Forest Park Reads

“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”

-Calvin Trillin

About Alice

Deadline Poet

American Fried

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”

-Howard Nemerov

Figures of Thought

A Commodity of Dreams

Gnomes & Occasions

“Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.”

-Art Spiegelman

Maus

In the Shadow of No Towers

Breakdowns

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

-Frederick Douglass

Escape From Slavery

The Autobiographies

My Bondage and My Freedom

“She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds.” 

-Shannon Hale

The Actor and the Housewife

Austenland

Book of a Thousand Days

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

-Charles Dickens

“The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.”

-Margaret Atwood

The Blind Assassin

Oryx & Crake

The Tent

“Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.”

-Alberto Manguel

All Men Are Liars

The Library At Night

A Reader On Reading

“Books have to be heavy because the whole world’s inside them.”

-Cornelia Funke

Dragon Heart

Inkdeath

Ghost Knight

“You’re a library of me.” 

-Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man

On Beauty

White Teeth

Changing My Mind