Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

10/10 - Oh, this took me back to the days when all I used to read was Anne Rice novels. I just love the supernatural genre. This book also gets the award for most appealing male character. Can I trade places with Bella, please? Edward is, literally, to die for. I could gush about his attributes forever. Mmmmm..................... Oh, what was I doing. That's right, I was telling you about this book. So much fun, the perfect read for October. Lots of greats suspense, and did I mention Edward?

Inspired Passages ~ One True Thing

This inspired passage comes from the lovely Anna Quindlen. It is the best descriptions of what marriage is that I've ever read. It's hard to describe to someone who is not married how love changes over time, but she does it so well in this dialog between Ellen and her mother. I think any married person who reads this will appreciate the truth in it.

You make concesions when you're married a long time that you don't believe you'll ever make when you're beginning," she said. "You say to yourself when you're young, oh, I wouldn't tolerate this or that or the other thing, you say love is the most important thing in the world and there's only one kind of love and it makes you feel different than you feel the rest of the time, like you're all lit up. But time goes by and you've slept together a thousand nights and smelled like spit-up when babies are sick and seen your body droop and get soft. And some nights you say to yourself, it's not enough, I won't put up with another minute. And then the next morning you wake up and the kitchen smells like coffee and the children have their hair all brushed and the birds are eating out of the feeder and you look at your husband and he's not the person you used to think he was but he's your life. The house and the children and so much of what you do is built around him and your life, too, your history. If you take him out it's like cutting his face out of all the pictures, there's a big hole and it's ugly. It would ruin everything. It's more than love, it's more important than love.

Inspired Passages

I'm creating a new type of post, entitled inspired passages. I'm going to include an excerpt from a book that I found particularly poignant, inspiring, or just plain hilarious. The kind of passage that you would bookmark to have a friend read later. Or that you would pass to a spouse and say, "You have to read this part!". I find things like this all the time, and since I'm usually reading alone (or my husband wouldn't get it) I have noone one to share it with. So now I'm going to share it here. Isn't the internet a wonderful thing!!

One True Thing by Anna Quindlen

10/10 - I think a better name for this book would have been Many True Things. Quindlen just hits the nail on the head so many times in this book that it has inspired a new type of post for me. I'm entitling it "Inspired Passages". More on that in the next post. What amazed me the most was how Quindlen is able to write so convincingly from so many perspectives. The dialog in this book is just amazing. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much from this book. To read the description, the story sounds so "done". But it was so much more that I thought it would be. I definitely want to read more by her, and will take every description with a grain of salt now.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

10/10 - This is one of the most eloquent books I've ever read. It was amazing, and heartwrenching. The kind of book that you could read a 100 times and never understand all of it's meaning. I feel spent from reading it. It's hard for me to give a book that is so sad a perfect 10, but this book is perfect and sad. Side note - Why is this book categorized as Young Adult?