Closing Lines

The good thing about living a solitary life is that I can freely devote most of my spare time to reading. Though I spend lots of time devouring books, I am still far from finishing all of the titles included in my reading list. Twenty-seven percent of the total – that’s how far I am. What’s funny is that my list of “books to read” lengthens faster than my list of “books that have been read.”

Below are the titles and authors of the books that I’ve read for the past two months (May 1 to 29 June). I've also quoted the closing lines of each book for such lines say more about the book’s power and beauty than any description I can give.

• Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
  Ishmael gave himself to the writing of it, and as he did so he understood this, too: that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.
• Paris Trout by Pete Dexler
  And she would lie in the dark until morning sometimes, wondering which one of them it was.
• The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
  And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
• Candide by Voltaire
  “All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.”
• Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra
  And I shall remain satisfied, and proud to have been the first who has ever enjoyed the fruit of his writings as fully as he could desire; for my desire has been no other than to deliver over to the detestation of mankind the false and foolish tales of the books of chivalry, which, thanks to that of my true Don Quixote, are even now tottering, and doubtless doomed to fall for ever. Farewell.
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
  But I shielded it with my hand and it burned again to light me along the dark passage.
• My Antonia by Willa Cather
  Fortunate country,that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!
• Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
  The children were sleepy, and morning would dawn as early and demanding as always. Time to go inside and cover up the coals and pull in the latch string.
• Starting Out in the Evening by Brian Morton
  But as she waited, holding her lover’s hand, she found herself thinking that she wouldn’t mind if it never appeared: the night was astonishing already, just as it was.
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.