Author: Lee

Some Quotes from We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

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I didn’t stop to make any separate posts for quotes from this book, so they are all going in this post:

I know that I am always alone, even when surrounded by people, so I let the emptiness in.

– Page 7 (Chapter One)

And I knew that you were the kind of person I wanted to know. But what I didn’t know yet was that you can tell a girl you want to hang out with her because she said something smart.

– Page 49 (Chapter Four)

I wonder if there’s a secret current that connects people who have lost something. Not in the way that everyone loses something, but in the way that undoes your life, undoes your self, so that when you look at your face it isn’t yours anymore.

– Page 68 (Chapter Six)

If this were a short story, it would mean something.

– Page 71 (Chapter Six)

I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn’t a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to repeat the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.

– Page 88 (Chapter Seven)

Cookie Read-A-Thon: Day 9

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I almost forgot to do this part! Oops!

So I basically slept almost the entire day (I think I was awake a total of like 4 hours today, yay for fever dreams by the way), but I did manage to pick a book out to read and get almost halfway through it.

I’m not sure why I grabbed the one I did, but it was like yelling at me to read it, so I am. (I don’t even know how it wound up on my TBR.)

Books Read Today:

Time Spent Reading Today:  1 H 38 M

Total Pages Read:  2251

Total Time Spent Reading:  27 H 11 M

Books Completed During Read-A-Thon:  8

Tomorrow I want to finish We Are Okay. I’d love to do more than that, but I’m basing my expectations on today, which means I’ll be #Suffering and in and out of sleep all day long.

Love & Gelato & Casual Racism

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Alright, so I just finished Love & Gelato last night, and there were plenty of things to like, but also one thing that bothered me the entire book. The “Mexican knife fight” crack.

There was some muffled yelling and then what sounded like a Mexican knife fight going on between her and her brother.

There’s a point in the novel where Lina is on the phone to her friend in America and there’s a scuffle on the other end, the friend evicting her brother from the room so they can talk, and she describes it that way.

What does that even mean? Like I understand wanting to describe the scuffle. That part makes perfect sense. But why bring Mexicans into it? Knife fights are inherently Mexican? Mexicans are inherently violent? White women are inherently racist? Get the fuck out of my face.
(Also why a “knife fight” in the first place? What does a knife fight even sound like?)

Maybe someone who didn’t grow up with everyone around them making jokes about stabbings every time they dared to show an emotion just because they happen to be Mexican — “Oh no, you’re mad, don’t shank me!” — wouldn’t notice or care about this, but I noticed and I care and I’m so fucking tired of casual racism in popular novels…

Cookie Read-A-Thon: Day 8

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I managed to meet my goal, although it did take me a strangely long amount of time to read 250 pages. I’m going to blame the fact that my lips and hands are all tingly from lack of oxygen. (I miss breathing… I bet it’s nice this time of year…)

I plan to make a post or two about Love & Gelato, but not tonight, too exhausted.

Books Read Today:

Time Spent Reading Today:  3 H 10 M

Total Pages Read:  2131

Total Time Spent Reading:  25 H 33 M

Books Completed During Read-A-Thon:  8

Tomorrow I will need to pick yet another book from my shelf (you can see the options here, and give me your opinion on what I should read next because I super need it!) and I’d like to make a sizable dent in it. Also I may try to work on Unmade a little more, but somehow I doubt it.

Friday 56: October 20, 2017

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The Friday 56 is a weekly meme hosted by Freda’s Voice and the rules are simple:

  • Grab a book, any book (I, personally, prefer to use my current read.)
  • Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader (If you have to improvise, that’s ok.)
  • Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it)
  • Post it

Love & Gelato by Jenna Evans Welch

Sonia had left the journal right in the center of my pillow, like maybe she was worried I wouldn’t notice it otherwise, and it was weighing down the bed like a pile of bricks.

First Lines Fridays: October 20, 2017

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First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

  • Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
  • Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
  • Finally… reveal the book!

First Lines:

The woman put her sad moon-face in the window of the car.
“You be good,” she said. “You hear me? You little ones, mind what Dicey tells you. You hear?”

Interested? Scroll down for the cover and summary!

Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt
(Tillerman Cycle, book 1)

It’s still true…

That’s the first thing James Tillerman says to his sister Dicey every morning. It’s still true that their mother has abandoned the four Tillerman children somewhere in the middle of Connecticut. It’s still true they have to find their way, somehow, to Great-aunt Cilla’s house in Bridgeport, which may be their only hope of staying together as a family.

But when they get to Bridgeport, they learn that Great-aunt Cilla has died, and the home they find with her daughter, Eunice, isn’t the permanent haven they’ve been searching for. So their journey continues to its unexpected conclusion — and some surprising discoveries about their history, and their future.

Cookie Read-A-Thon: Day 7

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I’m sad to admit I haven’t been doing very well at the read-a-thon yesterday or today.

Yesterday I literally slept all day. When I was awake I was in that half-asleep haze… I wanted to read, and at one point my fever was high enough that I thought I was reading, but then I realized I didn’t have a book. I don’t think I can feasibly count that as read-a-thon progress.

Today I only read for about an hour. I intended to make up for yesterday by reading a whole book, but after falling asleep reading 3 times (once in the bath, thank goodness the book fell onto the floor and not into the tub with me, that would have been horrible) I’ve given up.

Books Read Today:

Time Spent Reading Today:  1 H 27 M

Total Pages Read:  1881

Total Time Spent Reading:  22 H 23 M

Books Completed During Read-A-Thon:  7

Tomorrow I hope to finish Love & Gelato. If I can do that, I’ll consider it a good day. Wish me luck y’all.