Books – they weren’t ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.
What I eventually realized is that the real business of books is not done by awards committees or people who turn trees into paper or editors or agents or even writers. We’re all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers.
Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone.
When we read the right book generously, it can change the way think about the world around us.
We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature.
You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller.
You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller, and that’s the secret weapon of the bookstore – is that no algorithm will ever understand readers the way that other readers can understand readers.
You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.
Colin emphatically pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading. “Did you like it?” His dad asked. “Yup,” Colin said. He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.
Throughout the book, she refers to herself as “the side effect,” which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible.
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
I’m a grenade, I just want to stay away from people and read books, and think...
As I recall, you promised to CALL when you finished the book, not text.
Books are seldom useful unless they are also beautiful.
That is, to me at least, one of the most helpful and useful things books do for us: They are generous enough to allow us to choose what matters to us.
In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.
Books are like tweets, except longer.
I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.
I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.
I’ve read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you’re a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.