Way Better Than Original Tag
My beloved CP has tagged me, and this time I'm all psyched to play. Why? Because Reading Is Sexy and don't you ever forget it.

A Book That Has Changed Your Life: The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
(Because it inspired me, the second I finished it, to sit down and write and every time I re-read it I am inspired again.)

"You were a wanted child, God knows, she would say at other moments, lingering over the photo albums in which she had me framed; these albums were thick with babies, but my replicas thinned out as I grew older, as if the population of my duplicates had been hit by some plague. She would say this a little regretfully, as though I hadn't turned out entirely as she'd expected. No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most.
I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this."

A Book That You Have Read More Than Once: The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
(All the books on a certain shelf in my room could fall into this category, but this is one that I will pick up again and again, just to read certain passages.)

"The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath--already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the seachange of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light."

A Book That Makes You Laugh: Glory Goes and Gets Some, Emily Carter

"So I'm hovering over this Lara, and like always with really small women, I feel like Alice after she took the one pill that makes you larger, big and--here's the word--galumphing. Galumphing, good word, and that of course makes me feel this heady sensation of protectiveness toward the smaller woman, and then the usual realization dawns on me. Oh My God I Am A Lesbian. And not one of those hip stylish ones who write avant-garde movie scripts and get their pictures taken in nightclubs either. I'm some sad old thing sitting at the bar while my little femme fatale girlfriend cheats on me with anything, male or female, that happens to be around. In other words, I get treated the way I've treated certain men in my life, which as a thought is worse than thinking about car accidents."

A Book That Made You Cry: Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"There was nothing there but a flash of yellow close to his ankle. He remained motionless for an instant. He did not cry out. He fell as gently as a tree falls. There was not even any sound, because of the sand."

A Book You Wish You Had Written: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
(Because it is my favorite and everything I like in a book: funny and poignant and simply stated and lyrical with a dash of magical realism.)

"Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn't matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.
She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window.
She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies.

Enemies were:
The Devil (in his many forms)
Next Door
Sex (in its many forms)
Slugs
Friends were:
God
Our dog
Auntie Madge
The novels of Charlotte Bronte
Slug pellets

And me, at first."

A Book You Are Currently Reading
(Lest anyone not believe me when I claimed membership in Lulu's Book Addicts Club...)
The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean
Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
God: A Biography, Jack Miles
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
The Culture of Fear, Barry Glassner
Lighthousekeeping, Jeanette Winterson
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
The Cheating Culture, David Callahan
Teacher Man, Frank McCourt
How the Universe Got its Spots, Janna Levin
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

A Book You Have Been Meaning To Read:
(And here's the other half of my bedside table...)
Side Effects, Woody Allen
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
War Talk, Arundhati Roy
Islam, A Short History, Karen Armstrong
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander
The Fifties, A Women's Oral History, Brett Harvey
All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren

Tags:
Hapabukbuk
Jerseyaikidogirl
Shorelinecity

Whew. That was fun. I'm spent.  ¶ 7:13 PM