Quotes from Nancy Pearl

Simply adored Timothy Schaffert's The Coffins of Little Hope: the voice of Essie, the narrator, is terrific & the last line blew me away.

If you're 50 years old or younger, give every book about 50 pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up. If you're over 50, which is when time gets shorter, subtract your age from 100 - the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding whether or not to quit. If you're 100 or over you get to judge the book by its cover, despite the dangers in doing so.

I have for a long time felt that our society is becoming more and more fractured and divisive and that you could go a whole day without really talking to another person. If you give people a good book to talk about, you can build a community out of a diverse group. A common language grows out of it.

I just said, 'Well, the real people performing miracles every day are librarians,' and we all laughed ourselves off our chairs.

Book lust forever!

Whenever I begin reading a new book, I am embarking on a new, uncharted journey with an unmarked destination. I never know where a particular book will take me, toward what other books I will be led.

If you still don't like a book after slogging through the first 50 pages, set it aside. If you're more than 50 years old, subtract your age from 100 and only grant it that many pages.

I can relate to the novelist Carrie Brown...who described herself as being 'a promiscuous reader.' I'll give almost any book a chance to have its way with me.

One of my top ten favorite novels in any category is Stephanie Plowman's The Road to Sardis, a heartbreaking retelling of the events of the Peloponnesian War, which broke out in 431 B.C. between longtime rivals Athens and Sparta, and lasted for twenty-seven years.

Girl discovers reading, then discovers life.

One of the most intricate Cold War spy novels I've ever read is David Quammen's The Soul of Viktor Tronko, based on the real-life case of a Cold War–era Russian defector who tells his debriefers that a Russian agent has infiltrated the upper echelons of the CIA.

The Last Canyon by John Vernon is a beautiful retelling of John Wesley Powell's 1869 exploration of the Grand Canyon and his and his men's inevitable and tragic clash with a tribe of Paiute Indians who lived on the canyon's northern edge.

To read Hotel Angeline is to celebrate how this diverse group of writers (and readers, all of them) can pool their talents and expertise to come up with such an entertaining and soul-satisfying novel.

Richard Rhodes's exceptionally readable The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the place to start. This sweeping chronicle of the difficult and sobering history of the endeavor called the Manhattan Project is marked by Rhodes's insightful studies of the complicated people who were most involved in the creation of the bomb, from Niels Bohr to Robert Oppenheimer. Rhodes followed this book with Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.

Undoubtedly, the place to start with Chinese fiction is with Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century classic, A Dream of Red Mansions, a sweeping epic about family life and Confucian practices in feudal China, including numerous subplots, a gazillion characters, and a touching love story.

Both Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae and Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War are well-told accounts of crucial events in Greek history.

John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in many ways defines the spy genre; it introduces the grand theme of ferreting out the Russian agent high up in British intelligence.

Three books set in Iran—first a novel about two lovers caught up in the Iranian Revolution, then two books about Iran since the Revolution: The Persian Bride by James Buchan The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran by Robin B. Wright Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Elaine Sciolino

Wild Life by Molly Gloss Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle

I believe reading is about experiencing joy, and that we learn something about ourselves, and the world, with every book we read, whether a romance, biography, mass-market thriller, or a literary novel. ...We may agree, or we may not, on what's a good book; readers differ all the time on the quality of a book. When it comes to reading, the only opinion that should matter is our own.

The best place to begin is with the Library of America's two-volume collection, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & 40s and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. Together they include all the major writers as well as bring some lesser-known authors to a wider audience. In general chronological order, here are some depths to which you can lower yourself:

Paul Cain is an early, influential figure in this genre, who is now quite hard to find even in used bookstores and libraries. His 1932 Fast One was a noir landmark; it

The Killer Inside Me is a chilling first-person story of an evil lawman, while Pop. 1280 is a strangely funny version of the same plot. Of all the noir writers, Thompson is the most popular today, in part because several of his novels, including The Grifters, were successfully adapted for film.

The three grand old men of Cuban literature are Alejo Carpentier (his masterpiece is The Lost Steps); José Lezama Lima (whose autobiographical novel Paradiso infuriated Castro); and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (the setting of his novel Three Trapped Tigers—pre-Castro Havana—reminded me of Oscar Hijuelos's A Simple Habana Melody From When the World Was Good).