RECENT READS

A little taste of what I was reading last month (okay, two months ago now)....

AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED (Khalid Hosseini) "I have been absent.  Absent for all the meals Thalia and Mama have shared at this table, the laughs, the quarrels, the stretches of bordem, the illnesses, the long string of simple rituals that make up a lifetime.  Entering my childhood home is a little disorienting, like reading the end of a novel I'd started, then abandoned, long ago."

WONDER (R. J. Palacio) "Mom says the farting nurse turned out to be a nice woman... Mom remembers exactly what the nurse whispered in her ear when the doctor told her I probably wouldn't live through the night: 'Everyone born of God overcometh the world.'  And the next day, after I had lived through the night, it was that nurse who help mom's hand when they brought her to meet me for the first time...She had been preparing herself for the seeing of me.  But she said that when she looked down into my tiny mushed up face for the first time, all she could see was how pretty my eyes were."

ALLEGIANT (Veronica Roth) "He picks up one of the bigger maps.  It shows the entire globe, pressed flat like kneaded dough.  I stare at it long enough to make sense of the shapes on it, the blue stretches of water and the multicolored pieces of land.  On one of the pieces is a red dot.  He points at it, 'That dot covers all the places we've ever been.  You could cut that piece of land out of the ground and sink it into this ocean and no one would ever notice... So everything I've ever worried about or said or done, how can it possibly matter...it doesn't.'  'Of course it does,' I say.  'All that land is filled with people, everyone of them different, and the things they do to each other matter.' "

INSURGENT (Veronica Roth) " 'Insurgent,' he says.  'Noun / A person who acts in opposition to the established authority, who is not necessarily regarded as belligerent.' I look at Fernando.  The last time I broke into a factions headquarters, I did it with a gun in my hand and I left bodies behind me.  I want this time to be different.  I need this time to be different. 'I like it' I say. 'Insurgent.  It's perfect.' "