Page 42 - Part Two

Starting a new thread - the old one is becoming a little difficult to navigate at 400+ posts.

***

Furthermore, Mrs. van D. is ticked off because we're using her china instead of ours. She's still trying to find out what we've done with our plates; they're a lot closer than she thinks, since they're packed in cardboard boxes in the attic, behind a load of Opetka advertising material. As long as we're in hiding, the plates will remain out of her reach. Since I'm always having accidents, it's just as well! Yesterday I broke one of Mrs. van D.'s soup bowls.

The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition by Anne Frank

I remembered what Morrie said during our visit: "The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it."

- from Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom

Through the triple portals of the great Abbey Church of Saint Mary Magdalene as we approached the procession of Vespers came another moving stream of banners and silken vestments and gold. As it paused before once more entering the Church, the Abbey Cross held on high, the dun-coloured throng of pilgrims that crowded the many steps of the Abbey moved and swayed and bent their heads as I have seen a field of barley ears move and sway just before harvest time when the wind passes. Our own Archbishop, Baldwin of Canterbury, was there, men said, and the King's half-brother, Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, but at this distance we could not distinguish them. We saw only the triple portals as if indeed we were at Heaven's gate, and the splendour and the holiness within.

-- Men Like Shadows by Dorothy Charques

Outdoors was very large and dim and chilly. The bunkhouse lay low and dark under the big sky, and the little office tent was ghostly in the starlight. It seemed far away from the lamplit shanty.

-- By the Shores of Silver Lake - Laura Ingalls Wilder

By this time the French offered no resistance: instead the dragons scattered; wildly, Laurence thought at first, then he perceived how well they had distributed themselves around. Four of the smaller dragons darted upwards; the rest dropped perhaps a hundred feet in height, and Accendare was once again hard to tell from the decoys.

-- Throne of Jade - Naomi Novik

Aapo: Indeed, it's a mad and deceitful world we live in. Venla has looks and Juhani his hooks and crooks. Sorvari is a farm with a good name and it acts as a bait to lure her, while Jukola, this pauper's nest, is a total ruin and we, its seven heirs, are even more wretched in the eyes of the world. When people remember the lazy and often wild days of our youth, they no longer expect anything decent of us. Ten years of proper and completely respectable behavior will hardly serve to restore us to full human esteem in the eyes of our countrymen. It's so hard to clean off the mud of a bad name once it sticks to a man. But better to rise at last than to sink forever in Satan's filth. So let us strive for a conversion, for a conversion, with all our might.

-- Aapo is one of the Seven Brothers of Finnish author Aleksis Kivi's novel.

(And I) love the flexible perfection of Rory Too (who is slightly larger, but you can't be picky when you're only dealing with roadkill raccoons) but Rory 1 is the one who makes me laugh every time I look at him.

- Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson

He grinned. Three billion and six people didn't know it, but today would be a bigger antic than anyone had bargained for.

- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

(Page 42 seems oddly appropriate for this book)

Claire, as I noted earlier, is smarter than I am.
-- The Dinner by Herman Koch

The second strike got a hot reception from the Japanese. The surprise on the ground had evaporated; it was now replaced with a grim determination. The bombers of both carrier groups got the worst of it, but they did their job, which was to work over the aircraft on the ground and destroy the air facilities. The dive bombers concentrated on the runways with their 500-pound bombs and destroyed two buildngs. The torpedo bombers dropped their fragmentation bobs among the parked aircraft and blew many of them apart. But Ensign Theodore Clement and his gunner, Kenneth Jackson, were last seen over the target. Their plane was one of those hit by anti-aircraft fire that were seen to crash on the island.

-- McCampbell's Heroes: The Story of the U.S. Navy's Most Celebrated Carrier Fighters of the Pacific War by Edwin P. Hoyt

Times Square pulsated with incandescent messages. Chew gum. Drink beer. See the world's most beautiful girls. The Camel man blew out gigantic rings of smoke. Through his monocle, the Planter's Peanut sized her up. Coca-Cola. Lucky Strikes. A gypsy reached for her palm. A fifteen-foot cup of coffee advertised the Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. The fur-framed face of the Eskimo Pie boy enticed with a chocolate-dipped ice cream bar. Mr Kool, a penguin in a top hat and bow tie, rapidly blinked his icicle eyes: "Willie the Penguin says, even if you cough like crazy, Kools still taste fresh as a daisy." Down a few dingy steps into LeBlang's drugstore basement, a landmark, discounted theater tickets were sold for one dollar. The counter boy flipping burgers could pass for a cousin of Florence's favorite matinee idol, Ramon Novarro.

-- The Red Leather Diary by Lily Koppel

A week passed. He and Wendy didn't speak much. But he knew she was watching, not believing. He drank coffee black and endless cans of Coca-Cola. One night he drank a whole six-pack of Coke and then ran into the bathroom and vomited it up. The level of the bottles in the liquor cabinet did not go down. After his classes he went over to Al Shockley's - she hated Al Shockley worse than she had ever hated anyone - and when she came home she would swear she smelled scotch or gin on his breath but he would talk lucidly to her before supper, drink coffee, play with Danny after supper, sharing a Coke with him, read him a bedtime story, then sit and correct themes with cup after cup of black coffee by his hand, and she would have to admit to herself that she had been wrong.

The Shining by Stephen King

***

>11 BookConcierge:

Interesting that both of ours mention Coca-Cola.

Her brothers were not home to defend her. Junior ws watching the parade with the girl he ws soon to marry. Jerry was in traction (no wonder the Hankshaws needed the Colonel's money) at the Medical College of Virginia. Refused enlistment into the paratroopers because of his size, Jerry had stood up in a ferris wheel seat at the Atlantic Rural Exposition - he had to so something - and gravity, that old scene-stealer, had once more gotten into the act.

-- Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins

>12 artturnerjr: That IS an interesting coincidence ...

"No, she's not the shipwrecked baby because, first, my records show Mary Catherine was born several years before they say the shipwreck happened. Second, it wouldn't have been a secret. I mean, Nana would've been the baby's niece, she would know if her aunt had been a shipwrecked baby. And the story has too many holes in it, like it says the Marrs lost a baby just before the shipwreck, but there's no dead baby, as least not one I found in family records, and genealogists aren't supposed to create family history with fantasy or speculation, we're supposed to use documented evidence."

-- Waterbaby by Chris Mazza

"You mean . . . ?" A light was beginning to dawn in my mind, an elucidation of how man and dog had found each other, of why their relationship was so perfect, of the certainty of their happy future together. It seemed like fate. "Aye," the old man went on sadly. "I 'ave no sense of smell."

