KRCU's To Your Health

“The sun is leaving for the day, and I probably should too. I shouldn't be here at all. This has to stop, everyone says so. It's not healthy, Cady. It's not right. Not normal, not legal.”

“New Orleans - 1866. I had few pleasures to call my own. There was the peace found in the attic where I was made to board, the transporting comfort of the books in Mrs. Harper's library, the deliciousness of the sweet bread I purchased with my allowance from the bakery down the road each Sunday of rest. But all of it paled in comparison to the joy brought upon me by Oliver, the terrier I considered my own.”

“Thursday, December 27th, eleven p.m. Kuldesh Sharma hopes he's in the right place. He parks up at the end of the dirt track, hemmed in on all sides by trees, ghoulish in the darkness. He had finally made up his mind at about four this afternoon, sitting in the back room of his shop. The box was sitting on the table in front of him. He made two phone calls, and now here he is."

On a recent trip, I listened to the audiobook of Chris Bohjalian's civil war novel The Jackal's Mistress. Based on a real-life story, it presents an interesting dilemma... How much would you risk to help a wounded enemy?

“Sybil is a mother and grandmother, divorced, retired from a distinguished career in law, these things are all there around her. On Monday around ten or half past Sybil Van Antwerp sits down at her desk again. It is the correspondence that is her manner of living.”

“On February 19, 1963, a troublesome, imperfect, controversial woman named Betty Friedan published a troublesome, imperfect, controversial book titled “The Feminine Mystique.” The book didn't solve the problem. But it did put a name to it, shining a light that helped women who felt isolated and powerless find one another, and their voices.”

“A sleek black motorcar was edging its way through the crowds of passengers going toward the boat. It stopped when it was still a good ten yards away from her, and a woman got out at the passenger side with a canvas bag in her hand and a bundle in a blanket in the crook of her other arm. She was not young, sixty if she was a day.”

“Bethany Waites understands there is no going back now. Time to be brave, and to see how this all plays out. She weighs the bullet in her hand. Life is about understanding opportunities. Understanding how rarely they come along, and then rising to meet them when they do."

“A human life improved by a dog isn't just a theoretical concept. It's a real life event that happens a million times a day, all over the world.”

“There's an old saying about stories, and how there are always three versions of them: yours, mine and the truth. The guy who first said it worked in the film business, but it holds true for journalism too. We're not really supposed to take sides. We're supposed to deal in facts: Facts add up to truth.”

“Volterra. The ninth of April, 1478. They put her little brother in a cage. Her brother, who wasn't so little anymore, but because Ravenna Maffei was older, she would always think of him that way."

“His name was David Winkler and he was fifty-nine years old. This would be his first trip home in twenty-five years - if home was what he could still call it."

It's hard to find a truly funny book ...but this is one. If you love books, trivia contests and witty repartee, then you must read The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman.

In 2001, Geraldine Brooks, one of my favorite authors, published her first novel Year of Wonders. She wrote it after coming across an intriguing finger post in England pointing to the Plague Village.

If you're looking for a well written, World War II story, more fact than fiction, that illustrates the power of human goodness, then you must read The Ragged Edge of Night by Olivia Hawker.

If you're interested in the history of flight or love McCullough's writings, then you must read The Wright Brothers by David McCulllough.

"Any multinational organization can be cutthroat, but when the organization is made up of trained killers, the stakes are incalculably high."

“There is a place, hidden among the sweeping sandy swaths of southern desert, where all you can see is red. From above, it's a carpet of crimson, but as you lean closer, you see that it's not one singular sheet of color, but rows upon rows of distinct red dots. Like a wild field of poppies. Except it's nothing like that."

“Sometimes, in her sleepless hours, she watches the strips of moonlight slide across her bedroom ceiling, glances at that photograph, and thinks wistfully about the family she could have had, all the pictures of holidays that will never exist...."

“Salento, Italy, June 1934: A coach stops in the main square of Lizzanello, a tight-knit village where everyone knows one another. A couple gets off: the man, Carlo, is happy to be back home after a long time away; the woman, Anna - his wife - is a stranger from the North. Carlo's brother is there to meet them, and he and everyone else can't help but notice that Anna is as beautiful as a Greek statue.”

“Strange people often came to the farm, but they tended to be late risers, so Mad knew the first few hours would be easy…Now she looked up to see a car driving down the dirt road, a PT Cruiser, which was not a car that you saw in this area."

“It's one of the last days before Easter. Very soon Louisa is going to be thrown out of an art auction for vandalizing a valuable painting. Old ladies will shriek and the police will come and it really wasn't planned.”

