#bookception

When I turned to the dedication page my breath seized at the stark precision of its single sentence: To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead of enslaved.

Story idea 10

Love without truth is hypocrisy. Truth without love is brutality.

Derek didn’t know exactly when it happened, but he was in the middle before he even realized he had begun.

A young man walks into Longbourn Library with his borrowed copy of The Hunger Games, then hesitates to put it in the return box. There is a particular look on the boy’s face: captivated. I often see that look of being transformed by what one has just read. I help him locate Catching Fire, the next installment in the series, and he reads ten pages before his mom forces him to check it out and take it home. I know he will be back in the next two days—he will walk to the library if he must—to get Mockingjay and finish out the series. That is the enchantment books hold over us readers. When we see a room full of books, we do not see stacks of paper bound together. We sense magic.