Jen's Book Thoughts: They Said What?

Since I was in L.A. last Sunday, I didn't have a chance to post my favorite lines of April. So, I'll post it today, just a tad bit late. I didn't fit in as much reading last month, but I still found some great lines to share with you.

First up are a few lines from Andrew Gross's new thriller RECKLESS. I think Andrew did an amazing job of creating images that truly represent the fear and destruction of terrorism in this day and age. His choice of imagery is a big part of what made RECKLESS so powerful. The following are some of the excerpts that had tremendous impact on me:

"If he had ever been worth saving, the statute of limitations had long run out. The pieces of his soul had scattered across the globe. Like an F5 blowing into town. Leveling most everything. Scattering the rest."
"'What if there were people on an organized basis, people of influence,' she suggested, 'who wanted to do our country systemic harm, using a new strategy, a 'change of direction,' as they referred to it.' She steeled herself, 'Not by flying a plane through our tallest buildings, like before, but by driving one figuratively, sir, through the heart of our most vital national asset. The root of everything we stand for.'"
"The triumph that comes after a bloody battle. Where it's hard to tell who has won and who has lost."

I finished Don Winslow's POWER OF THE DOG and I know I've peppered the last few favorite lines posts with excerpts from this book. Had I been reading a print copy and not listening on audio, I may have had even more lines. Winslow never ceases to amaze me with his pen. But the fact that I recalled so many of these to look them up and include them, I think says a lot about the writing in this book. The final line I'm including is:

"I'm a farmer in fields of the dead. The barren crop I cultivate with only a scythe. My landscape of devastation."

And finally, I have a few lines from Michael Koryta's SO COLD THE RIVER, which is due out in June. You'll hear a lot more about the book later, but overall, the writing in this book is amazing and I didn't think there was another level Koryta could reach in his writing but he proved me wrong with this masterpiece. Here are a couple sneak peaks:

"Artifacts of their ambition. Only through study of those things could you truly understand people long departed. General artifacts could be over-analyzed, layered with undue importance. It was critical to find things that indicated ambitions and aspirations, that tired bit about hopes and dreams. The reality of someone's heart lay in the objects of their desires. Whether those things were achieved did not matter nearly so much as understanding what they had been."
"The train had seemed faster than anything to her that day, dazzling in its speed. There were race cars that went faster than the train, though, and planes that went faster than the cars, and rockets that went faster than the planes, but what still blew them all away was time itself, the days and months and the years, oh, yes, the years. They went faster than anything man had the capacity to invent, so fast that for a while they fooled you into thinking they were slow, and was there any crueler trick than that?"

And finally, it's subtle lines like this one that always make me devour Koryta's work. This is a line that could easily be overlooked by someone reading too quickly or God-forbid, scanning:

"The visitor got out, a man with short hair of a color that had gotten confused somewhere between blond and brown."

I just love that image.

One last thing I'd like to mention in this post today is a book I received in the mail this week. It was put together by Brad Meltzer for his son and it is stunningly beautiful. HEROES FOR MY SON. I've added the book jacket photo to this post, but I assure you it doesn't do this book justice. I wasn't expecting to receive this book, but when it arrived I couldn't stop looking at it. I'm reading the stories inside and learning many things I never knew, feeling inspired and just smiling an awful lot. The day after I received the book, I took it to work because I wanted people I work with to see this, too. In a day and age where I think our heroes are chosen for the wrong reasons, I'm encouraged by this book. I have to say that I'm incredibly thankful that Brad didn't save this exclusively for his son, but shared it with the world. We can all stand to be reminded of these heroes. They span genders, races, religions, even political parties. I don't have children myself, but I have a lot of people I'm planning to bestow this book on. I hope everyone will take time to look at this book and open their hearts and their minds.

I also wanted to share this short little video I found about the book on Brad's website. It talks about how this book came to be. I enjoyed hearing about it, so I thought you might as well: