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73 books
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29 voters
Shelly
https://www.goodreads.com/michelletheshelver
“The archive room had the feel of a tabernacle, with millions of souls packed away on microfilm like incense in tiny jars, waiting for someone to free their essence to be felt, tasted, inhaled again, if only for a moment.”
― The Life We Bury
― The Life We Bury
“A forest floor, the Woodland villagers knew, is a living thing. Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders' hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another. It was here that you'd find the resourcefulness of rot, the wholeness of fungi.”
― A Psalm for the Wild-Built
― A Psalm for the Wild-Built
“Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books -- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles -- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries.”
― The Ten Thousand Doors of January
― The Ten Thousand Doors of January
“all stories, even the meanest folktales, matter. They are artifacts and palimpsests, riddles and histories. They are the red threads that we may follow out of the labyrinth.”
― The Ten Thousand Doors of January
― The Ten Thousand Doors of January
“The story and the storyteller are never far apart, in my experience. Authors and their books maintain a relationship that is the best and worst of us.
Once a book is out in the world, the author pretends to let go. Stories, after all, are for the people who need to hear them. We have to let go of a story, give up the reins, when we ask it to be read. We pretend it's like making any other product, bread for the hungry or coats for the cold. But what no author admits is that it's not like that at all. Stories are not made of flour or wool. Stories, real stories, are made with a sliver of yourself.
The purpose for stories is what readers will make of them. But the reason, the desperate need, is a splinter in the author alone. A good story gets under your skin, because that's where all good stories start.”
―
Once a book is out in the world, the author pretends to let go. Stories, after all, are for the people who need to hear them. We have to let go of a story, give up the reins, when we ask it to be read. We pretend it's like making any other product, bread for the hungry or coats for the cold. But what no author admits is that it's not like that at all. Stories are not made of flour or wool. Stories, real stories, are made with a sliver of yourself.
The purpose for stories is what readers will make of them. But the reason, the desperate need, is a splinter in the author alone. A good story gets under your skin, because that's where all good stories start.”
―
Shelly’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Shelly’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
3,619 books
|
119 friends
3,254 books
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48 friends
2,210 books
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199 friends
1,351 books
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905 books
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43 friends
736 books
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67 friends
2,381 books
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91 friends
5,488 books
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382 friends
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