Alphareader - Danielle Binks

When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you're born with, and eventually lose. Everyone under the age of seven is fluent in 'ifspeak'; go hang around with someone under three feet tall and you'll see. What if a giant funnelweb spider crawled out of that hole over your head and bit you on the neck? What if the only antidote for venom was locked up in a vault on the top of a mountain? What if you lived through the bite, but could only move your eyelids and blink the alphabet? It doesn't really matter how far you go; the point is that it's a world of possibility. Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

'My sister's Keeper' Jodi Picoult 

Matt Ryan Tobin has released The Faculty artist proofs for $125. Limited to 30, the 24x36 screen print features glow-in-the-dark red ink. It comes with a 10x10 hand-embellished giclee print and "I'm Discontent" sticker (both pictured below).

I fall in love with these kids over and over again and my heart aches for their tragedies and marvels at their friendship.

'On the Jellicoe Road' by Melina Marchetta

I love you.

OUTLANDER | Brotherly Love (7.10)

Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only ever found sorrow.

'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver 

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

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