-- All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot

While Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was the largest and most influential group within the {German} homosexual rights movement (it had one thousand members in 1914), there were others as well--for example, the Committee of the Special, founded in 1902. Headed by Benedict Friedlander and Adolf Brand, it maintained that relations between older men and younger men had contributed to the "glory of Greece"--a theory that Hirschfeld opposed. Friedlander and Brand sought to refashion the image of the homosexual man as even more masculine and athletic than the heterosexual man. The ancient Greeks were cited repeatedly; it was asserted that sexual friendship between soldiers had made Sparta's armies nearly invincible. The vision of a constructive, overtly masculine society, bonded by homoerotic ties, was persued by Hans Bluher (1888-1952) in two controversial books: The German Youth Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon (1912) and The Role of Eroticism in Male Society (1917). Bluher, originally a follower of Freud, later turned to the anti-Semitic right. He, too, ridiculed the idea of a "third sex" and adopted a contrary position. Throughout history, he wrote, the soldierly, aggressive homosexual male had fought wars, conquered nations, founded empires. Frequently he not only had a wife but kept a male lover as well. Despite Bluher's later embrace of the right, the Nazis did not hesitate to attack him vehemently, once they came to power. The Wandervogel movement, already riven by factionalism, was embarrassed by Bluher, and insisted that he had exaggerated the homoerotic component. In the end, the Youth Movement was first absorbed and then destroyed by Hitler Youth leaders, when its "decadent" and "elitist" homoeroticism succumbed to the "racially productive" blood-and soil philosophy of the Nazis. Today, Bluher's ideas may seem like pop Freudianism, spiced with homosexual imperialism and Black forest romanticism, but to many gay Germans in the Youth Movement before World War I who felt uncomfortable at being branded as a "third sex," Bluher's views helped to impart a sense of being acceptable as men among men.

-- The Pink Triangle: the Nazi War Against Homosexuals by Richard Plant

An IBM Selectric II and the keyboard, monitor and printer for a home computer were lined up along its length. The bookshelves were white Formica too, filled almost exclusively with medical texts. There was a sitting area in the far corner: two overstuffed chairs and an ottoman covered in a a plaid fabric of rust, white, and slate blue. The coffee table, reading lamp, books and magazines stacked nearby suggested that this was where Bobby spent his leisure time.

- C is for Corpse by Sue Grafton

The "kulig" was by no means only a ball. It was a dizzying, magic journey in the full excitement of carnival. Two sleighs went off in the evening over the snow with Manya Sklodovska and her three cousins, masked and dressed as Cracow peasant girls, huddled under the covers. Young men in picturesque rustic dress escorted them on horseback, brandishing torches. Other torches twinkled through the fir trees, and the cold night was filled with rhythm; the musicians' sleigh came up, bringing four little Jews from the village, mad and charming creatures who for the next two nights and days would wring from their fiddles the intoxicating tunes of the waltz, the krakoviak and the mazurka, tunes caught up in chorus by the whole crowd. The little Jews would play until three, five, ten other sleighs, answering their call, had found them in the night. In spite of jolting and sliding down dizzy slopes of ice they never missed a stroke of the bow and they would lead the fantastic night dance in triumph to the first stop.

-- Madame Curie by Eve Curie

For Churchill, the time for tears is over. Regrets vanish. What is done is done, what remains is to rally his nation. The British are alone, with their backs to the wall; they must fight to a finish. Sentiment, loyalty, friendship must be sacrificed to expediency, resolution, even ruthlessness. Churchill the leader never hesitates; Churchill the man suffers an agony of the soul.

-- Churchill: The Valiant Years by Jack Le Vien and John Lord (The subject under discussion is the fall of France)

We worked all day and some of the night, and a slave who made a week, even after doing that, was lucky if he got off without getting a beating. We got mighty bad treatment, and I just want to tell you, a n------ didn't stand as much show there as a dog did. They whipped for most any little trifle. They whipped me, so they said, just to help me get a quicker gait.

-- My Folks Don't Want Me to Talk About Slavery: Twenty-One Oral Histories of Former North Carolina Slaves edited by Belinda Hurmence

Graduation day finally came. We were given our orders the night before and our leave forms. I had twenty-one days of leave. I was assigned to some place called "West Pac." In fact, all of us were. None of us had a clue what that meant. We just knew we were to report back to Camp Pendleton in December to a place called "Staging Battalion." Again, no clue. We cornered the corporal our last night there to talk to him about this West Pac place. He informed us it meant Western Pacific, Vietnam. We weren't shocked. We just couldn't figure out why they just didn't say "Vietnam."

We Never Wanted a Parade by Donald G. Tackett

Although mtDNA traces only one line down through the centuries and millennia, among the many ancestors we all gather as we follow our family trees back through time, the study threw up some surprises for the participants involved. The results show quite graphically what a subjective and shifting concept ethnicity is. While similarities and differences between human populations are fascinating, the idea of "race" doesn't make sense in biology -- it's a concept pulled together from a ragbag selection of physical characteristics, culture and religion and attachment to place of birth. Ultimately though, however much we may feel that we come from a particular place, our genes show that our ancestry is far more diverse -- and more interesting.

-- The Incredible Human Journey by Alice Roberts

"Why, she helped the girl to bolt," said Davidson turning at me his innocent eyes, rounded by the state of constant amazement in which this affair had left him, like those shocks of terror or sorrow which sometimes leave their victim afflicted by nervous trembling. It looked as though he would never get over it.

-- Victory by Joseph Conrad

‘Oh, we shall find something. I have got a few cards-up my sleeve. There are people who owe me money, for instance — Paris is full of them. One of them is bound to pay up before long. Then think of all the women who have been my mistress! A woman never forgets, you know — I have only to ask and they will help me. Besides, the Jew tells me he is going to steal some magnetos from the garage where he works, and he will pay us five francs a day to clean them before he sells them. That alone would keep us. Never worry, mon ami. Nothing is easier to get than money.’

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
(eBook - 42nd page turn)

>17 rocketjk:

That's fascinating. I had no idea there were gay rights groups that early in the 20th century - in Germany, no less.

>25 artturnerjr: Yes, I found it as fascinating as you did, though I was not as surprised to learn there'd been such groups in Germany, which was, after all, the birthplace of all sorts of philosophies and movements. At any rate, Plant's book is very good.

There were quiet for a bit, then she said, "There is something I should confess, Cristian. I hope you will forgive me."

-- Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst

Maisie made her way back to her office. It was dark by now, and although she was gasping for a cup of tea much stronger than the light Darjeeling served at Fortnum & Mason's she needed to work. She reflected upon the Davenham story, knowing only too well that there was a lot more to elicit.

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

Along the parsonage road went Jussi, pleased with the deal and the horse, which followed along without a single pull at the lead rope. It matched his pace as if it really did have a human mind. And Otto brought up the rear, whistling. Wherever the road ran close to the lake, he would skip stones, shouting, "By God, Jussi, look at that one. It hopped at least twenty times."

-- Under the North Star by Vaino Linna

"They already call you Dr. Croc," Levine said patiently. "They can't call you Dr. Croc and Mr. Batteries."

-- We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler

The pastor said no more, but went on his way. left alone, Akseli continued working and tried to think nasty thoughts. "Go and trade mutton for raisins and rice with the storekeeper. Go and do your goddamned black marketeering, the two of you."

