..books like men...

"A passionate woman, I like my men and books to knock my socks off. It's got to be love at first sight. I need to be bowled over by an author's insight, to wonder how I lived before the book explained it all to me, or how the author knew me so well.

In reality, while there is often a mystical bond between writer and reader, the author is just trying to figure out his or her own life, on the page, not mine. But as the Irish poet W.B. Yeats once told an admirer of his work, 'If what I say resonates with you, it's merely because we are both branches on the same tree.'

So it is with this book. The wonderful writer Katherine Paterson has observed that part of the magic of books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else's life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn't been able to see before."- Sarah Ban Breathnach in Something More.