“It is three p.m., and Elizabeth is carrying flowers for Marcus Carmichael. The dead man. That drowned body, suddenly alive as you like and living at 14 Ruskin Court. The man she saw lowered into a grave in a Hampshire churchyard, now unpacking boxes and struggling with his new Wi-Fi.”

“A dragon without its rider is a tragedy. A rider without their dragon is dead…Article One, Section One, The Dragon Rider's Codex...."

A stranger, Savannah, appears at Joy and Stan's door with a bloody forehead seeking shelter from an abusive boyfriend. They take her in and in exchange, Savannah cooks and cleans for them until a connection between her and the Delaney family is discovered. Then she disappears and foul play is suspected.

Salman Rushdie's newest novel Quichotte or in Spanish, Quixote is two stories, one of the author Sam DuChamp or Brother and the other of Ismail Smile, the main character in Brother's novel.

If you're a parent who has had similar work/family balancing issues, then you must read It. Goes. So. Fast. by NPR's Mary Louise Kelly.

“Later that day the cops would crawl over the intricacies of his life and discover he was into pirates because he had been born with only one eye."

“Killing someone is easy. Hiding the body, now, that's usually the hard part. That's how you get caught."

“Santa Monica, 1923. The plane rattled, as if with fever. The engine spit once, and then, like a ruptured heart, my Curtiss OX-5 engine burst, spewing hot oil from both sides of its chest."

“Louise. August 1975. The bed is empty. Louise, the counselor— twenty-three, short-limbed, rasp-voiced, jolly—stands barefoot on the warm rough planks of the cabin."

“To Emmett, all the houses in this part of the country looked like they'd been dropped from the sky. The Watson house just looked like it'd had a rougher landing. The roof line sagged on either side of the chimney and the window frames were slanted just enough that half the windows wouldn't quite open and the other half wouldn't quite shut. In another moment, they'd be able to see how the paint had been shaken right off the clapboard.”

“1 August 2023 4:34 p.m. There were only five minutes left for Joy Moody and her twin daughters."

“I mostly remember the trial,” she said. “And the aftermath - being taken into a room and asked to draw what happened."

“Lizzie pressed hard on the bridge of her nose, willing the numbers in front of her to change.”

“Many young authors finding themselves so satisfactorily situated would have waded into the choppy seas of their ambitions without a moment's delay...."

“There was a buzz of excitement when I arrived at my Harvard office on a June morning in 1972. Richard “Dick” Goodwin had just taken an office on the third floor."

“It's the crime of the decade! The early-morning headline explodes across my iPhone as I scan it through bleary eyes."

“The day Sloan Cooper died began before dawn and ended shortly before midnight. As a corporal in the Natural Resources Police, she'd helped take down a trio of men who spent most of the fall harassing, robbing and assaulting hikers on the trails in the Western Maryland mountains.”

“Theo couldn't imagine wanting anything in this sadness-infused pile of discards.... There were some old paperbacks slugged into a beer carton. He was always curious about what people read. He reached down to check the titles. And that is when he saw the horse.”

“Later, not a single person will recall seeing the lady board the flight at Hobart Airport."

“Phillip. The story begins before the reporters and the television correspondents flocked to interview the team."

“Day and Night, the final pages of “Clearly It Is Ocean” haunted me. I couldn't stop rereading them."

“April 6, 1865. Well, father, who won the majority? Emma or Mansfield Park? William Stevenson answered from behind his newspaper at the head of the breakfast table, “Emma, of course.”

“The monk heard that a ship had arrived carrying one of the dog-headed people whom travelers speak of when they tell tall tales of the one-eyed and the winged, and he went out to the docks to see if it was true.”

“As the fist in her belly pulled tighter, she bit her bottom lip. Ignoring the pain that rippled and receded, she tiptoed barefoot into the night."

"For years, Allina had begged her aunt and uncle for more information about her real parents. Your mother and father loved you very much, they'd always reply, but it's best to keep the past in the past.”

“One of the first bullets comes in through the open window above the toilet where Luca is standing. He doesn't immediately understand that it's a bullet at all, and it's only luck that it doesn't strike him between the eyes."

“And in northern Wisconsin, in the middle of the middle of nowhere, John Sawtelle and his new pup walked down a dirt road toward a farm that would turn out to be unoccupied and for sale."

“June sunshine poured over the street, the sounds of a jazz saxophone drifted over from next door, somewhere on Capitol Hill Senator McCarthy was waving lists of card-carrying American Commies, and a new guest had come to the Briarwood boardinghouse.”

“The Korowai Pass had been closed since the end of the summer, when a spate of shallow earthquakes triggered a landslide that buried a stretch of the highway in rubble."