“Youth isn't wasted on the young, literature is.”

Quirky literature, perhaps more than most. This past year has been light on quirky reads. I’ve expanded the list to include a few that evoke the peculiar rather than the zany.

Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
“You need a cemetery to go through life.”

Be Frank with Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
“Sometimes just explaining your predicament--to a bartender, a priest, the old woman in a shift and flip-flops cleaning the lint traps in the Laundromat dryers--is all it takes to see a way out of it.”

Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson
“It amazed Izzy the way the children rushed through so many complicated emotions without space between each one. Everything rose so quickly to the surface and then subsided, like firecrackers, and what had originally been so jarring to her, their unguarded emotion, now filled her with great comfort, that anything, no matter what it was, would eventually give way to something else.”

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
“Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon . . . is not the dragon the hero of his own story?”

The Weight of Feathers by Anna-Marie McLemore
“The sense of falling did not touch her, not as long as her body was between the hands of this boy who felt steadier in the air than on the ground.”