I Am A Collection Of Oddities, A Circus Of Neurons And Electrons: My Heart Is The Ringmaster, My Soul

oh my goddd i am fucking oBSESSED with this art for the ministry of time seriously i need y'all to please read this book. i need y'all to swoon over graham gore with me. it's not just a gorgeous romance novel, nor just a spy thriller, nor just a fantastic twist on time travel, nor just a way to obsess over the franklin expedition (for all you the terror girlies) but an incredible evisceration of the british empire that follows a British-Cambodian character by a British-Cambodian author. just. GOD. and graham gore is so dreamy. have i said that yet? he’s so dreamy and i adore the narrator (she’s a crunchy character with some incredible flaws and i adore her for them) and it's so good. 5/5 stars. if i could give it more i would. (also contrary to what i'd said before based on what i'd heard, it does end happily imo!)

Odysseus had twenty years to shed his battle skin. My grandfather left the battlefield in France and rode home in a ship that crawled across the ocean slowly so he could catch his breath. I get on a plane in hell and get off, hours later, at home.

‘The Impossible Knife of Memory’ by Laurie Halse Anderson

As an adult I have often known that peculiar legacy time brings to the traveller: the longing to seek out a place a second time, to find deliberately what we stumbled on once before, to recapture the feeling of discovery. Sometimes we search out again even a place that was not remarkable itself - we look for it simply because we remember it. If we do find it, of course, everything is different. The rough-hewn door is still there, but it's much smaller; the day is cloudy instead of brilliant; it's spring instead of autumn; we're alone instead of with three friends. Or worse, with three friends instead of alone.

'The Historian' by Elizabeth Kostova

What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac 

I wish we could go back in time and climb trees together again. I love you, Vera. I always will.

'Please Ignore Vera Dietz' by A.S. King

It is rarely the book you came to seek, but the book next to that book, which changes your mind and heart.

‘When A Bookstore Closes, An Argument Ends’ by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker (June 12, 2015)