Thursday, May 07, 2020

Thursday, May 07, 2020

Hippo's top twenty books

Posted by Hippobean at 2:56 PM
In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro
-Thomas a Kempis

f = fiction nf = non-fiction

1. Wuthering Heights (f)- Emily Brontë
"He took a seat opposite Catherine, who kept her gaze fixed on him as if she feared he would vanish were she to remove it. He did not raise his to her often: a quick glance now and then sufficed; but it flashed back, each time more confidently, the undisguised delight he drank from hers."

2. Rebecca (f) - Daphne Du Maurier
"Will you look into my eyes and tell me that you love me now?"

3. The Binding (f) - Bridget Collins
"I walk past Emmett, out of the summer house on the grass. The wind buffets me. Even though it's icy laden with the scent of soil and moisture, in the end of winter. I lean against the pillar, drinking it in. Out of the whirl of memories, one surfaces: a damp, blue evening last spring, when I walked back to the New House from the farm. I'd stayed to dinner, because Emmett had asked me to. When I said goodnight he'd grinned at me, that awkward quick-quenched grin that made me feel like we were the only people in the world. I walked home whistling, dancing on the path like a music-hall turn, laughing softly to myself. I was wearing Emmett's shirt. My heart was so light I could have flown. The memory of it takes my breath away. I didnt know happines was that simple."

4. The Mirror Visitor: A Winter's Promise, The Missing of Clairedelune,
The Memory of Babel, A Storm of Echos
(f) - Christelle Dabos
"I was angry with myself because I had the conceit to think for one moment that you wouldnt do so."
"Don't go falling down any more stairs, avoid sharp objects, and above all, above all, keep away from disreputable people, alright? Oh, and by the way, I love you."
"If it's my claws that put you off ... I'm aware that I'm hardly attractive ... this leg wont stop me from ..."
"One had to have a good reason for looking Thorn straight in the face. Ophelia had one. She kissed his scars, first the one cutting through his eyebrows, then the one cutting into his cheek, and finally the one cutting across his temple." "Fifty six. That's the number of my scars"."Show them to me". The world instantly ceased to be a word and became skin. Ophelia spent these last three years feeling empty. She was at last, replete."
"Physical contact disgusted him. There was just one exception to this rule."
"No, no one was waiting for him in the Pole anymore, and that suited him. As long as one particular person would be waiting for him elsewhere, that would suit him."
Thorn's attention had become all-consumming. Usually so reluctant to eat, he suddenly seemed ravenous"
"From a pocket, Thorn took out the gloves Ophelia has entrusted to him. He put them on her himself, first one hand, then the other, even buttoning them up at the wrists for her. A most intimate thing to do."

5. Marina (f) - Pietro Coldesina

6. Possession (f) - A S Byatt

7. The Romance of a Poor Young Man (f) - Octave Feuillet
"At midnight, when everything was silent, I said farewell, to the old tower where I had suffered - and loved - so much. I slipped into the chateau by a secret door of which I had the key. Furtively, like a criminal, I passed along the empty and resounding galleries, guiding myself as I best could in the dark. At last I reached the salon where I had first seen her. She and her mother had not long left it, and their recent presence was revealed by a sweet and pleasant perfume which transported me. I searched, and I touched the basket where a few moment before she had replaced her embroidery. Alas, my poor heart! I fell on my knees before the seat she generally occupies, my forehead against the marble. I wept. I sobbed like a child."

8. A Canticle for Lebowitz (f) - Walter M. Miller Jr.

9. The English Patient (f) - Michael Ondaatje
"When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently, just as Clifton might have opened a car door for you a year earlier and ignored the fate of his life."
"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead."

10. Seymour an Introduction (f) - J. D. Salinger
" ..artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons; a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction - extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a partiality for grand-scale adultery, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isnt at the top of the list..."

11. The Agony and the Ecstasy (f) - Irving Stone
"I honestly dont know the answer, Your Grace. For Raphael, the creating of a work of art is a bright spring day in the Campagna; for me, it is a transmontana howling down the valley from the mountaintops. I work from early morning to dark, then by candlelight or oil lamp. Art for me is a torment, griveous when it goes bad, ecstatic when it goes well; but always it possesses me. When I have finished with a day of work I am a husk. Everything that was inside of me is now inside the marble or the fresco. That is why I have nothing to give elsewhere."

12. Balkan Ghosts (nf) - Robert D. Kaplan
"These lands require a love for the obscure. If the intruder from the West is not willing to feel with his whole being, he cannot hope to understand."
"Travelling in Romania was often like inhabiting the pages of a Dostoevsky novel. After a few weeks in Romania, a perverse side of your nature allowed you to fall in love with the country and people. You even thought that, perhaps, the Romanians possessed a peculiar wisdom about life and survival that the rest of the world lacked. And thus you would begin to undertand..."

13. The Monstrumologist (f) - Rick Yancey

14. The Winter of Our Discontent (f) - John Steinbeck

15. Lireal (Old Kingdom book 2) (f) - Garth Nix

16. The Last Romantic: A Biography of Queen Marie of Roumania (nf) -
Hannah Pakula
"Captured a whole squadron of impassioned admirers, most of them...officers, brilliant, dashing, sentimental, daring, full of Russian ardour mixed with that almost intolerable melancholy so characteristic of the Slav, a melancholy which tore at your heartstrings and disturbed your peace..."

17. The Glass of Time/The Meaning of Night: A Confession (f) - Michael Cox

18. The Rule of Four - Ian Caldwell (f)/ The Real Rule of Four (nf) -
Joscelyn Godwin

19. The Book of the Dead (Pendergast Series 7) (f) -
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

20. The Cloisters Walk (nf) - Kathleen Norris

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