Super Mo, our Needle and Thread: Stitching for Literacy 2011 Bookmark Challenge Super Model, is ready to check out and do some fun reading. Love that look!

The first line this week comes from the beginning of In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed, by Carl Honore, which I am reading right now.

My whole life has turned into an exercise in hurry, in packing more and more into every hour. I am Scrooge with a stopwatch, obsessed with saving every last scrap of time, a minute here, a few seconds there.

“Scrooge with a stopwatch” is the bit I especially like but also that fact that I can relate to this feeling. It’s precisely what Precious Ramotswe criticizes about westerners, and something our culture seems to revere: she who is busiest is best. My hyperactivity may prevent me from ever fully embracing slowness, but I praise it nonetheless. I think embroidery may be my strongest link to slowness.

I’m going to throw out another Line I Love because I marked about a jillion in Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, and I’m going to have a little fun with it. I haven’t picked one in particular to use, so I’m just going to open the book to a marked page and see what kind of connection I can make between the Line and this post or something else that is happening right now. Here goes!

Promoting novels in a sound-bite culture is like selling elephants from a gumball machine.

Crack me up!

Is there any need for me to explain why I like this or how I can connect it to the first Line I Love? I will, but it hardly seems necessary.

Cheers to you, Carl and Barbara!