I finished Keeping Faith this week and began Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. My friend, Shelly, gave me this book a million years ago, and I’ve started it twice before. This time I’m going to finish it. It was fun to read a grownup book, and I’ve decided to keep one grownup book in the reading mix all through the Bookmark Challenge. What a novel idea!

If information is the currency of democracy, then libraries are the banks. –Wendell Ford

The body of Benjamin Franklin
Printer,
Like the covering
Of an old book
Its contents torn out
And stript of its lettering
And gilding
Lies here, food for worms;
But the work
Shall not be lost,
It will (as he believed)
Appear once more,
In a new
And more beautiful edition,
Corrected and amended
By the author.
–Epitaph for Benjamin Franklin

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all. –Voltaire

Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries. –Christopher Morley

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me. –W. Somerset Maugham