” I couldn’t help myself. “Lie,” he said. “Why do you fabricate these outlandish stories?” I had often thought about this myself, and although I had a ready answer, I did not feel obliged to give it to him. “Well,” I wanted to say, “there are those of us who create because all around us, things visible and invisible are crumbling. We are like the stonemasons of Babylon, forever working, as it says in Jeremiah, to shore up the city walls.” I didn’t say that, of course. What I did say was: “I don’t know.”

It’s wonderful how the mind works in such situations. I remember distinctly that my first thought was “Here’s Flavia, her hands full of fire in a cupboard jam-packed with combustibles.”

‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news,’ or so, at least, said the apostle Paul, quoting Isaiah, but presumably speaking of his own feet, in his letter to the Romans,” the vicar remarked to no one in particular.

Walk Two Moons (Trophy Newbery) (Sharon Creech)

Read in parallel with Laura. Great book. I didn't expect the ending.

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Quotes:

Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.

Margaret Cadaver.

Salamanca Tree Hiddle.

Phoebe Winterbottom

“Oh!” I thought. “I am happy at this moment in time.”

It is surprising all the things you remember just by eating a blackberry pie.

I said to myself, “Salamanca Tree Hiddle, you can be happy without her.” It seemed a mean thought and I was sorry for it, but it felt true.

Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.

Coeur d’Alene,

Everyone has his own agenda.

In the course of a lifetime, what does it matter?

You can’t keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair. Phoebe

You can’t keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.

Because of all these gifts, Zeus named her Pandora, which means ‘the gift of all.’”

That night I kept thinking about Pandora’s box. I wondered why someone would put a good thing such as Hope in a box with sickness and kidnapping and murder. It was fortunate that it was there, though.

We never know the worth of water until the well is dry.

Kissing was thumpingly complicated. Both people had to be in the same place at the same time, and both people had to remain still so that the kiss ended up in the right place. But I was relieved that my lips ended up on the cold metal locker. I could not imagine what had come over me, or what might have happened if the kiss had landed on Ben’s mouth. It was a shivery thing to consider. I made it through the rest of my classes without losing control of my lips.

In the course of a lifetime, there were some things that mattered.

It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things that are closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside is something that we can manage, something that isn’t as awful as it had at first seemed. It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murderers and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind.

Chike and the River (Chinua Achebe)

Read with Laura. OK book, but not Achebe's best.

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Quotes:

In Onitsha the letters S.M.O.G. were said to bring good luck because they stood for Save Me O God.

Heavy Water: and Other Stories (Vintage International) (Martin Amis)

Good stories, especially the one about the janitor in Mars. Not earth-shattering.

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Quotes:

“What will my death be like?” he thought—and knew at once, with abrupt certainty, that it would be just like his life: different in form, perhaps, but nothing new, the same balance of bearables, the same.

So class and race and gender were supposedly gone (and other things were supposedly going, like age and beauty and even education): all the really automatic ways people had of telling who was better or worse—they were gone. Right-thinkers everywhere were claiming that they were clean of prejudice, that in them the inherited formulations had at last been purged. This they had decided. But for those on the pointed end of the operation—the ignorant, say, or the ugly—it wasn’t just a decision. Some of them had no new clothes. Some were still dressed in the uniform of their deficiencies. Some were still wearing the same old shit. Some would never be admitted.

More scavenger than predator, in matters of the heart, Rodney was the first on the scene after the big cats had eaten their fill. He liked his women freshly jilted.

They didn’t know—as I do—that this happens to all type-v worlds in the posthistorical phase. Without exception. They go insane.

We fixed it so that they think they’re simulations in a deterministic computer universe. It is believed that this is the maximum suffering you can visit on a type-v world.

The supermarket tabloids were calling it the straight cancer and the straight plague, but even the New York Times, in its frequent reports and updates, struck a note of heavily subdued monotony that sounded to Cleve like the forerunner of full hysteria.

A spokesman for the Anti-Family Church Coalition predictably announced that the straight subculture had brought this scourge on itself.

A kitchen, to Cleve, was an arena for the free play of delectation, enterprise, and wit. Not the rear end of some desperate holding operation, a field hospital of pots, pails, acids, carbolics, and cauldrons of boiling laundry. “This is meat and potatoes,” he whispered. “Meat and potatoes tops.” He couldn’t imagine cooking anything in here. He could imagine having his legs amputated in here.

To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

Amazing book, very strange to be reading this at the same time that the Zimmerman case was going on. The more things change, the more they don't.

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Quotes:

“First of all,” he said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view-”

“First of all,” he said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view-”

“Jack! When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it.

Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand…

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

“Jee crawling hova, Jem!

He likened Tom’s death to the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters and children,

How could this be so, I wondered, as I read Mr. Underwood’s editorial. Senseless killing—Tom had been given due process of law to the day of his death; he had been tried openly and convicted by twelve good men and true; my father had fought for him all the way. Then Mr. Underwood’s meaning became clear: Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men’s hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.

The Flavia de Luce 3-Book Bundle: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, A Red Herring Without Mustard (Alan Bradley)

Great series of books. Flavia de Luce is a rich character and the perfect unreliable narrator.

