Lines in Books

One thing Natalie had never wondered about until now: After the explosion of tributes, then what? Who picked up the wilted flowers, the rain-soaked poems, the blurred photos, the jarred candles?
After a woman's mother dies along with the man who was about to propose marriage to her, she is forced to pick up the pieces. She gives up her job that provides more stability than joy, and heads back to her childhood home where her mother ran a bookshop and her grandfather, now beginning to suffer from dementia, continues live. There's a pile of work to be done there, getting the bookshop's finances in order and keeping the building from falling apart both of which she manages to do with help. Not for nothing, in the course of the repairs, the building reveals its secrets: keepsakes hidden in its crevices by former occupants including a rare set of books which ultimately acts as a saviour.

"I'm the armarius, in charge of the scriptorium and the library." "Is it a big library?" "We have eight books, but when I get home we'll have sixteen. And the scriptorium consists of me and an assistant, Brother Tatwine. He colors the capital letters. I do the plain writing—I'm more interested in words than colors."
A prequel to The Pillars of the Earth, the author talks about how Kingsbridge priory came to be from uninspiring beginnings thanks to the vision, generosity, and hard work of a few people despite odds that often seemed all but insurmountable. Also, an interesting study of how justice is all too often superseded by expediency and power. Even so, justice sometimes triumphs in the long run.

There are patterns to life... Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. A young woman with more regrets than she can easily keep track of, the bulk of which seem to be not fulfilling others' dreams for her, snaps under the weight of her burdens and tries to kill herself. She winds up not quite dead and being given the opportunity to see what her life would have looked like had she made other choices only to discover that she does make a difference, and that the life she tried to escape is the one she wants.

I know now that burning out is when a longer struggle gives way to a relentless, unstoppable assault, like a rock's face being worn down by erosion. You emerge with your contours hewn differently and something else inside transfigured. Some of these changes are welcome, but others can leave you grieving for the self you have lost.A woman and her husband move away from London to an island in Scotland. There, their marriage falls apart, and he leaves her to live alone and be reshaped by the loss of love, by local traditions, and by the land itself into a more resilient person than perhaps she herself knew she could become.

Memory is not to be trusted. It's as mendacious as the shimmer on the surface of a placid lake. Providing an illusion of calm, while beyond the sunless depths the sand and silt are littered with rocks and the debris of life. And there within the roots of a drowned tree, a pike lurks with hate in its unseeing eyes.
A man remembers being abused by his mother, and reconnects with his older brother whom he had forgotten. His brother too had been abused, and had run away from home as a child only to find himself in the hands of traffickers.

Coming at us like this—in waves, massed and unbreachable—knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment—becomes bad knowledge—so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness. [....] In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence. [....] If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance.
A television series made in America and aired in Japan to sell US meat there winds up becoming the unlikely vehicle through which lives are changed, and authenticity is found in the fabulist.

I'd much rather know, but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.
A woman in Canada finds a diary by a teenaged girl living in Japan washed up on the shore along with some family heirlooms. She reads the diary, and although the two never meet, their lives seem to become entwined with each other... and, at one point, the woman finds herself wondering if she is a creation of the girl's pen. "Agency," as one of the characters says, "is a tricky business."