"I read the great American “East of Eden,” strangely enough, during my first rail trip across Europe. After I completed each chapter I would rip the pages in a chunk from my paper back and leave them in whatever train car I was departing to lighten my load. There was something very comforting having something so American with me while being so far from home. The beauty of Steinbeck's language stays with you for years if not decades."

"The breathtaking beauty of Alameddine’s prose alone makes this compulsive reading. Its true genius, however, lies in the sacrosanct ideas that the narrator—a translator of books that will never be read—lays bare with humorous irreverence, wry insouciance, or intellectual outrage. She is fearless in looking at aging and death, the morality of war and survival, and the true meaning of a meaningful life. She also gives advice on not dying your hair blue in bad light."

"It’d be good to be reminded, as I pass my days sitting on a beach under a coconut tree, of all the life, all the beauty and sorrow, all the mystery; all that can be contained within a relatively modest number of pages. It’d be good to be continually reminded, as I grew older, about how much rampant life, how much emotion and conflict and joy and disappointment, can be conveyed in a novel so perfectly, symmetrically structured."