Alphareader - Danielle Binks

When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

'East of Eden' by John Steinbeck

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides  

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

'East of Eden' by John Steinbeck

The last thing he ever said to me was, "Just always be waiting for me, and then some night you will hear me crowing."

'Peter Pan' by J.M. Barrie 

“I am haunted by humans.”

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Book launch in the time of COVID! Wasn’t exactly what I’d planned, but it was still joyous and exciting!