March Book Madness! Day 9, Tag Tuesday: Top 5 Books I Wish I Had Read When I Was Younger

Kid’s Reading by Walter Firle via BookArt: 30 Stunning Classic Paintings of Reading People

For future reference, I would love to be tagged in any book initiatives! For this post, I am doing a Tag Tuesday post from Meeghan @ Meeghan Reads. Today I will list the top 5 books I wish I could have read as a child.

Book Details

Once, in a cottage above the cliffs on the Dark Sea of Darkness, there lived three children and their trusty dog Nugget. Janner Igiby, his brother Tink, their crippled sister Leeli are gifted children as all children are, loved well by a noble mother and ex-pirate grandfather. But they will need all their gifts and all that love to survive the evil pursuit of the venomous Fangs of Dang who have crossed the dark sea to rule the land with malice and pursue the Igibys who hold the secret to the lost legend and jewels of good King Wingfeather of the Shining Isle of Anniera.

Andrew Peterson spins a quirky and riveting tale of the Igibys’ extraordinary journey from Glipwood’s Dragon Day Festival and a secret hidden in the Books and Crannies Bookstore, past the terrifying Black Carriage, clutches of the horned hounds and loathsome toothy cows surrounding AnkleJelly Manor, through the Glipwood Forest and mysterious treehouse of Peet the Sock Man (known for a little softshoe and wearing tattered socks on his hands and arms), to the very edge of the Ice Prairies.

Full of characters rich in heart, smarts, and courage, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness presents a world of wonder and a tale children of all ages will cherish, families can read aloud, and readers’ groups are sure to discuss for its layers of meaning about life’s true treasure and tangle of the beautiful and horrible, temporal and eternal, and good and bad.

Goodreads Overview

Since childhood, I’ve loved stories that depict the battle between good and evil. I started reading this book last summer, and I marveled at Andrew Petersen’s quirky sense of humor, magical prose, and emphasis on childhood’s place in depicting good people standing up to evil in their life. I love the characters, setting, and beautiful messages scattered throughout this and the other Wingsfeather sequels. If I could travel back in time and give my childhood self this book, I would!

Favorite Quote

So this is a story about light and goodness and Truth with a capital T. It’s about beauty, and resurrection, and redemption. But for those things to ring true in a child’s heart, the storyteller has to be honest. He has to acknowledge that sometimes when the hall light goes out and the bedroom goes dark, the world is a scary place. He has to nod his head to the presence of all the sadness in the world; children know it’s there from a very young age, and I wonder sometimes if that’s why babies cry. He has to admit that sometimes characters make bad choices, because every child has seen their parent angry or irritable or deceitful–even the best people in our lives are capable of evil.

But of course the storyteller can’t stop there. He has to show in the end there is a Great Good in the world (and beyond it). Sometimes it is necessary to paint the sky black in order to show how beautiful is the prick of light. Gather all the wickedness in the universe into its loudest shriek and God hears it as a squeak at best. And that is a comforting thought. When a child reads the last sentence of my stories, I hope he or she drifts to sleep with a glow in their hearts and a warmth in their bones, believing that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

Andrew Peterson

Book Details

Out of this wild night, a strange visitor comes to the Murry house and beckons Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O’Keefe on a most dangerous and extraordinary adventure—one that will threaten their lives and our universe.

Goodreads Overview

I might be one of the few people in The United States who did not read this book in Middle School. I knew it existed, but didn’t think it would interest me. (I was REALLY into fantasy books back then.) I read A Wrinkle In Time when I was 26 and instantly regretted I didn’t take the time to read it as a child. I struggled knowing my self worth for much of my childhood. Meg and I could have been best friends facing these uncertainties together. Alas, it never was.

Favorite Quote

You mean you’re comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

Madeleine L’Engle

Book Details

For Milo, everything’s a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only because he’s got nothing better to do. But on the other side, things seem different. Milo visits the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping), learns about time from a ticking watchdog named Tock, and even embarks on a quest to rescue Rhyme and Reason! Somewhere along the way, Milo realizes something astonishing. Life is far from dull. In fact, it’s exciting beyond his wildest dreams. 

Goodreads Overview

Sad story of my youth, I never read this book till I was in college. Norton Juster did a marvelous job taking all the quirky Colloquialisms and rules in the English language and putting them to story. It feels like Alice in Wonderland but with proper grammar rules. I really liked Eva Ibbotson‘s books as a kid, and The Phantom Tollbooth feels like it could fit into one of her stories!

Favorite Quote

You must never feel badly about making mistakes … as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.

Norton Juster

Book Details

A sci-fi drama of a high school aged girl who belongs in a different time, a boy possessed by emptiness as deep as space, an alien artifact, mysterious murder, and a love that crosses light years.

To Amy, everyone has a flavor. Her mom is the flavor of mint–sharp and bright. Her dad is like hot chocolate–sweet and full of gentle warmth.

Amy lives on a mining colony in out in deep space, but when her dad loses his job the entire family is forced to move back to Earth. Amy says goodbye to her best friend Jemmah and climbs into a cryotube where she will spend the next 30 years frozen in a state of suspended animation, hurtling in a rocket toward her new home. Her life will never be the same, but all she can think about is how when she gets to Earth, Jemmah will have grown up without her.

