Yesterday, I reviewed The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry – a book I absolutely loved! I knew I wanted to use some quotes from the book in my review, but as I was writing it, I realized that including everything I wanted would make the review a mile long! There are so many gems (mostly courtesy of A.J.) in this book that I decided the best quotes deserved their very own post!

Here we go…

On books and reading:

“How about I tell you what I don’t like?” I do not like postmodernism, post-apocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. […] I do not like anything over 400 pages or under 150 pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and – I imagine this goes without saying – vampires.

“Do you like Moby Dick?”, he asks. “I hate it,” she says. “And I don’t say that about many things. Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of ‘quality.’ But it’s forcing kids to read books like that that make them think they hate reading.”

But then novella is something of a gray area. Still, if you find yourself among the kind of people who bother to make such distinctions – and I used to be that type of person – it is best that you know the difference. (If you end up going to an ivy league college, you are likely to run into such people. Arm yourself with knowledge against this bumptious lot. But I digress.)

But me-also-thinks my latter-day reaction speaks to the necessity of encountering stories at precisely the right time in our lives. […]  the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.

Lovely twist, more like a turn, at the end. You’re a good reader, and you’ll probably see it coming. (Is a twist less satisfying if you know it’s coming? Is a twist that you can’t predict symptomatic of bad construction? These are things to consider when writing.)

As a bookseller, I assure you that prizewinning can be somewhat important for sales but rarely matters much in terms of quality.

A place is not really a place without a bookstore.

On life:

I’m not what you’d call an alcoholic, but I do like to drink until I pass out at least once a week. I smoke occasionally and I subsist on a diet of frozen entrees. I rarely floss. I used to be a long-distance runner, but now I don’t exercise at all. I live alone and I lack meaningful personal relationships. Since my wife died, I hate my work, too.

No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset. No one cares why a thirty-nine-year-old man has thrown a plastic tub of vindaloo across the room like a toddler.

The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.

You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?