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469. Bag of Bones

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Fantasy, Suspense, Horror

529 pages, published September 22, 1998

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Bag of Bones is the story of novelist Mike Noonan and the grief he suffers after the sudden death of his pregnant wife Jo.  Mike develops writer’s block which is temporarily relieved when he returns to Sara Laughs, their remote vacation home on a lake in Maine.  There he meets the beautiful young widow Maddie and her toddler daughter Kyra.  Much stands in the way of Mike and Maddie’s growing attraction for each other:  her vengeful ex father in law who wants custody of Kyra, Mike’s reluctance to be with someone so much younger and the ghosts that increasingly insert themselves into the lives of Mike and those around him.

Quotes 

“Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,” Hardy supposedly said, “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” I understood because that was what I felt like in those interminable, dissembling days: a bag of bones.”

“Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.”

 

“This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things – fish and unicorns and men on horseback – but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”

 

“For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.”

 

“I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.”

 

“Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.”

 

“I was being paid to do what I loved, and there’s no gig on earth better than that; it’s like a license to steal.”

 

“I see things, that’s all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.”

 

“A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.”

 

“I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.”

 

“Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.”

 

“Fear is actually an acronym for Fuck Everything And Run.”

 

“And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.”

 

“Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme.”

 

My Take

I have always enjoyed reading Stephen King and Bag of Bones was no exception.  In fact, it is now one of my favorite Stephen King books. Improving the reading experience was Stephen King narrating the audio version himself.  The main character novelist Mike Noonan is a stand in for King and hearing King tell this story adds extra resonance.  I especially enjoyed the touching relationship between Mike and toddler Kyra that is tenderly drawn.  I highly recommend this book.

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450. The Institute

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:   Fiction, Horror, Thriller, Fantasy

561 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In the middle of the night, twelve year old Luke Ellis is kidnapped from his house in suburban Minneapolis and his parents are murdered.  Luke wakes up in a bizarre facility known as The Institute which imprisons kids like him with special powers including telepathy and telekinesis.  Luke’s mission is to escape from The Institute.

Quotes 

“Great events turn on small hinges.”

 

“He wanted to tell Luke that he loved him. But there were no words, and maybe no need of them. Or telepathy. Sometimes a hug was telepathy.”

 

“It came to him, with the force of a revelation, that you had to have been imprisoned to fully understand what freedom was.”

 

“It was so simple, but it was a revelation: what you did for yourself was what gave you the power.”

 

“There was an abyss. And books contained magical incantations to raise what was hidden there, all the great mysteries.”

 

“It came to him (and with the force of a revelation) that life was basically one long SAT test, and instead of four or five choices, you got dozens.”

 

“Seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by atomic bombs, the world is still here even though many nations have atomic weapons, even though primitive human emotions still hold sway over rational thought and superstition masquerading as religion still guides the course of human politics.”

 

My Take

Another quick-moving, compelling read by Stephen King.  Not his best work, but very enjoyable nonetheless.  Perfect escapism for a vacation.

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189. The Girl with all the Gifts

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   M.R. Carey

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Horror

460 pages, published June 19, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Girl with all the Gifts is set in a bleak future after most of humanity has succumbed to a pathogenic fungus that has turned most people into “hungries” who have an insatiable desire to eat what is left of the human race and pass along the disease.  Dr. Caldwell believes that a group of hungry children who are kept bound to their chairs at all times, especially the incredibly intelligent Melanie, hold the key to combating the deadly pandemic.  However, Melanie is much more than a test subject, especially in the view of Miss Justineau, her favorite teacher with whom she has bonded.

 

Quotes 

“The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you’re only showing that you’re unworthy of it.”

 

“No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.”

 

“This gauntlet, flung down by a bullying, contemptuous universe that allowed human beings to grope their way to sentience just so it could put them in their place that bit more painfully.”

 

“And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both. But you have to open it to find that out.”

 

“It’s not just Pandora who had that inescapable flaw. It seems like everyone has been built in a way that sometimes makes them do wrong and stupid things.”

 

“the horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand”

 

“may we live as long as we want, and never want as long as we live,”

 

“And the sun comes out, like a kiss on the cheek from God.”

 

“It’s a little bit like a cow listening to a recipe for beef stew.”

 

“It’s like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they’d be born out of the cocoon as something else.”

 

“It’s equinox, with the world balanced between winter and summer, life and death, like a spinning ball balanced on the tip of someone’s finger.”

 

“It doesn’t matter,” she explains to Miss J. “I want to be where you are. And I don’t know the way back to wherever I was before, anyway. I don’t even remember it. All I remember is the block, and you. You’re…” Now it’s Melanie’s turn to hesitate. She doesn’t know the words for this. “You’re my bread,” she says at last. “When I’m hungry. I don’t mean that I want to eat you, Miss Justineau! I really don’t! I’d rather die than do that. I just mean… you fill me up the way the bread does to the man in the song. You make me feel like I don’t need anything else.”

 

My Take

It didn’t take long for me to be drawn into the bleak, post-Apocalyptic world created by M.R. Carey in The Girl with All the Gifts.  A big reason was the two main characters, Melanie (a young girl who is incredibly sympathetic despite who constant urge to eat human flesh) and Miss Justineau, Melanie’s teacher and protector who grapples with a world gone mad and her own past demons.  While the subject matter is a big-time downer, I was captivated by the storytelling and held in suspense until the climactic end.  If you like the dystopia genre, you should definitely check out this book.

 

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148. The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Neil Gaiman

Genre:  Fiction, Fantasy, Horror

181 pages, published June 18, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Ocean at the End of the Lane opens with a middle-aged man returning to his childhood home in Sussex, England to attend a funeral.   Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother.  He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the dilapidated old farmhouse, the past comes flooding back.  It is a past too bizarre, frightening, and dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

 

Quotes

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

 

“Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.”

 

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”

 

“Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.”

 

“Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

 

“That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.”

 

“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters.”

 

“I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.”

 

“Nothing’s ever the same,” she said. “Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”

 

“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.”

 

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”

 

My Take

Nominated and awarded multiple honors in the fantasy genre, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is creates a fantastical parallel world of monsters, one of whom eerily takes on human form, seen through the eyes of young English boy. Reading it, you are never quite sure how much of the book is the boy’s imagination and how much actually happened.  That juxtaposition of fantasy and reality, as well as the skilled pen of author Neil Gaiman, is what makes The Ocean at the End of the Lane an appealing read.

 

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