My beloved book club is called “Get Lit.”  We’ve been reading and drinking together for over a decade now (we do both quite well, hence the name).  The women in that club are some of my best friends:  brilliant professionals, world travelers, great mothers, and just amazing people I am proud to know.

Reading is a habit for me.  I’m honestly not sure I can fall asleep without a book in my bed, because I haven’t thought to try since I was about 14.  Nor do I want to; my bedtime reading is among my favorite times of day.  I must admit, I don’t read nearly as much since Thing 1 and Thing 2 came along.  I still eagerly curl up with a book each evening, but I average about five pages before I start drooling on the pillow.

That’s why it’s such a treat when a book keeps me up all  night, flipping pages by the dim light on my bedside table.  Sometimes these blessings happen on a weekend, when time is free and meaningless.   But if a book grabs my soul on a weeknight, then the looming morning alarm seems a small price to pay.  I take these blessings when they come.

I can’t help but savor books with two lenses:  one as the reader, along for the ride and enjoying the story.  But also as a dreamer:  someone who loves to write, and with that lens I frequently stumble upon lines that are so brilliant I wish I’d written them myself.

So this page is dedicated to the lens of envy!  From here on out, I pledge to document all the brilliant lines in literature that make me drool… and not in the “on my pillow” sleepy way!

LINES I LOVE:

3/27/12:  From Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey – page 34.  Mabel is describing her first impressions of Alaska as she arrived here as a homesteader in the 1920’s.
“So this was Alaska – raw, austere.  A cabin of freshly peeled logs cut from the land, a patch of dirt and stumps for a yard, mountains that serrated the sky.”

“Mountains that serrated the sky” – brilliant!

2/15/12:  From Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Page 105.  The narrator is trying to move a large steamer trunk in an old, abandoned orphanage.
“I grabbed it by the sides and pulled.  It didn’t move.  I pulled again, harder, but it wouldn’t give an inch.  I wasn’t sure if it was just that heavy, or if generations of accumulated moisture and dust had somehow fused it to the floor.  I stood up and kicked it a few times, which seemed to jar things loose, and then managed to move it by pulling on it one side at a time, shimmying it forward the way you might move a stove or a fridge, until it had come out all the way from under the bed, leaving a trail of parenthetical scars on the floor.”

“Parenthetical scars” – seriously?  Brilliant!