-- The Uprising by Väinö Linna

Inflammatory oratory and a radical, catchall program, important as they were for a fledgling party out to attract attention and recruit mass support, were not enough, and Hitler now turned his attention to providing more - much more. The first signs of his peculiar genius began to appear and make themselves felt. What the masses needed, he thought, were not only ideas - a few simple ideas, that is, that he would ceaselessly hammer through their skulls - but symbols that would win their faith, pageantry and color that would arouse them, and acts of violence and terror, which if successful, would attract adherents (were not most Germans attracted to the strong?) and give them a sense of power over the weak.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer

>32 artturnerjr: Wow!

>33 rocketjk:

Lol - sound familiar? Demagoguery hasn't changed much over the years, it seems.

>34 artturnerjr: Yep! That's what I was "wow"-ing about all right.

I've seen scholics who displease the Muse, much less the more important gods. Some years ago - the fifth year of the siege, actually - there was a scholic from the Twenty - sixth Century, a chubby, irreverent Asian with the unusual name of Bruster Lin - and even though Bruster Lin was the brightest and most insightful scholar amongst us, his irreverence was his undoing. Literally. After one of his more ironic comments - it was about the mano a mano combat between Paris and Menelaus, winner take all, that would have settled the war on the outcome of that single combat. The one-on-one fight to the death between Helen's Trojan lover and her Achaean husband - although staged in front of two cheering armies, with Paris beautiful in his golden armor and Menelaus fearful with his eye full of business - was never consummated. Aphrodite saw that her beloved Paris was going to be hacked into worm meat, so she swooped down and spirited him off the battlefield back to Helen, where, like effete liberals in every age, Paris was more the happy warrior in bed than on the battlefield. So it was after one of Bruster Lin's amusing comments on the Paris - Menelaus episode, that the Muse - not amused - snapped her fingers and the billions upon trillions of obedient nanocytes in the hapless scholic's body aggregated and exploded outward in one giant nano - lemming leap, shredding the still - smiling Bruster Lin into a thousand bloody shreds ...

Iilium by Dan Simmons

And had I ever been like them? At home I had been a girl among boys and men. There had been no one prettier, or richer, or in any way better than I was. I did wonder., of course, if such a person existed, and knew that she must, but then the thought had dropped from my head. My place in my family was so well defined I'd had no need to wonder about what could be for too long.

--The Yonahlossee Riding Camp For Girls by Anton DiSclafani

"What do you mean, John?" Mrs. Cherry replied calmly. "This event is open to the public, isn't it?"

The Apple Bandit by Carolyn Keene

When it was over that night, those few minutes, when the man with the guitar vanished in a shroud of screams, I sat there transfixed in front of the television set, my mind on fire. I had the same two arms, two legs, two eyes; I looked hideous but I'd figure that part out . . . so what was missing? THE GUITAR!! He was hitting it, leaning on it, dancing with it, screaming into it, screwing it, caressing it, swinging it on his hips and, once in a while, even playing it! The master key, the sword in the stone, the sacred talisman, the staff of righteousness, the greatest instrument of seduction the teenage world had ever known, the . . . the . . . "ANSWER" to my alienation and sorrow, it was a reason to live, to try to communicate with the other poor souls stuck in the same position I was. And . . . they sold 'em right downtown at the Western Auto store!

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

Sometimes I come across a catpillar that has just been planted and still hasn't become a cattree. New catpillars look at my face and meow or cry, but the ones where all four limbs planted in the ground have vegetized, with their greenish faces stiffly set and eyes shut tight, only move their ears now and then.
Then there are catpillars that grow branches from their bodies and put out handfuls of leaves. The mental condition of these seems to be completely vegetized, they don't even move their ears. Even if a cat's face can still be made out, it may be better to call these cattrees.

Standing Woman by Tsutsui Yasutaka

I thought to myself, I'm really in for it this time. Mom was a master at delivering creative punishment. Once, after Sunday school, and in my usual rush to get outside and play, I wore my church shoes in the creek to hunt crawl-dads with Roy Lee. When Mom cast an eye on my soggy Buster Browns, she said, 'I swear, Sonny, if your head gets any emptier, it's going to float off your head like a balloon." For punishment, she dictated that the next week I had to go to church in my stocking feet. It didn't take long before everybody in town got wind of what I was going to have to do. I didn't disappoint, walking down the church aisle in my socks while everybody nudged their neighbor and snickered. The thing was, though, I had picked out the socks, and my big tow poked through a hole in one of them. Mom was mortified. Even the preacher couldn't keep a straight face.

--- Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam

It was so radiant, so serenely poised, that he wondered for a moment if it were real at all. Then, while he gazed, a tiny puff clouded the edge of the pyramid, giving life to the vision before the faint rumble of the avalanche confirmed it.

James Hilton, Lost Horizon

The Describers Dictionary by David Grambs

I hadn't let him out of the flat, apart from to do his business downstairs, because he was still on his anti-biotics. So I stuck him in the same green, plastic recycling box I'd used a fortnight earlier to take him to the RSPCA. The weather was miserable so I took the lid and let it rest loosely on the box once we were out and about. He wasn't much more comfortable in it that day than he was the first time I put him in it. He kept sticking his head out and watching the world go by.

A Street Cat named Bob by James Bowen

>39 rocketjk:

My favorite read of 2016. Zoomed through the whole thing in about four days, iirc.

>44 artturnerjr:

Yes, I'm enjoying it, too. Springsteen and his music have been a huge part of my life since I first saw him at Seton Hall University in NJ in the spring of 1974. It's been a highly interesting and entertaining reading experience for me. I'm about halfway through, now.

>45 rocketjk:

Wowzers - pre-Born to Run (album) (not to mention way pre-Born to Run (book) (obviously)). I've been a rabid fan since the Columbia House Record Club (remember them? are they still around?) sent me a vinyl copy of Nebraska back in 1982. That one really spoke to the angst-filled adolescent in me, and continues to speak to me now (especially when I am in my more pessimistic moods), as does most of his work. Amazing songwriter, amazing performer, fascinating human being, great (and admirably candid) book.

"The thing I'm confused about," Liz said to Mary, "is what day does Mervetta come? Because the house is getting gross." A twice-monthly fixture at the Tudor since Liz's childhood, Mervetta cleaned the Bennets' toilets, vacuumed their rugs, and changed their sheets; once, when Liz was ten, Mervetta had told her that the Bennets were the only white people she'd ever known who ate grits.

-- Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

42 Brazen: Adding that to my wishlist!

Sheriff Sonny Summers had never watched Bayou Brothers, but he knew who Buck Nance was, and of course he'd already heard about the incident at the Parched Pirate. Now some fast-talking shaker named Jon David Ampergrodt was on the phone explaining that his company--make that his "agency"--represented Mr. Nance.

Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen

The figures turned out to be Deputy Kyle McLanahan, Sheriff Barnum, and a visibly upset Don Hawkins. What Joe had thought were boulders strewn across the ground were actually carcasses of cattle, at least a dozen of them. The sour-sweet smell of death filtered into the cab of the pickup through the vents, and Maxine sat up ramrod straight, her brow winkled in concern.

-- Trophy Hunt by C J Box

NOTE: "Maxine" is Joe's dog....

