Top Ten Tuesday – Spring TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s theme is books on my Spring to be read list. These are my NetGalley ARCs I’m planning to read this Spring.

1. Mad Blood Stirring by Simon Mayo
2. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
3. White Houses by Amy Bloom
4. How I Lose You by Kate McNaughton
5. Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
6. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
7. Two Steps Forward by Graeme Simsion and Annie Buist
8. The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth by William Boyd
9. Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
10. The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

What I read on Mother’s Day

Every Mother’s Day my husband takes our daughter out for the day so I can settle down and try to read a book in a day. The perfect Mother’s Day treat, peace and quiet and a good book! Yesterday I read Where’d You Go Bernadette? by Maria Semple. It was the perfect Mother’s Day read; light, funny, quick and featuring a really close mother daughter relationship. A lovely relaxing day.

Top Ten Tuesday – Favourite book quotes

It’s been a while but I really want to get back into Top Ten Tuesdays which I discover is now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is Favourite Book Quotes which is a difficult one as I don’t have good recall for quotes from books. So I’ve looked up some of my favourite books and tried to find good quotes from them.

1. From The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. This was one of the readings at my wedding so it was the only quote that came instantly to mind for this topic.

“I’ll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wont’ just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight…”

2. From The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty. This quote jumped out at me so much, it struck such a bell with me. I thought that not working would give me the opportunity to stop having to talk to people all the time and found that as a mother you’re required to talk to even more people than you do at work!

“The other mothers, the teachers, the people. I didn’t realize that having a child was so social. You’re always talking to people.”

3. From The Rainbow Opera by Elizabeth Knox. This sums me up perfectly!

“I have no particular plan in life – and that’s something I rather like. Most things that people do seem to me to be rather dull and silly. In my ideal life I’d be left alone to read”

4. From A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

“Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.”

5. From The Cider House Rules by John Irving

“What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.”

6. From A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler. I could have picked a million Anne Tyler quotes, she writes so brilliantly about life, love, death and family.

“You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is?”

7. From We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

“I realize it’s commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, ‘I love you, but I don’t always like you.’ But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, ‘I’m not oblivious to you – that is, you can still hurt my feelings – but I can’t stand having you around.’ Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if wouldn’t have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, ‘I like you.’ I wonder if just enjoying your kid’s company isn’t more important.”

8. From Atonement by Ian McEwan

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. ”

9. From The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

“What you’ll find, I think, is that the things you most want to avoid are the things that make you feel the greatest when you actually do them.”

10. From The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Sums up the beauty of British landscapes beautifully.

“I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.”