Alphareader - Danielle Binks

Life was a too-tall stack of books that had started to lean to one side, and each new day was another book on top.

‘Goodbye Stranger’ by Rebecca Stead

Odysseus had twenty years to shed his battle skin. My grandfather left the battlefield in France and rode home in a ship that crawled across the ocean slowly so he could catch his breath. I get on a plane in hell and get off, hours later, at home.

‘The Impossible Knife of Memory’ by Laurie Halse Anderson

"Every time he looked at me I felt like I'd touched my tongue to the tip of a battery. In art class I'd watch him lean back and listen and I was nothing but zing and tingle. After a while, the tingle turned to electricity, and when he asked me out my whole body amped to a level where technically I should have been dead. I had nothing in common with a sheddy like him, but a girl doesn't think straight when she's that close to electrocution."

'Graffiti Moon' by Cath Crowley 

oh my goddd i am fucking oBSESSED with this art for the ministry of time seriously i need y'all to please read this book. i need y'all to swoon over graham gore with me. it's not just a gorgeous romance novel, nor just a spy thriller, nor just a fantastic twist on time travel, nor just a way to obsess over the franklin expedition (for all you the terror girlies) but an incredible evisceration of the british empire that follows a British-Cambodian character by a British-Cambodian author. just. GOD. and graham gore is so dreamy. have i said that yet? he’s so dreamy and i adore the narrator (she’s a crunchy character with some incredible flaws and i adore her for them) and it's so good. 5/5 stars. if i could give it more i would. (also contrary to what i'd said before based on what i'd heard, it does end happily imo!)

Suzanne collins wrote a trilogy where a main media propaganda strategy was to market a horrific act of violence as a love story to distract ppl and then it got adapted into a box office breaking movie and ppl made it all about the love triangle. so then since they didn’t get the point the first time Suzanne collins wrote a prequel story about the main dictator and she makes it so that you as a reader want it to be a genuine love story so badly even tho it’s so very clearly not and instead feels extremely unsettling to make her point even more meta which then gets adapted into another box office breaking film and now ppl are making romantic snowbaird tik toks. do u think she’s gonna write another book that’s somehow even more blatant or just give up and start executing ppl? hard to say but I wouldn’t blame her for the second one

Without a keeper of words, stories tumble and fall, eventually melting into the ether, never to be heard of again. Stories link us to our mob, doesn't matter if you are Koorie, Irish, Kiwi, Welsh or Indian. It’s the listening and telling of these stories that bring our people close, both young and old. Stories keep our culture and our faith alive.

'Grace Beside Me' by Sue McPherson 

Poem by Palestinian-American poet and reporter, Noor Hindi. What’s happening right now is atrocious and terrifying. Raise up Palestinian voices, listen.

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

'White Oleander' by Janet Fitch