When Amy arrives on Earth, she feels like an alien in a strange land. The sky is beautiful but gravity is heavy and the people are weird. Stranger still is the boy she meets at her new school–a boy who has no flavor. 

Goodreads Overview

I. Love. This. Series! I went parousing through Webtoons and came across Stephen McCranie’s series in a featured spotlight. I had read several other webtoons and not been impressed, but I liked the art so I gave it a try. I am so glad I did. I love everything about this series and look forward to new chapters every week. Though I am glad I read this as an adult, I really think my younger self would have ate up this story’s beautiful art and depictions of school life. I also think I would have understood and identified with the character Oliver.

Favorite Quote

Oliver, men like you and I don’t make promises unless we can keep them.

Oliver’s Father, Episode 140

Book Details

The story of the new kid in town – little Yotsuba, a green-haired and wide-eyed girl who doesn’t have a clue… about anything! With no knowledge of the world around her, and an unnatural fear of air conditioners, Yotsuba has her new neighbors’ heads spinning. 

Goodreads Overview

Yotusbato is one of the most relaxing manga I’ve ever read. Yotsuba is such a cute little girl, and the author Azuma Kiyohiko is so funny! When I read it for the first time, I had so many times I laughed so hard I cried. I didn’t read manga as a kid, but if I could give myself a headstart into the Japanese reading world, I would give myself Yotsubato and smile. 

Yotsuba: I’ll get revenge! … I’m going!

Jumbo (in a suffering manner): Yotsuba… please, come back alive…

Yotsuba (heroic): Alright. Even if I die… I’ll come back alive.

—–Yotsuba!

Thank you for reading! See you tomorrow!

March Book Madness! Day 8, The Bhagavad Gita, Translated By Eknath Easwaran

March Book Madness! Day 10, Gregory Maguire’s Egg and Spoon (2014) 3.5/5

Beauty Around Us: Part 4, Quotes to Inspire

For this post, I will post twenty-five quotes from books, movies and various people. Words which move us help set afire the beauty dormant within us.

1.

Around the world–even in some of the countries most troubled by poverty or civil war or pollution–many thoughtful people are making a deep, concerted search for a way to live in harmony with each other and the earth. Their efforts, which rarely reach the headlines, are among the most important events occurring today. Sometimes these people call themselves peace workers, at other times environmentalists, but most of the time they work in humble anonymity. They are simply quiet people changing the world by changing themselves.

Eknath Easwaran, Your Life is Your Message: Finding Harmony With Yourself, Others, and the Earth

2.

The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

3.

Peace begins with a smile..

Mother Teresa

4.

Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.

Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

5.

Witch, do this for me,
Find me a moon
made of longing.
Then cut it sliver thin,
and having cut it,
hang it high
above my beloved’s house,
so that she may look up
tonight
and see it,
and seeing it, sigh for me
as I sigh for her,
moon or no moon.

Clive Barker Abarat: Days of Magic Nights of War

6.

When you are born,” the golem said softly, “your courage is new and clean. You are brave enough for anything: crawling off of staircases, saying your first words without fearing that someone will think you are foolish, putting strange things in your mouth. But as you get older, your courage attracts gunk, and crusty things, and dirt, and fear, and knowing how bad things can get and what pain feels like. By the time you’re half-grown, your courage barely moves at all, it’s so grunged up with living. So every once in awhile, you have to scrub it up and get the works going, or else you’ll never be brave again.

Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland, #1)

7.

I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.

Abraham Lincoln

8.

If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?

Yann Martel, Life of Pi

9.

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.

Leo Tolstoy

10.

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

Victor Hugo

11.

To love another person is to see the face of God.

Victor Hugo

12.

It’s easy to do nothing, it’s hard to forgive.”

Avatar the Last Airbender, “The Southern Raiders”

13.

The greatest illusion of this world is the illusion of separation. Things you think are separate and different are actually one and the same. We are all one people, but we live as if divided.

Avatar the Last Airbender, “The Guru”

14.

A lesson without pain is meaningless. That’s because no one can gain without sacrificing something. But by enduring that pain and overcoming it, he shall obtain a powerful, unmatched heart. A fullmetal heart.

Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist, Vol. 25

15.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

16.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

William Wordsworth

17.

We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

18.

Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.

Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

19.

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it, always.

Gandhi, Gandhi

20.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Albert Einstein

21.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

22.

“There is more to a boy than what his mother sees. There is more to a boy then what his father dreams. Inside every boy lies a heart that beats. And sometimes it screams, refusing to take defeat. And sometimes his father’s dreams aren’t big enough, and sometimes his mother’s vision isn’t long enough. And sometimes the boy has to dream his own dreams and break through the clouds with his own sunbeams.

― Ben Behunin, Remembering Isaac: The Wise and Joyful Potter of Niederbipp

The earth is speaking to us, but we can’t hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then – maybe – the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper.

Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

24.

If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.”

Madeleine L’Engle

25.

When there is kindness, there is goodness. When there is goodness, there is magic.

Cinderella (2015)

A Wrinkle In Time (1962) Book Quotes

I had never read this book until a few days ago and I have only one regret; that I can not go back in time and read it again as a child. It was a beautiful story. I highly recommend it.

“We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal.” -Madeleine L’Engle