“I think it’s clear that his intent was to live for his full Biblical span of eight hundred years and to write a volume about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin every year. He’d have slowly worked his way through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, we’d have read about their adventures in sailing ships in the Great War, and rescuing people at Dunkirk.”
“The first step — and I can’t emphasize this too much for anyone who might be considering a similar move — was to hire a structural engineer. Putting this many books in an upstairs area is just asking for trouble. Books are heavy.”
“Tolkien had his beloved wife Edith. Sam had his Rose. But there is room, I think, for another kind of love, specific to both the real and invented worlds that Tolkien inhabited. A love that grew in extraordinary hardship, and ultimately could not survive outside of it; but that was deeply meaningful all the same.”
“Astell studied astronomy with John Flamsteed between 1697 and 1698, and her notes in Les Principes demonstrate that she had already attained a high level of understanding in the sciences prior to her formal studies with the Astronomer Royal.”
“The concern trolling book lovers miss the point that other people’s bookshelves don’t exist to please or displease them: they exist because the owner of the rainbow shelves likes their books to be that way.”
“To love a book is to constantly interrogate it. … Every time you pick up a book and it is set in another world, written long before some social changes have been made, you have to ask yourself whether or not it is problematic that the orcs are a certain color, or why the villain is disabled.”
“In a famous anecdote in the Confessions, Augustine describes seeing Ambrose of Milan reading on his own without making a sound. Ambrose was not the first person in history to read silently, but his quiet, private reading was unusual enough to make an impression.”