Onstage I see his old smile, charming and keen, and a little breathing room opens up: the distress that has weighed down the show from the start seems to dissipate a little, and I give in and smile at him. It's a good moment, a private moment between the two of us, and I remember how he used to skip around me, cheering and shouting and laughing as though the air itself were tickling him. In his eyes now there is the same luminance, a little beam of light aimed at me, believing in me, and it's like everything can still be repaired, even for us, for me and him.

-- A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman

Mom placed the steamed octopus on the chopping block and tried to slice it. But the knife kept slipping, just as it had when she was slicing the radish. "I'll do it, Mom." You took her knife again, sliced the hot radish-scented octopus, dipped a piece in red-pepper-and-vinegar sauce, and held it out to Mom. This was what she'd always done for you.

-- Please Look After Mom by Khung-sook Shin

On a map, Zacatecas looks like an amoeba in the middle of Mexico. Its lines curve in and out of territories with the logic of a modern art painting. On the ground, the state is vast and beautifully rugged. In parts, mesquite trees pock forbidding deserts of beige dust. Elsewhere, the desolation gives way to dirt the color of cayenne pepper. But whatever its color, the land of Zacatecas never could hold people to it.

-- Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration by Sam Quinones

I was moving along, listening with half an ear to the lieutenant's prattle and the loud explanations of the deputy-commandant, when I pitchforked into what might have been the end of my business. We were going through a sort of convalescent room, where people were sitting who had been in hospital. It was a big place, a little warmer than the rest of the building, but still abominably fuggy. There were about half a dozen men in the room, reading and playing games. They looked at us with lacklustre eyes for a moment and then returned to their occupations. Being convalescents I suppose they were not expected to get up and salute.

-- Greenmantle by John Buchan

(1936)
Thursday 10 December

This is the first hour, or since it is 5:30, & the abdication was announced at 4, the first hour & a half, of the new reign. Yes, I thought, its silly buying sachets at Stags & Mantles: I will go to Westminster. A bus took me to the top of Whitehall, There traffic was turned off & I dismounted. Whitehall was full of shuffling & trampling. People going both ways. Not a thick crowd - a moving crowd. A very beautiful yellow brown light: dry pavements: still lamps lit. Lines of light at Parliament Sqre. & the houses of Parliament in silhouette. The lamp burning in the watch tower. Opposite the Horse Guards there was Ottoline, black, white, red lipped coming towards me. She intercepted my impulse to escape. We turned & walked on. Then Bob Trevelyan loomed up. We three stood & talked.

Bob raising his eyebrows & qualifying in his usual way.

They said it was dreadfull... I'm very sad ... Its a pity. Has he abdicated? I asked. No, but they say he will. No one knew if he had or hadn't. A stir of uneasy feeling ... most people half sad, yet also ashamed, yet also excited. Bob left us, not before tho' he's hummed & hawed & said that Hawtrey didn't think so badly of the D. of York. Then on we wandered down the yellow brown avenue.

also, Under wh. King Bezonian ... Speak or die?

We looked up at the beautiful carved front of - what office? I don't know. That's the window out of which Charles the First stepped when he had his head cut off said Ottoline, pointing to the great lit up windows in their frame of white stone. So my mother always told me. I felt I was walking in the 17th Century with one of the courtiers; & she was lamenting not the abdication of Edward - still though people shuffled this way & that - but the execution of Charles. Its dreadful, dreadful, she kept saying.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5) 1936-41

He left the station at four o'clock. The birds were doing their best to persuade everyone that it was dawn, but no one seemed fooled. It was dark still, and the air was chilled.

.... Knots and crosses by Ian Rankin

Casey earned raves for his outfielding, and at twenty-three he was one of the league's shining faces. He could certainly feel secure in his standing. Sure enough, with the threat of Casey's jumping to the Federal League still out there, Ebbets signed Casey to a two-year deal at six thousand dollars a year right after the 1914 season ended. For Casey, it was big-time money.

-- Casey Stengel: Baseball's Greatest Character by Marty Appel

This is the kind of conversation it was: convivial, both of us making gifts to each other of little funny stories, sort of shining them up and handing them over and being nice to each other about them. we didn't drag out our secret souls and let them dance naked around the restaurant, but our little stories were glimpses into the interior, colorful postcards from the lands of Martin and Cornelia. A good way to begin.

-- Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos

My absolutely favorite feature is the Ball of Love, a standard-issue revolving Saturday Night Fever disco ball suspended over the middle of the dance floor. But our Ball of Love is controlled by a switch on the floor of the bandstand; one of the great treats at the Dewdrop is stomping on that switch with the toe of your leather boot right on the downbeat of the first song. The room is suddenly transformed from dingy tavern into dazzling palace of romance. People meet, dance, and fall in love under that crystal ball. They also pout and punch each other out on occasion. The house rule is that the Ball of Love is turned on only while the band is playing, and the privilege of stomping on that switch belongs to the bandleader.

-- And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You by Kathi Kamen Goldmark

After a hurried walk home, he sneaked back into his room to dispose of the egg fragments. He was sure Garrow and Roran would not notice the egg's absence - it had faded from their thoughts after they learned it could not be sold. When his family got up, Roran mentioned that he had heard some noises during the night, but, to Eragon's relief, did not pursue the issue.
---- Eragon by Christopher Paolini

Every such emergency and the chance of being cornered again by some sharp-eyed and eager-nosed hound necessitated frequent changes in hairstyle and sunglasses, avoiding rush-hour crowds as much as possible, carrying under her arm evidence from improbable places on the planet and renewing her stock of tales, ready to declare herself a resident of Hawaii, Bogota, Johannesburg, retrieving on the spot a tourist pamphlet from her overseas home.

-- Back to Delphi by Ioanna Karystiani

Mike came back to my office shortly before five-thirty, as Laura was packing up to leave for the day. "I don't blame you for getting out of here," he said to Wilkie. "I bet you never knew how unpopular your boss was. I got a list as long as your arm here of people who'd like to get rid of her, and those are just the guys she's prosecuting, who don't even know her personally. Wait til I start with that crew."
--- Final Jeopardy by Linda Fairstein

When a miner is hurt it is of course impossible to attend to him immediately. He lies crushed under several hundredweight of stone in some dreadful cranny underground, and even after he has been extricated it is necessary to drag his body a mile or more, perhaps, thorough galleries where nobody can stand upright. Usually when you talk to a man who has been injured you find that it was a couple of hours or so before they got him to the surface. Sometimes, of course, there are accidents to the cage. The cage is shooting several hundred yards up or down at the speed of an express train, and it is operated by somebody on the surface who cannot see what is happening. He has very delicate indicators to tell him how far the cage has got, but it is possible for him to make a mistake, and there have been cases of the cage crashing into the pit-bottom at its very maximum speed. This seems to me a dreadful way to die. For as that tiny steel box whizzes through the blackness there must come a moment when the ten men who are locked inside it know that something has gone wrong; and the remaining seconds before they are smashed to pieces hardly bear thinking about. A minor told me he was once in a cage in which something went wrong. It did not slow up when it should have done, and they thought the cable must have snapped. As it happened they got to the bottom safely, but when he stepped out he found that he had broken a tooth; he had been clenching his teeth so hard in expectation of that frightful crash.

