"Seems to me a man should have a choice whether to take up arms or not."

"We have no more choice in that than in whether or not to be born."

Good Christmas read, eh?

When the book you're reading is so good that you have to "reward" yourself with chapters just so that you'll be able to get anything else in your life done.

Doesn't it seem strange to you that a man who had no talent as a teacher should have made teaching his career?

Yes and no. The ranks of the teaching profession are, as you must know, full of refugees and misfits.

"But then, what are books for if not to change our lives?"

"Don't smile. I am perfectly aware how much I was behaving like a character in a book - like one of those high-minded young women in Henry James, say, determined, despite her better instincts, to do the difficult, the modern thing."

I am geeking out about this book. Its conceit is so interesting and its words are so well-chosen. It doesn't feel real, it feels truer than real.

How to escape the filth: not a new question. An old rat-question that will not let go, that leaves its nasty, suppurating wound. Agenbite of inwit.

How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors of works that will outlast them: roads, walls, pylons? Immortality of a kind, a limited immortality, is not so hard to achieve after all.

This book is amazing.

Nothing like some poetry in a hurricane, eh? Stay safe, fellow Floridians and other lower Atlantic coast Litsy users! What are you reading during the hurricane?

Can you find it?

Sir Arthur Eddington, by way of Bill Nye.

The dedication has got me feeling things.

Was lucky enough to snag a signed copy at a Black Friday thing at Barnes&Noble last year, finally getting around to reading it.

I'm so glad the villain wrote their motivation on the ceiling of their secret room. Was it because there was a possibility they would forget?

How you take HP pics so you don't accidentally spoil anyone. But spoiler alert: Harry Potter and the Why This.

FINALLY.

~*THE ADVENTURE BEGINS ANEW*~

"It would be stretching things to say that I had left New York and come to Savannah as a result of eating a paillard of veal served on a bed of wilted radicchio. But there is a connection"

"... eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine - he could see out, but you couldn't see in."

A passionless exercise that went through the motions of a post-WW2 conspiracy thriller. A stupid, selfish protagonist blunders his way through the predictable plot with blatant deus ex machines helping him along to the next exposition fairy. Only saving grace was the female character's competency.

I will now never be able to take the opinion of the Roanoke Times, the Charleston Post & Courier, or Publisher's Weekly seriously. Ever.

Little after-work, before-homework light reading. This book is utterly ridiculous.

The exact moment when there's less to read than you already have read. The story's just at its best part but you know it will be over soon. Excruciating bliss.

Chapter two; already enamored. Wishing this book had been available for the years I spent as a weird, creepy kid who read incessantly about ghosts and demons from books checked out of the library.

A black cat named Nyx, a fitting companion for an adventure like this.