"The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry"

It's ridiculous that this pleasant tale should keep me up at night, but the more I fixated on Maya's mom's tragic fate, the more I disliked what the author Gabrielle Zevin arranged for her.

• No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World
• I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be.
• made that big dandelion of a girl cry
• No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset.
• The kind of hotshot literary fiction that, like, follows some unimportant supporting character for a bit so it looks all Faulkneresque and expansive. But this . . . is feeling more like a novel to me after all. Emotionally, I mean.
• I loathe collectible books anyway. People getting all moony over particular paper carcasses.
• Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.
• [Translation: Since I have no investment in the outcome of this situation, it costs me nothing to be optimistic.]
• A.J. runs their credit cards and concludes that a theft is an acceptable social loss while a death is an isolating one.
• Pregnant, she is like a very pretty Gollum.
• A.J. nods out of politeness, but he doesn’t believe in random acts. He is a reader, and what he believes in is narrative construction.
• If Jenny were a book, she would be a paperback just out of the box—no dog ears, no waterlogging, no creases in her spine. A.J. would prefer a social worker with some obvious wear.
• For a while, the circle responds to contemporary stories about overly capable women trapped in troubled marriages;... In April, The Paris Wife. In June, A Reliable Wife. In August, American Wife. In September, The Time Traveler’s Wife.
• People should have backups.
• “So it’s basically like a book party.”
• And your whole life is determined by what store you get left in.
• She turns to walk back to the ferry, and one important second later he turns to walk to the bookstore.
• Pretty much every bad thing in life is a result of bad timing, and every good thing is the result of good timing.
• He is fascinated by the Amelianess of the things in the frame behind her: {an 'Enhance' moment}
• As Leon Friedman (Leonora Ferris?) once wrote, “A good marriage is, at least, one part conspiracy.”
• Amy turns the bottle over and reads the bottom: A Good Man-darin Is Hard to Find.
• A.J. has often reflected that, bit by bit, all the best things in the world are being carved away like fat from meat.
• Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.
• A question I’ve thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/ acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.
• “Poor Amy.” “Yes, before I was a bookseller’s wife. That was pitiable enough. Soon I’ll be the bookseller’s widow.”
• We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.