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in an effort to digest Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, I’m reading The Princess Bride with Sara.

because oh my god. Strange & Norrell. I have truly never read an ending so perfect. I like to exaggerate on these things, but know this: it is not an exaggeration when I intend to put it into the previously-two-book perennial reading rotation (the other two being Watership Down and Ender’s Game). I consider it so formative an experience in both my literary education and my personal growth that yes, despite being over 1000 pages, it will most certainly get many more read-throughs.

anyway. I’m SO glad I hadn’t read Princess Bride before now, because I would not have been able to so closely relate to the love stuff. it makes rather perfect sense to me now. I’m about 1/5 through already (lunchtime reading is BACK) and it’s delightful. a perfect palate-cleanser after the wild beauty that was Strange & Norrell.

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The box was small and oblong and apparently made of silver and porcelain. It was a beautiful shade of blue, but then not exactly blue, it was more like lilac. But then, not exactly lilac either, since it had a tinge of grey in it. To be more precise, it was the color of heartache.

ladies and gentlemen, the color of my car

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nextian:

One of the maids burst in and cried out, “Oh, madam! The master is here!”

Someone came into the room.

He was a thinner, browner person than she remembered. his hair had more grey in it and there was a whitish scar above his left eyebrow. The scar was not recent, but she had never seen it before. His features were what they had always been, but somehow his air was different. This scarcely seemed to be the person she had been thinking of only a moment ago. But before she could be disappointed, or awkward, or any of the things she had feared she would be when he at last came home, he looked around the room with a quick, half-ironic glance that she knew in an instant. Then he looked at her with the most familiar smile in the world and said, “I’m home.”

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, p 362.

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I want to read every book referenced in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

I mean who doesn’t want to find out what’s between the covers of “Revelations of Thirty-Six Worlds”