Lezersrecensie
A slow start but fiery ending!
“In you I see a spark like no other, and when you’re growing en, I hope it will become such a light that it will show us a way out.”
Review ,75
A story about a magic library, a library so big you just can’t wrap your head around it and where time is behaving differently. A library where all the knowledge the world needs is stored, but not accessible to everyone.
When I saw these gorgeous book and read the synopsis I just had to have them! And know I’ve finally read the first book.
Although it took some getting used to, the writing style, the world-building and magic of the library, I really enjoyed this story! It’s just so beautifully written, sometimes almost poetic.
It’s a thick book and you really need your concentration while reading it. But when you have that, you’re reading such a beautiful story about different worlds that collide and work together to make the world better. I’m definitely looking forward to reading the second book! Which is, thankfully for my poor hands/wrist, a lot less thick
Some of my favorite quotes:
There are no useless skills, girl. Only talents that have yet to find and application.
We humans are herd animals. When several gather to browse in one spot, more will come. Few places offer more eloquent testimony to this fact than does a library, wherein our focus ensures some few books scarcely touch the shelves from the moment of their binding until the day they fall apart from overuse. Whilst all around, in sullen silence, the unloved show their spines in endless rows, aching for the touch that never comes.
Like all hunters, sorrow advances on slow, silent feet, until the last moment when it attacks from cover, springing with such speed that the impact rocks its victim on their heels.
The scent of old glue, of polished leather, dry parchment, the mustiness in the air as the spores of a thousand molds and fungi sought purchase: it was the aroma of time itself, the scent passing years. And when you opened a book, especially one that had waited lifetimes for someone to turn its cover, that first breath was of something new, almost individual.
Rather like when it came to choosing a new book from the stacks. The knowledge that he couldn’t possibly read all the books on offer put a peculiar pressure on choosing his next read. There must be diamonds out there, the best book in a thousand the best book in a million, and surely he didn’t want to waste his time reading one that was merely adequate when he could be reading one of those diamonds? So instead, he often wasted his time hunting for a read instead of reading.
All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.
He said a story is a net. It can capture something as large as the spirit of the age or as small as the emotion of a man watching the last leaf fall from a tree, or sometimes both, and make one a reflection of the other.
How it might be possible for two sets of eyes to witness the same events and later give accounts at odds with each other.
Somehow the stories that never happened, ones that merely sprang from the dreaming of some long-dead author, were more true than the histories that might be found on the opposite shelf.
Truth, it was often said in the library, was stranger than fiction.
Although she would never admit it to any fellow librarians, Livira liked to sniff the books she carried back into the vastness of the library.
Things are so easy to see once you’ve been shown them. You can look forever and not find what you’re hunting. See something every day and not really see it. And then…
It’s always the books you don’t have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones already on your shelf. They can wait.
The key to any mystery is in the threads, however faint, that join its pieces.
Do what you will with him then. But hear me on this one thing. You understand me - so you must understand that I will burn everything down before I let you hurt her.
Where are you going? To break some more rules. Coming?
Are you even you, or just the story you’re telling about yourself? We’re all the story we tell about ourselves, silly.
Thank you for trying to save me, my love. But don’t forget to save yourself.
Review ,75
A story about a magic library, a library so big you just can’t wrap your head around it and where time is behaving differently. A library where all the knowledge the world needs is stored, but not accessible to everyone.
When I saw these gorgeous book and read the synopsis I just had to have them! And know I’ve finally read the first book.
Although it took some getting used to, the writing style, the world-building and magic of the library, I really enjoyed this story! It’s just so beautifully written, sometimes almost poetic.
It’s a thick book and you really need your concentration while reading it. But when you have that, you’re reading such a beautiful story about different worlds that collide and work together to make the world better. I’m definitely looking forward to reading the second book! Which is, thankfully for my poor hands/wrist, a lot less thick
Some of my favorite quotes:
There are no useless skills, girl. Only talents that have yet to find and application.
We humans are herd animals. When several gather to browse in one spot, more will come. Few places offer more eloquent testimony to this fact than does a library, wherein our focus ensures some few books scarcely touch the shelves from the moment of their binding until the day they fall apart from overuse. Whilst all around, in sullen silence, the unloved show their spines in endless rows, aching for the touch that never comes.
Like all hunters, sorrow advances on slow, silent feet, until the last moment when it attacks from cover, springing with such speed that the impact rocks its victim on their heels.
The scent of old glue, of polished leather, dry parchment, the mustiness in the air as the spores of a thousand molds and fungi sought purchase: it was the aroma of time itself, the scent passing years. And when you opened a book, especially one that had waited lifetimes for someone to turn its cover, that first breath was of something new, almost individual.
Rather like when it came to choosing a new book from the stacks. The knowledge that he couldn’t possibly read all the books on offer put a peculiar pressure on choosing his next read. There must be diamonds out there, the best book in a thousand the best book in a million, and surely he didn’t want to waste his time reading one that was merely adequate when he could be reading one of those diamonds? So instead, he often wasted his time hunting for a read instead of reading.
All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.
He said a story is a net. It can capture something as large as the spirit of the age or as small as the emotion of a man watching the last leaf fall from a tree, or sometimes both, and make one a reflection of the other.
How it might be possible for two sets of eyes to witness the same events and later give accounts at odds with each other.
Somehow the stories that never happened, ones that merely sprang from the dreaming of some long-dead author, were more true than the histories that might be found on the opposite shelf.
Truth, it was often said in the library, was stranger than fiction.
Although she would never admit it to any fellow librarians, Livira liked to sniff the books she carried back into the vastness of the library.
Things are so easy to see once you’ve been shown them. You can look forever and not find what you’re hunting. See something every day and not really see it. And then…
It’s always the books you don’t have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones already on your shelf. They can wait.
The key to any mystery is in the threads, however faint, that join its pieces.
Do what you will with him then. But hear me on this one thing. You understand me - so you must understand that I will burn everything down before I let you hurt her.
Where are you going? To break some more rules. Coming?
Are you even you, or just the story you’re telling about yourself? We’re all the story we tell about ourselves, silly.
Thank you for trying to save me, my love. But don’t forget to save yourself.
1
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