I’m not a big collector of quotes, so I took this week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt as a challenge to go through Goodreads looking at what quotes other people have liked from books I read recently, and pick my favourites. Let’s see…

1. “I missed you every hour. And you know what the worst part was? It caught me completely by surprise. I’d catch myself just walking around to find you, not for any reason, just out of habit, because I’d seen something that I wanted to tell you about or because I wanted to hear your voice. And then I’d realize that you weren’t there anymore, and every time, every single time, it was like having the wind knocked out of me. I’ve risked my life for you. I’ve walked half the length of Ravka for you, and I’d do it again and again and again just to be with you, just to starve with you and freeze with you and hear you complain about hard cheese every day. So don’t tell me why we don’t belong together.”
   -Mal to Alina in Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo. Because eeeh.
2. “Nobody’s lives just fit together. Fitting together is something you work at. It’s something you make happen – because you love each other.”
   -From Rainbow Rowell’s Landline. Because it’s true.
3. “Maybe I’ll post a consumer review. ‘Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped working. 0/10.’”
   -Mark Watney in Andy Weir’s The Martian. Because I know some people who would.
4. “I can’t give you the white picket fence, and if I did, you’d set it on fire.”
   -Curran to Kate in Magic Bleeds, by Ilona Andrews. Because I have a weakness for reading about relationships like that.
5. “You can’t trust everything that ass Plato wrote,” Sokrates said.
   -From The Just City, by Jo Walton. Hear hear!
6. “Books… are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with ’em, then we grow out of ’em and leave ’em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.”
   -From The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, by Dorothy L. Sayers. Quite true!
7. “ ‘In our inmost and secret heart, which you ask us to bare to you, we wish to banish them as we were banished, to a cold and lonely house, in the charge of a man who hated us. And we wish them trapped there as we were trapped.’
   ‘You consider that unjust, Serenity?’
   ‘We consider it cruel,’ Maia said. ‘And we do not think that cruelty is ever just.’ ”
   -From The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison. Pretty much sums up exactly why I loved the book.
8. “In everyone’s life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.”
   -From Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Truth.
9. “The most important thing is to be true to yourself, however you feel, and not try to feel or behave differently because you think you should, or someone has told you how you must feel. But do think about it. Unexamined feelings lead to all kinds of trouble.”
   -From Clariel, by Garth Nix. Because it’s a good point.
10. “A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.”
    -From The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, by Catherynne M. Valente. Just one wise snippet from a book with quite a few wise things to say!

I’ll be interested to see what other people have come up with — and how they came up with them! I just used Goodreads and browsed through quotes which obviously have already been thought significant by previous readers…

This week’s theme is about book to movie adaptations, and I’m not that interested in cinema. So instead I’m going to talk about what I’d like to see adapted into audiobook format, with a full cast!

1. The later Dark is Rising sequence books, Susan Cooper. Preferably with the original cast from the BBC adaptation of the first two, but the kids will all have grown up and some of the actors might even be retired or dead, so I’m aware this is totally mad.
2. Sunshine, Robin McKinley. Come on, it’d be amazing. And they could have the sound effects of the kitchen work and make everyone hungry.
3. Chalice, Robin McKinley. I love this even more than Sunshine. You could do this really well as something short and atmospheric, I think…
4. Ben Aaronovitch’s books. I have no idea if a full casGt audio adaptation exists, but it would be awesome if it did.
5. Seaward, Susan Cooper. It’d be beautiful, I think. You wouldn’t need a big cast — keep it minimal. Five or six actors.
6. Anything by Patricia McKillip. It might make them more accessible to an audience who don’t so much like her prose style!
7. Gifts, Ursula Le Guin. With the oral storytelling stuff in this trilogy, surely this’d make a good one.

And existing ones which I need to listen to include the BBC’s versions of Neverwhere and Good Omens, and Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint. If they’re not perfect, they can go down as numbers 8-10!

Of the options for this week, the theme is “Top Ten Debut Authors Who Have Me Looking Forward To Their Sophomore Novel” or “Top Ten Sophomore Novels That I Loved Just As Much If Not More As The Author’s Debut”. Because I’m fickle, I’m going to do this one somewhat randomly based on both prompts.

1. Pacific Fire, Greg van Eekhout. I wasn’t sure about California Bones, but Pacific Fire won me over and I just had to get Dragon Coast.
2. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien. I mean, The Hobbit was okay, but I think it’s The Lord of the Rings that really cemented Tolkien’s reputation.
3. Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch. Every subsequent book has made me more of a fan of the series.
4. Crown of Midnight, Sarah J. Maas. I wasn’t sure if I was into the series until I read Crown of Midnight.
5. Red Seas Under Red Skies, Scott Lynch. I loved The Lies of Locke Lamora, and I wasn’t sure if Lynch could keep it up. He could.
6. The Wrong Goodbye, Chris F. Holm. I was worried the second book would be too much like the first, that the fun wouldn’t hold out. It did!
7. Huntress, Malinda Lo. I liked this waaaay more than Ash.
8. The Blasted Lands, James A. Moore. This is a second book that I’m looking forward to. I know it’s out and has been a while. Shush. I’m behind.
9. Jacqueline Koyanagi. There’s gonna be more after Ascension, right? Right??
10. Seth Dickinson. Gimme more Baru!

I’m really bad at keeping track of debut authors and so on, so I’m gonna be interested to see what other people have come up with this week. Maybe I’d better keep some paper at the ready for taking notes…

This week’s prompt from Top Ten Tuesdays is a seasonal one — a Hallowe’en themed freebie. So here’s some things that scare me in books… perhaps not all traditionally scary.

1. When you just know a character is going to make the wrong decision. You know better than them, or you’re just smarter than them, and you can see them about to make a big mistake…
2. Tense moments in books in third person/multiple first person. You know the character can actually die, because they haven’t had to survive to tell you the story!
3. Knowing something a character doesn’t. Especially when there’s miscommunication going on. This one ranges from heartbreaking to embarrassing…
4. Temptation. You know, like Frodo with the One Ring. Gaaah. You can’t help them because they’re allegedly not real. You just have to watch.
5. Atmospheric moments. Suddenly, you’re getting a description of the weather, the atmosphere, the darkness pooling between the street lights…
6. When you know an author is not afraid to kill characters. Scott Lynch, I can’t trust you.
7. When a character betrays principles for a dubious higher cause. Aka the entirety of The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Gah.
8. Revelation to another character. “I accidentally killed your best friend and we fell in love and now I’m telling you that and you’re going to hate me.”
9. Misunderstandings. Like the above, only someone doesn’t stay to hear the full story, or somehow something else garbles the story.
10. That moment when you hear it’s going to be a movie. Right?

Yep, I’m a giant wuss and I’m not really into actually scary books, so a Hallowe’en theme for me was a bit of a stretch!