SPEAKING FROM AMONG THE BONES: A Flavia de Luce Novel by Alan Bradley

"When they finally saw the light, I might even become something of a village heroine, with banquets, etc. held in my honor, with after-dinner speeches by Father, the vicar, the bishop, and, yes, perhaps even by Magistrate Ridley-Smith himself, thanking me for my dogged persistence, and so forth.

     I believe Daffy referred to such an extravagant outpouring of praise as an encomium, and I realized that I had not been given an encomium for a very long while."

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"Neither of us spoke a word and we didn’t need to. We stood there clinging to each other like squids, damp, quivering, and unhappy."

DON'T GET TOO COMFORTABLE by David Rakoff

"It is not the fault of South Beach that I am a joy-obliterating erotophobe. That it comprises some of my deepest aversions (heat, direct sunlight, and a pervasive sense of fun) while lacking many of my most cherished requirements in a destination (occasional rain, the generally suppressive influence of the superego, and a melancholic populace prone to making monochrome woodcuts of hollow-eyed women sitting disconsolate in shabby rooms with their meager suppers on tin plates before them) is nobody's problem but my own. And it's a problem that I will have to keep to myself this weekend as I work the pool at one of Miami's hiply refurbished art deco hotels—the Hiawatha, let's call it."