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Quotes:

I skipped down the broad stone staircase into the hall, pausing at the door of the dining room just long enough to toss my pigtails back over my shoulders and into their regulation position.

Odd, isn’t it, that a charge of lipstick is precisely the size of a .45 caliber slug.

Whenever she was thinking about Ned, Feely played Schumann. I suppose that’s why they call it romantic music.

Because she plays so beautifully, I have always felt it my bounden duty to be particularly rotten to her.

If there was anything that surprised me about this tale, it was the way in which Father brought it to life. I could almost reach out and touch the gentlemen in their high starched collars and stovepipe hats; the ladies in their bustled skirts and bonnets. And as the characters in his tale came to life, so did Father.

Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes—or so the Vicar had remarked to Father, who had told Feely, who had told Daffy, who had told me.

Something in me that was less than noble rose up out of the depths, and I was transformed in the blink of an eye into Flavia the Pigtailed Avenger, whose assignment was to throw a wrench into this fearsome and unstoppable pie machine.

The first thing that struck me was the smell of the place: a mixture of cabbage, rubber cushions, dishwater, and death.

“Hello, Flavia,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

What would Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier have done? I wondered. Would she have stood here fuming and foaming like one of those miniature volcanoes which results when a heap of ammonium dichromate is ignited? Somehow I doubted it. Marie-Anne would forget the chemistry and tackle the door.

As an accomplished fibber myself, I spotted the telltale signs of an untruth before they were halfway out of his mouth: the excessive detail, the offhand delivery, and the wrapping-up of it all in casual chitchat.

It has been my experience that facetiousness in the mouth of someone old enough to know better is often no more than camouflage for something far, far worse.

I saw the faraway look come into her eyes: the look of an adult floundering desperately to find common ground with someone younger.

They had what they call an ink-quest at the library—it’s the same thing as a poet’s mortem,

Jack’s carved wooden face was a face we all recognized: It was as if Rupert had deliberately modeled the puppet’s head from a photograph of Robin, the Inglebys’ dead son. The likeness was uncanny.

Last night’s excitement had drained everyone of their energy and they were, I guessed, still snoring away in their respective rooms like a pack of convalescent vampires.

Sometimes I hated myself. But not for long.

Experience has taught me that an expected answer is often better than the truth.

“You lie when you are attacked for nothing … for the color of your eyes.” “Yes,” I said. “I suppose I do.” I had never really thought of it in this way. “So,” she said, suddenly animated, as if the encounter with Mrs. Bull had warmed her blood, “you lie like us. You lie like a Gypsy.” “Is that good?” I asked. “Or bad?” Her answer was slow in coming. “It means you will live a long life.”

steadily losing ground to the more exciting religious sects such as the Ranters, the Shakers, the Quakers, the Diggers, the Levellers, the Sliders, the Swadlers, the Tumblers, the Dunkers, the Tunkers, and yes, even the Incorrupticolians,

I’d learned quite early in life that the mind loves nothing better than to spook itself with outlandish stories, as if the various coils of the brain were no more than a troop of roly-poly Girl Guides huddled over a campfire in the darkness of the skull.

Death by family silver, I thought, before I could turn off that part of my mind.

Although it sounded like a dry chuckle, the sound I heard must really have been a little cry of dismay from the Inspector at having so foolishly lost the services of a first-rate mind.

I swore it on my mother’s grave. Harriet, of course, had no grave. Her body was somewhere in the snows of Tibet.

When I come to write my autobiography, I must remember to record the fact that a chicken-wire fence can be scaled by a girl in bare feet, but only by one who is willing to suffer the tortures of the damned to satisfy her curiosity.

By necessity, I had become quite an accomplished laboratory chef.

With a bit of patience and a Bunsen burner, some truly foul odors can be generated in the laboratory.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the nursery rhyme riddle is the most basic form of the detective story. It’s a mystery stripped of all but the essential facts.

A “dear” or “dearie” to me is about as welcome as a bullet to the brain. I’ve had places reserved in the ha’penny seats of Hell for people who address me in this way.

I think there must be a kind of courage that comes from not being able to make up your mind.

“We always want to love the recipients of our charity,” the doctor said, negotiating a sharp bend in the road with a surprising demonstration of steering skill, “but it is not necessary. Indeed, it is sometimes not possible.”

Thinking and prayer are much the same thing anyway, when you stop to think about it—if that makes any sense. Prayer goes up and thought comes down—or so it seems. As far as I can tell, that’s the only difference. I thought about this as I walked across the fields to Buckshaw. Thinking about Brookie Harewood—and who killed him, and why—was really just another way of praying for his soul, wasn’t it? If this was true, I had just established a direct link between Christian charity and criminal investigation. I could hardly wait to tell the vicar!

Until now, my fury had always been like those jolly Caribbean carnivals we had seen in the cinema travelogues—a noisy explosion of color and heat that wilted steadily as the day went on. But now it had suddenly become an icy coldness: a frigid wasteland in which I stood unapproachable. And it was in that instant, I think, that I began to understand my father.

“Of course I love them,” I said, throwing myself full length onto the bed. “That’s why I’m so good at hating them.”