-- The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

"I don't know, Dephine," Rachel said thoughtfully. "You know, when the sad day comes and the Queen dies? I wonder if the world is prepared. Do we have any idea, any clue at all, of what will go with her?"

"A few corgis, and a case of gin?"

- My Mrs Brown by William Norwich

Today is Sunday, and I am in church, sitting next to Ed. We share a cell, Ed and I, along with four other men, and he's the only person in here I'd call a friend. Ed Mason. He's a cabinetmaker by trade and a burglar by profession, serving a ten-year sentence for grand larceny. He got here ten months before me, right after Kilby first opened, and they assigned him to the woodshop, where he makes picture frames and cradles and baskets. The prison sells his work, and it does me some good thinking about those mothers settling their infants into one of Ed's cradles.

-- Work Like Any Other by Virginia Reeves

There was just one trouble with the running argument. I knew I had made up my mind. I knew just when and how I had made it up. It was when I had taken the eighty dollars from her purse. I hadn't taken it for me. I had taken it for her. I was just picking it up the way you pick up ammunition when you anticipate a fight.

-- A Purple Place for Dying by John D. MacDonald

Eichmann had passed the summer safely in his new identity, coming through several standard CIC interrogations on his wartime activities without a hitch. None of his answers had provoked further inquiry, and he spent his days stacking heavy ammunition in an air force warehouse. In late August, the Americans moved him to another camp located at Ober-Dachstetten, to the west of Nuremberg. His adjunct Janisch was sent to a different camp. Eichmann was isolated among three hundred former SS officers and assigned to a work detail. Nobody there knew who he was.

-- Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi by Neal Bascomb

"You!" she said. "You will explain this monstrosity" - and she waved disdainfully at Monsieur Trepagny's fine house. "What a shack. C'est in vrai taudis! Explain to me how this hut in the forest is a fine manor house and the site of a great rich city as you told my guardian uncle." She sprang from the cart with the elasticity of an Inuit hunter, and the voyageurs applauded. She scorched them with a fiery look of disdain and marched into the house with the maid, Monsieur Trepagny and Pere Beaulieu following.

Barkskins: A Novel by Annie Proulx

"I see!" he says. "I see! Then you've obviously forgotten the way he was to his parents when he became a pack leader. How everything you did was wrong in his eyes, and he laughed at us as a stupid old bourgeois couple--you've forgotten all that, have you, Evie? A good lad is he, Karlemann!"

-- Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada

"Now finally, now that the trees have filled green and the last day of school has come round, and we pupils are stacking chairs and dusting erasers, the boys have to break their recess from cruelty, because Caroline is, despite my worries, irresistibly ugly. I hear them laughing from across the room and feel it, familiar and dreadful as the hotcomb come too close to my neck: they're laughing at us. Mr Pennington has turned his radio's full power down the hall to propel our cleaning, and as the Clovers sing "Fool, Fool, Fool," the little boys from the lower grades pile atop each other like puppies sliding around the hardwood floor."
-- Saint Monkey by Jacinda Townsend

"That is correct," said Yama. "And have you, Tak of the Archives, never heard of a palimpsest- a scroll which has been used previously, cleaned, and then used again?"

"Of course, but the mind is not a scroll."

"No?" Yama smiled. "Well, it was your simile to begin with, not mine. What's truth, anyway? Truth is what you make it."

He lit his cigarette. "These monks have witnessed a strange and terrible thing," he continued. "They saw me take on my Aspect and wield an Attribute. They saw Mara do the same - here, in this monastery where we have revived the principle of ahimsa. They are aware that a god may do such things without karmic burden, but the shock was great and the impression vivid. And the final burning is still to come. By the time of that burning, the tale I have told you must be true in their minds."

"How?" asked Ratri.

"This very night, this very hour," he said, "while the image of the act flames within their consciousness and their thoughts are troubled, the new truth will be forged and nailed into place. . . . Sam, you have rested long enough. This thing is now yours to do. You must preach them a sermon. You must call forth within them those nobler sentiments and higher qualities of spirit which make men subject to divine meddling. Ratri and I will then combine our powers and a new truth will be born."

Sam shifted and dropped his eyes. "I don't know if I can do it. It's been so long . . ."

"Once a Buddha, always a Buddha, Sam. Dust off some of your old parables. You have about fifteen minutes."

Sam held out his hand. "Give me some tobacco and a paper."

He accepted the package, rolled himself a cigarette. "Light? ... Thanks."

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

He lay in the grass looking at the spaced and orderly trees in the park and clear sky through the trees. Blackbirds and starlings were pecking in the grass around him.
After a while he got up and went home. In the little dark house his grandfather was sitting in his rocking chair in the living room.
Is that you? he called.
Yes.
I thought I heard somebody out there.
It's only me.
Come in here.
In a minute, he said.
What are you doing?
I'm not doing anything.

-- Eventide by Kent Haruff

In the first century AD the forerunners of the Kingdom of Champa took their first cut at the tablet of recorded history by raiding the Red River Delta outposts of the Chinese Empire. The first Cham king came to power in 192. His people were Malayo-Polynesians who believed all elements were animated by spirits. The king and his successors ruled with the wisdom of India, broadening and deepening imported Hindu culture and administrative methods throughout the centuries. Divine royal puissance and public prosperity were thought to flow from stone Shiva Lingams; brick temples that housed these Lingams and other Hindu icons endure today on dry hills in Central Vietnam.

-- Land of Frozen Laughter: a Community Development Volunteer in the Vietnam War, 1967-1969 by John Lewallen

The few stops were brief indeed, and then they'd push back out, always back out once again onto the river whose waters finally began to narrow, indicating that they were nearing the western extremity of Youcan Flats and so had traversed perhaps two hundred miles from the fort. Indeed, there were now low hills visible in the distance to either side of the river. Here, Lot of Water was littered in placed by ice ledges, tangles of downfall logs driven in against islands that formed and shifted and disappeared within the space of a few days -- ice, debris, waterlogged corpses of moose and caribou, even a great brown bear quite alive and bellowing like a lost calf as it paced about on top of a log jam, for some inexplicable reason unwilling to launch itself into the heavy, still-laden current.

-- Fire in the Sky by J.A. Shears

Chase walks off. Once he has left the frame, the camera holds on the door for a second or two, and then, very slowly, starts pushing in on the keyhole. It is a lovely shot, full mystery and anticipation, and as the opening grows larger and larger, taking up more and more of the screen we are able to look through into Hector's office. An instant later, we are inside the office itself, and because we expect to find it empty, we are not at all prepared for what the camera reveals to us. We see Hector slumped over his desk. He is still unconscious, but he is visible again, and as we try to absorb this sudden and miraculous turnaround, we can come to only one conclusion. The effects of the drink must have worn off. We have just watched Hector disappear, and if we are able to see him now, it can only mean that the drink was less powerful than we thought.

