Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (audio)

★★★★

"The world spins.  We stumble on.  It is enough."

This was one of the most interesting novels that I had read in a long time.  Filled with interwoven story lines, it features a host of unique characters and powerful insight to the connects that we make on a daily basis on how they effect our lives.  I very much enjoyed the audio version and the different narrators made the story even more intriguing. 

The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin (audio)

★★★★ 1/2

"The New York of the plays, the movies, the books: the New York of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair and Vogue.  It was a beacon, a spire, a beacon on top of a spire.  A light, always glowing from afar, visible even from the cornfields of Iowa, the foothills of the Dakotas, the deserts of California.  The swamps of Louisiana.  Beckoning, always beckoning.  Summoning the discontented, seducing the dreamers.  Those whose blood ran too hot, and too quickly, causing them to look about at their placid families, their staid neighbors, the graves of their ancestors and say - I'm different.  I'm special.  I'm more.  They all come to New York."

In this wonderful novel, Melanie Benjamin portrays the story (and ultimate betrayal) between Truman Capote and his "swans" - famous New York socialites of the 1960s.  These women were basically well-known because of their marriage to rich and successful men.  There jobs were basically to look gorgeous, socialize with the right people, and spend lots and lots of their husband's money.  The favorite of Capote's swans was Babe Paley, wife of CBS founder Bill Paley and the story centers around her, but intertwines the story of the other women as well.

I did not know much about these people (or this time period) before reading this book, but Benjamin brought it to life with such energy and showed not only the glamour, but the ambition and loneness and betrayal as well.  These women's lives were so far from my comprehension, but I found them extremely intriguing.  I thought that the novel was not only beautiful written and well-research, but entertaining and addicting as well.  I read it in only a few days (which is rare for me at this point in my life) and cannot wait to go back and read the author's previous novels.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

★★★★★

"After that the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind.  But I hope you will remember this: A man walking fast down a dark lonely street.  Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need.  A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes.  A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time."

"What do you seek in these shelves?" 

 This book was brilliant.  I read a lot of books, and it's rare that I find a novel so wonderful and unique as this one.  An idea that just...simply hasn't been done before.  To my knowledge anyways.  At least not done as well as this.  Its cute and quirkey - the main character is a total 21st century geek - yet surprisingly insight full.  

When Clay Jannon loses his job as a web designer, he stumbles into Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and takes up the late-night shift.  With very strange and random customers, Jannon begins to realize that there might be more to the bookstore than he thought.  Enter a world of card cataloging meets the internet, the book has everything: bookstores, libraries, Google, audio books, data visualization, secret societies, history of print, typography, children's fantasy novels, databases, remote storage facilities, digital vs. print, coding, cataloging, ebooks, the internet, information overload, Wikipedia - and of course, books.  When Penumbra mysteriously dissapears, Jannon and his friends soon find themselves on the quest for immortality amongst the shelves.  

This is the ultimate book for book lovers and I couldn't put it down!  It's about finding "the right book, at exactly the right time" and creating a world where print and technology can exist side by side.  Not only was it fascinating, but super fun to read.  I just loved it.  Robin Sloan got this one right.  

Oh, and did I mention that the cover glows in the dark?  Yep, it does...way cool :)

This book was #5 on my top ten list of 2014.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

★★★

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly in to the past."

"I hope she'll be a fool - that's the bast thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

★★★

"It is a bit of a chiche to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time...In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge.  In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred in decisions, for a hundred visions and revisions - we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second.  and before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come."

The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani

★★★★

"He promised to love me.  And for once in my life, I'm going to do the impractical, unwise, ill-advised thing.  I'm going to make a decision based upon the feeling I have in my heart, and not what looks good on paper or makes anyone else happy.  I'm going to do something for me, and I'll live with whatever Ciro brings into my life and be happy that I did."

This book was #9 on my top ten list of 2013.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

★★★★★

"From that time one, the world was hers for the reading.  She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends.  Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.  There was poetry for quiet companionship.  There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours.  There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to fee a closeness to someone should could read a biography.  On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived."

" 'People always think that happiness is a faraway thing,' thought Francie, 'something complicated and hard to get.  Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love.  Those things make happiness.' "

"She was made up of more, too.  She was the books she read in the library.  She was the flower in the brown bowl.  Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard.  She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly.  She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping.  She was the shame of her father stumbling home drunk.  She was all of those things and of something more...It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike."

Brooklyn by Colm Toblin

★★★

" 'She has gone back to Brooklyn,' her mother would say.  And, as the train rolled past Macmine Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years ahead, when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself.  She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more."

Uprising by Margaret Peterson Haddix

★★★★

"Mrs. Livingston stares off into the distance, off into the past, off into a time when she didn't know the first was coming.  'The story begins like so much else,' she says slowly.  'With hope.  Hope and dreams and daring."

" 'I think people remember the Triangle first because of the strike,' she tells Harriet.  'People had cheered us on.  They'd donated money to out cause, they'd bailed us out of jail, they'd marveled at our courage.  We weren't faceless and anonymously and easily forgotten after the strike.  And then so many of us died so young, so tragically, so soon after.  People left like they knew us.  They took our deaths personally."

"Bella had not known it was possible to stand shoulder to shoulder with another girl, one from Poland or Lithuania or some other place Bella had never heard of, both of them holding signs high over their heads, both of them longing just as strongly for eactly the sam thing.  Both of them completely connected."

Joy in the Morning by Betty Smith

★★

"Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time.  Then your time on earth will be filled with glory."