Welcome to Thursday Quotables! This feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week.  Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines will be, and you’re invited to join in! Hosted by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies.

I’m actually going to take it back to a book that I’m currently reading and one that I love so much. Well, I guess I did that the last time with the book I read but I hadn’t read it in a long time. I think I’m going to have to spend the weekend trying to catch up since I really haven’t touched this since I started. It takes a while to annotate books, well it takes me a long time to do it, and I think that’s why it’s taking me longer than normal. But I want to make sure I do it right. Or at least the right way for me.

Because, as my best friend Atsuko is fond of pointing out, it’s always easier for me to live in this space where I haven’t made something real yet.

prologue, page 3

I don’t usually like prologues in contemporary novels, but I really liked seeing this one. It gave me such a great insight into Kimi’s life and personality from the get-go, and it made me immediately love her. This was actually one of the quotes that I underlined during my annotating session, and I love looking back at it.

I also feel the same way, honestly. It’s so much easier to stay in a fantasy and not worry about what would happen if I tried to make that fantasy into a reality. I don’t have to worry about it blowing up in my face. I know that there’s always the chance that it will go the way I want it to, or even go better than I anticipated, but that fear of me being wrong can paralyze me. It stops me so often that I’m sure I’ve lost a lot of amazing opportunities that could have happened if I just wasn’t so afraid.

Fantasy can be amazing, especially in books, but like what Kimi eventually learns, and what I will eventually learn, we need to come out of the fantasy world and take a chance in the real world.

Kimi Nakamura loves a good fashion statement.

She’s obsessed with transforming everyday ephemera into Kimi Originals: bold outfits that make her and her friends feel like the Ultimate versions of themselves. But her mother disapproves, and when they get into an explosive fight, Kimi’s entire future seems on the verge of falling apart. So when a surprise letter comes in the mail from Kimi’s estranged grandparents, inviting her to Kyoto for spring break, she seizes the opportunity to get away from the disaster of her life.

When she arrives in Japan, she’s met with a culture both familiar and completely foreign to her. She loses herself in the city’s outdoor markets, art installations, and cherry blossom festival — and meets Akira, a cute aspiring med student who moonlights as a costumed mochi mascot. And what begins as a trip to escape her problems quickly becomes a way for Kimi to learn more about the mother she left behind, and to figure out where her own heart lies.

In I Love You So Mochi, author Sarah Kuhn has penned a delightfully sweet and irrepressibly funny novel that will make you squee at the cute, cringe at the awkward, and show that sometimes you have to lose yourself in something you love to find your Ultimate self.

I can’t wait to get back into annotating this book. This weekend I’m actually supposed to be discussing this book with Bookish Chaos, and even though I haven’t read it in a few years, I know I can still talk about it. I think I may annotate it while I’m in the book discussion, if I can handle doing both at once.

How is it only 10:30pm right now and yet I’m so exhausted? I’m usually up later than this, but maybe it’s a good thing so I can try to fall asleep earlier. Or it could be because I’m not watching anything super exciting while I type this blog post out. Or a combination of things? Honestly I have no idea. I do need to update my reading journal first before I end up going to bed though. I hope you’re doing well! See you next time.