-- The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster

If you recall, we mentioned earlier that the Jews in the ghetto complained of the unpleasant smoke and smell coming from the blacksmiths' workshops in the adjacent Kovacka Ulica, the first street towards the Sponza. Besides Ragusan blacksmiths, there were also those from the Ottoman Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnian blacksmiths Elez, Abdi and Mustafa made and repaired kettles and boilers for the Ragusans for dozens of years.

-- The Jews of Dubrovnik: a Walk Through Space and Time from the Early Days to the Present by Vesna Miovic

At that moment he realized there was one tiny detail that Erica didn't know about. A muscle in his face twitched nervously as he swallowed and added, "By the way, it was a murder."
-- The hidden child by Camilla Läckberg

Even in regard to the operations at the Loire at the turn of the year 1870-71, the late Field-Marshal Freiherr von der Goltz wrote in his Reminiscences, "With the exceptions of a few stout hearts, everyone was sick of even the most successful battles. The fire of war still burnt, but with a dim and flickering light. The craving to enjoy at length the long-for term of tranquility was very widespread."

-- Deductions from the War by Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven

One night, he exited his tent to go to the bathroom. The entire forest was glowing with millions of points of bioluminescence, caused by fungi that glow when the temperature and humidity are right. "It was like looking down at LA from thirty thousand fee," he said. "The most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

-- The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

... That was their bed. Then an old iron bed at the side that folded up. The youngest in the family slept in that. In the room, that's where the brothers slept, and my oldest sister slept. We had four beds. It was a room 'n' kitchen, you know, an' the toilet outside. An' that wis your whack! (Sam Watt)

-Space was always a problem, sometimes, if only temporarily, solved by moving to a bigger house.

Well, I can remember when I wasnae even at school. We were in a single-end. My father and mother were in the recess bed, my sister was in a wee bed chair, and I was in a cot. And then we really hit the big time because we got a room and kitchen. And the room and kitchen had a recess bed in the room! (Betty Knox)

-Usually the growing family outstripped the available rooms and necessitated a variety of complex arrangements. Many houses must have seemed like Charlie McCaig's:

The house was so small, that (beds) was about all that was in it. Oh, it was terrible! (Charles McCaig)

When you look at it now, ye know, you wonder how people were sort of able to fit in! I mean the places were spotless, ye know, they really were. And the size of the room! We had the five of us. And it was a masterpiece of organization at night. We had folding-down beds. We had all sorts of things! (Cathy Page)

Many families had iron beds in the 'room'; but beyond that there were all kinds of bed contraptions designed to be pushed out of the way during the day. Folding beds and bed-chairs have already been mentioned; 'hurly beds' were folding beds on castors designed to slide under the set-in bed; Margaret Burniston remembers a cupboard with a fold-down bed in it that became a linen cupboard as the children grew up and left home; in Tommy Doyle's house the children had a mattress on the floor; while more than one baby slept in a chest of drawers:

The youngest one in our family always slept in the top drawer! They pulled the top drawer out and put the youngest baby into it. (John Wotherspoon)

It was common for young children to sleep together two to six in a bed, two or three at one end, and two or three at the other. An attempt was usually made to separate boys and girls into different beds, at least once they were beyond a certain age ...

Up Our Close by Jean Farley

Anybody care to revive this thread? I thought it was a lot of fun, but it petered out several years ago. All you do is post one paragraph from page 42 of the book you're currently reading. Fiction, non-fiction, whatever. The book, genre and/or topic don't matter. I thought I'd try to get it going again. Any takers?

"Like it or not, we all carry the past of our country. The unresolved conflicts of race and class lay coiled, ready to erupt, unless we set our minds to an honest reckoning with that past and a search for solutions grounded in genuine truth and justice. Unlike the cursing anonymous voice on a telephone, or the menacing face, or the billy club that split John Lewis's head in Selma, Alabama, at the Edmund Petrus Bridge in 1965, implicit bias is hard to see; implicit bias is a silent snake that slinks around in ways we don't notice."

In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu

"To anybody who had the curiosity to watch him - Nash, the butler, for instance - Ronald Jameson would have appeared to be very much upset. He went up to his bedroom, wandered aimlessly about, smoked three cigarettes, and finally sat on the bed, staring in a sort of trance at a wood-engraving that hung above his dressing-table. At last he looked at his watch, went downstairs got his hat and umbrella and returned to the study.
~~ The Nursing Home Murder by Ngaio Marsh

"Now, with 51 Pegasi b, two rival camps emerged. Three actually. There were those who accepted the discovery, including my advisor, Dimitar. He was only in his mid-thirties, new to the faculty at Harvard and young enough to remain given to belief. Then there was the anti-camp, led by an aggressive astronomer named David Black. Some in his group argued the the Swiss had found not a planet's effect on its host star, but rather a new kind of stellar pulsation - that the star wasn't being tugged but was expanding and contracting, the way stars older than the sun do. Or, as Black believed, the Swiss were seeing the effect of one star on another. Perhaps 51 Pegasi b was a brown dwarf or a small star, not a planet. The third camp was our community's version of agnostics. Maybe the Swiss had found an exoplanet; maybe they hadn't. Because 51 Pegasi b was so far away, it didn't matter and never would."

The smallest lights in the universe by Sara Seager

"By all that's wonderful it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself--or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here--you all had something out of life: money, love--whatever one gets on shore--and, tell me, wasn't that the best time, that time when we were young at sea, young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing except hard knocks--and sometimes a chance to feel your strength--that only--what you all regret?"

Youth by Joseph Conrad

>79 BookConcierge: If you like Preston's non-fiction you might also enjoy Dinosaurs in the Attic.

"For the next two weeks, the men felt as though they were holding their breath. They hardly dared hope they had seen the last of the pressure attacks. The pack was still drifting northward, carrying Endurance with it. The sun was shining almost around the clock, and the temperature had finally climbed above zero. And then on October 18, a misty gray day, the ice began pressing in again on both sides of the ship." Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World.

"All eyes upon us, we took to the floor, and encouraged by the sprightly sounds of the shawms, sackbut, and tambour, I began picking out the intricate hops and leaps of the Galliard. I thank Papa for all of the lessons he urged upon me and my sisters under dear signore Vari, our bad-breathed dancing master. Signore Vari's instructions and breat came strongly to mind as I sailed through the air in my first great leap of the posture, though the memory ceased the moment I hit ground, for my partner clasped my hands and spoke." ~~ The Creation of Eve by Lynn Cullen

"It was quite a sermon, I believe. I thought as I wrote it how pleased my father would have been. But my courage failed, because I knew the only people at church would be a few old women who were already about as sad and apprehensive as they could stand to be and no more approving of the war than I was. And they were there even though I might have been contagious. I seemed ridiculous to myself for imaging I could thunder from the pulpit in those circumstances, and I dropped that sermon in the stove and preached on the Parable of the Lost Sheep. I wish I had kept it, because I meant every word. It might have been the only sermon I wouldn't mind answering for in the next world. And I burned it. But Mirabelle Mercer was not Pontius Pilate, and she was not Woodrow Wilson, either."

-- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

"Wonders and miracles are performed in Jerusalem. . . . In Miron a fiery column has been seen stretching from earth to heaven. . . . The full name of God and of Sabbatai Zevi were scratched on it in black. . . . The women who divine by consulting drops of oil have seen the crown of King David on Sabbatai Zevi's head. . . . Many disbelievers deny this and refuse to turn back at the very threshold of Gehenna. . . . Woe unto them! They will sink and be lost in the nethermost circle of Sheol!"

-- Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer

"The slope was close to thirty degrees but the forest was comprised of slightly older growth than farther up. Trees were six to eight feet apart and there wasn't too much undergrowth. Anna's boots dug deep in the duff as she hauled up, one step at a time, the side of the stretcher in one hand, the jump kit in the other. The position was awkward and she knew she wasn't helping much with Hamlin's weight."

Firestorm by Nevada Barr

"The other interesting thing about that ten thousand hours, of course, is that ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time. It's all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you're a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can't be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won't be time left in the day to practice enough. In fact, most people can reach that number only if they get into some kind of special program - like a hockey all-star squad - or if they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours."
~~ Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

"As the albino joey was lowered into her arms at the wildlife rescue in Melbourne, she experienced a pang of distrust: did people feel more connected to this particular kangaroo for white supremacist reasons, in the same way that they were more eager to adopt blue-eyed cats? Worth considering. Still, as she held him, she felt herself grow a deep elastic pocket at the center of her body: to smuggle something away from this continent, this continent where the moon traveled backward and the popsicles were known as Golden Gaytimes."
No One is Talking about This by Patricia Lockwood

He takes note of Rose's hair, its errant cinnamon tint fringed blond around the temples. Seeing the soldier's eyes on her dauhgter, Lan pushes the girl's face to her chest, shieldering her. The boy watches this child, the whiteness showing from her yellow body. He could be her father, he thinks, realizes. Someone he knows could be her father--his sergeant, squad leader, platoon partner, Michael, George, Thomas, Raymond, Jackson. He considers them, rifle gripped tight, his eyes on the girl with American blood before the American gun.

-- On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Monday, 23 May
Entrained for Newquay at 10:30, arrived at 5:30. These digs at Crantock St are terrible!! I shall go raving mad if I stay here long. Madly working class'ish. Quite the end.
The Kenneth Williams Diaries

"Some of the anti-slavers visit me here, seeing what stories they can harvest out of me for their pamphlets. What makes them imagine I'd agree? They'd only make it into one of those slave tales. It doesn't cross their minds that I might want to write it myself.
~~The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins

But the governing Federalists distrusted most western settlers as ignorant, violent, and indolent--and in need of federal control. The new territorial governor, Arthur St. Clair, sought to teach them "that the Government of the Union was not a mere shadow." Then "their progeny would grow up in habits of Obedience and Respect . . . and the Countless multitudes which will be produced in that vast Region would become the Nerves and Sinews of the Union." By restraining settlers, Federalists sought to convert the West from the Union's greatest threat into its primary asset.

-- American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 by Alan Taylor

“Of Zanzibar? But it’s quite an unimportant little place,” protested Dany, momentarily forgetting her own predicament in a sudden sense of outrage. Was there then no longer any lovely, romantic spot left in all the world that was free from squabbling political parties?

Death in Zanzibar by M.M. Kaye

"He still looked dead. Pale face, red under the eyes. A dead body. Operating but still, basically, a dead body. Was that fair? Was that justice? Was that a proper reward for being a firm believer in reincarnation for almost 130 years? You come back as a corpse?"

Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett

Divine hears church bells ringing (for she is awake). Instead of notes, which fly away, the chimes are strokes, five strokes, which drop to the pavement, and on that wet pavement, bear Divine with them, Divine who three years before, or perhaps four, at the same hour, in the streets of a small town, was rummaging through a garbage can for bread. She had spent the night wandering through the streets in the drizzling rain, hugging the walls so as to get less wet, waiting for the angelus (the bells are now ringing low mass, and Divine relives the anguish of the days without shelter, the days of the bells) which announces that the churches are open to old maids, real sinners, and tramps.

-- Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

Hitler's purposes were mixed. He wanted the British army to leave Europe. But by "not annihilating" the BEF, he did not wish to spare them. Three days before the halt order he let himself be convinced by Hermann Goering that the retreating BEF could be smashed to pieces by the Luftwaffe. On 23 May Major Engel, Hitler's adjutant, noted iin his diary that Hitler and Goering were talking on the telephone again: "The Field Marshal thinks that the great task of the Luftwaffe is beginning: the annihilation of the British in Northern France. The army will only have to occupy. We are angry. The Fuhrer is inspired."
~~ Five Days in London, May 1940 by John Lukacs

Still she said nothing, and Huber imitated the movements of a sower, a reaper, a harvester. Between each movement he struck his chest with the fist in which he clutched the piece of bread. The girl smiled. He pointed a finger toward her, toward the village, and put it to his lips. She smiled again. A smile of gratitude bared his black teeth. He repeated, "Dank sebön, Freilein!" Then the girl left.

-- First Harvest by Vladimir Pozner

'if I write the defining story of my career - and it will define me, I'm certain of that - it will open a Pandora's box.'

When I was Ten by Fiona Cummins

Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a wedge between poor whites and African Americans. These discriminatory barriers were designed to encourage lower-class whites to retain a sense of superiority over blacks, making it far less likely that they would sustain interracial political alliances aimed at toppling the white elite. The laws were, in effect, another racial bribe. As William Julius Wilson has noted, "As long as poor whites directed their hatred and frustration against the black competitor, the planters were relieved of class hostility directed against them." Indeed, in order to overcome the well-founded suspicions of poor and illiterate whites that they, as well as blacks, were in danger of losing the right to vote, the leaders of the movement pursued an aggressive campaign of white supremacy in every state prior to bald, disenfranchisement.

-- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

...Sandy Dennis was once performing on Broadway, and before the performance had ordered a steak dinner from Frankie & Johnnie's, the famous theatrical eatery on 45th Street. The delivery boy got lost on the way to the dressing room, but spied the actress out on stage having a conversation. With great relief he went up to her in the middle of her scene and said,
"Here's your steak, Miss Dennis."

Broadway Anecdotes by Peter Hay

She pulled out some coins to pay the taxi driver, then linked arms with me and started to march me up the Brompton Road. "So what are you doing in town?"
~~ Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen

This place didn't shudder, the windows didn't rattle, despite the fury outside. It had been built to last, and lasted it had. He figured it was more than one hundred, perhaps even two hundred years old.

Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny

The lawyer said sharply as through from habit, "Yesterday you said it was slow." From that moment the mayor hated Chavel. Chavel and he were the only men of position in the prison; he told himself that never would he have let Chavel down in that way, and immediately began tortuously to seek for an explanation--some underground and disgraceful motive. Although the lawyer seldom spoke and had no friends, the mayor said to himself, "Currying popularity. he thinks he'll rule this prison. He wants to be a dictator."

