From the Bookshelf of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge…

These are not our faces. This is not what we look like.

He was there. He saw it happen. He knows whose reflection they saw in the mirror that night.

People think, wrongly, that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn’t—or if it is, it tends to do a rotten job of it. Futures are huge things that come with many elements and a billion variables, and the human race has a habit of listening to predictions for what the future will bring and then doing something quite different. What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future, but the present. Taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It’s cautionary.

You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of the leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page.

Like you, I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard Amanda Palmer had been killed.

Once upon a time, back when animals spoke and rivers sang and every quest was worth going on, back when dragons still roared and maidens were beautiful and an honest young man with a good heart and a great deal of luck could always wind up with a princess and half the kingdom—back then, fairy tales were for adults.

Hope Mirrlees only wrote one fantasy novel, but it is one of the finest in the English language.

This is a very poor introduction to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (whose name rhymes, by the way, with quarrel, or with sorrel, the way Susanna Clarke pronounces it),

Who am I?
It’s a fine and legitimate question, one that haunted me when I was a boy. I would stare into the bathroom mirror and do my best to answer it, teasing information from my reflection, hoping for a clue.

I want to describe Amanda Palmer, half of art-punk cabaret-rock band The Dresden Dolls, in a way that makes her seem like something exotic, but truly, it’s hard for me to think of Amanda Palmer as exotic

And it’s easy to be cynical about death when you’re young. When you are young, death is an anomaly. It’s not real. It only affects other people. It’s a bullet you’ll dodge easily. It’s why young people can go into battle: they really will live forever. They know.

As you stick around, as you go around the Earth, you realize that life is an ever-narrowing conveyor belt. Slowly, inexorably, it takes us all along with it, and one by one we tumble off the sides of the conveyor belt into darkness.

I want to tell you about my friend Terry Pratchett, and it’s not easy. I’m going to tell you something you may not know.

Some people have encountered an affable man with a beard and a hat. They believe they have met Sir Terry Pratchett. They have not.

... But beneath any jollity there is a foundation of fury. Terry Pratchett is not one to go gentle into any night, good or otherwise. He will rage, as he leaves, against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness, not just the dying of the light, although that’s here too.