-- The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

Without telling us, she had invited the poet Gaius Valerius Catullus to join her here. We were glad to see him, particularly my children, though we would much have preferred to see him alone. When she’s around he’s either in the heavens or in hell. This time he was in hell, and soon we all were.

The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder

Despite the time lost to his unexplained illness early in the summer, by autumn he was back in a groove. He finished the Glen Roy paper. He worked on another geology manuscript, related to those endlessly ongoing Beagle publications. He pondered transmutation and also, by testimony to another little diary, he "thought much upon religion." The entry is cryptic, but it's safe to assume he wasn't experiencing an accession of piety. Probably he was worrying over the conflict between religious dogma as filtered through natural theology and, on the other hand, the view of origins he now held. He cast about for facts, alternative perspectives, and authority, reading the journal of an expedition to eastern Australia, Edward Gibbon's autobiography, John Ray's The Wisdom of God, and three volumes of a biography of Walter Scott. He read books about birds, Mt. Aetna, physiognomy, epistemology, and Paraguay. And then, in September of that year, 1838, he picked up the sixth edition of Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population.

-- The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen

The detective looked me up and down. His brow wrinkled, his eyes flicking back and forth from identifying feature to identifying feature. Behind the dismissive smirk I could almost see his brain cross-referencing my scars, height, and build with some database of wanted felons filed inside his head.

-- The Sellout by Paul Beatty

"As she marched me past pottery fragments, gold jewellery and decorated drinking horns, it dawned on me just how little I knew about this part of the world. There were flourishing cultures and cities here long before the Romans became Romans." Sovietistan by Erika Fatland.

The old slave quarters had been plotted, boldly, in the shape of a crucifix. Rue's cabin sat at the lowermost point of that cross and so she walked the whole of the empty dirt path, past all the quiet homes. Suddenly, she was struck with the absence of everyone, a swelling goneness.

-- Conjure Women by Afia Atakora

There were usually many hands running around the property, but now the place was ghostly. He'd titled the home - another offense in George's mind, giving a title to anything not breathing - Majesty's Palace. It was large enough to demand constant upkeep, its gilded accents so fragile that they seemed made more for tending to than anything else. And behind the home, George knew, the compound of cabins had been kept padded with enough bodies to rebuild ancient Rome, plenty to keep the home and farm operating smoothly.
~~ The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

"What are the advantages and disadvantages of being a wizard? Well, you got a certain amount of prestige, but you were often in dangerous situations and certainly always at risk of being killed by a fellow mage. He saw no future in being a well-respected corpse."

--Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett

A couple of hours later, Nanny gave my mother a plate of food to take up for him. Now, what my grandfather didn't know was that his family never had enough food. My mother was hungry, and as she walked up with the plate, the food slid toward the edge and she could not resist hooking her finger into the gravy to come out with a lump of mashed potato. She smoothed over the dent and knocked on the door. The old man opened the door and looked down at his plate. He took the plate and dragged her into the room, where he removed his leather belt and beat her until her buttocks and legs were striped with welts. Her mother told her it served her right for touching his food - he was the breadwinner, after all.
~~ This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing by Jacqueline Winspear

Just under a year after his last session for Chess, Phillips called {Rufus} Thomas back to the studio to cut "Bear Cat." After the record broke, Thomas formed his own group, the Bear Cats, and started touring on weekends. His follow-up, "Tiger Man," written by Sam Phillips and Joe Hill Louis, was another novelty number that should have done comparably well, but didn't. Thomas was not asked to record for Sun again, a fact that galls him to this day. "I sold a hundred thousand records for him," he told David Booth, "and all the time he was looking for a white boy. Sam never mentions that I was the first to make money for Sun Records either."

-- Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll by Colin Escott with Martin Hawkins

"Abdullah took a step forward, meaning to say something, but then Uncle Nabi's thick hand was on his shoulder, turning him around, Uncle Nabi leading him down the hallway, saying, "Wait 'til you see the bazaars in this place. You've not seen the likes of it, you two."
--And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

I'm trying to wrest control of my feelings from my rational mind. It tells me to rid myself of this crazy desire for fanatical love if I don't want to betray myself, if I don't want to lose not only my self-love, but also my self-respect. It seems to me that there is no struggle more difficult for women than the struggle between love and self-respect.

-- Diary of a Lonely Girl or the Battle Against Free Love by Miriam Karpilove

Hypothesis tests and confidence intervals provide overlapping information about the parameter or association being assessed. Common ground is that when a two-sided test is statistically significant at P < 0.05, then the corresponding 95% confidence interval will exclude the null parameter value. However, the P-value, especially if it is small, does give a more direct sense of the evidence against the null hypothesis.

Regression Methods in Biostatistics by Vittinghoff, etc.

Sometimes the fierce Santa Anna wind blows offshore, and then let the little shipping look out. This wind chops up good nature as well as the surface of the sea. The Santa Anna is not conducive to kindliness. In Spain they have a hot wind called the Solano. They have a proverb which says, “Ask no favors during Solano.”

Happy Days in Southern California (1898) by Frederick Hastings Rindge

Colonel Lloyd's slaves were in the habit of spending a part of their nights and Sundays in fishing for oysters, and in this way made up the deficiency of their scanty allowance. An old man belonging to Colonel Lloyd, while thus engaged, happened to get beyond the limits of Colonel Lloyd's, and on the premises of Mr. Beal Bondly. At this trespass, Mr. Bondly took offense, and with his musket came down to the shore, and blew its deadly contents into the poor old man.

-- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass

"Ha!" Albot had discovered that the door wasn't locked. Relief made Maud go weak at the knees. They were on their way into the boiler room. And the coal cellar.
~~An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed by Helene Tursten

Early in the evening of the day the bomb exploded, a Japanese naval launch moved slowly up and down the seven rivers of Hiroshima. It stopped here and there to make an announcement - alongside the crowded sandspits, on which hundreds of wounded lay; at the bridges, on which others were crowded; and eventually, as twilight fell, opposite Asano Park.

--Hiroshima by John Hersey

"The year they shot them Irish people down in the streets. Was a good year for guns and gravediggers, I know that." Pilate put a barrel lid on the table. Then she lifted the eggs from the wash basin and began to peel them. Her lips moved as she played an orange seed around in her mouth. Only after the eggs were split open, revealing moist reddish-yellow centers, did she return to her story. "One morning we woke up when the sun was nearly a quarter way cross the sky. Bright as anything. And blue. Blue like the ribbons on my mother's bonnet. See that streak of sky?" She pointed out the window. "Right behind them hickories. See? Right over there."

-- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

"It's a long story. Here, I'll begin it from the beginning. He's a prodigy, a genius, a mathematician, a sage, a jack-of-all-trades. He's one of those kind who are dumb as a fish today, but tomorrow they'll be standing in the University of Brussels, proclaiming that we Jews are a religion, not a nation, and that the Ostjuden stink up the atmosphere."

-- The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer

"I packed up my personal belongings and my current files. California Fidelity had suspended our relationship until the Wood/Warren matter could be "straightened out," whatever that meant. I had until noon to clear the premises. I called the telephone company and asked to have calls forwarded to my home until further notice. I unplugged the answering machine and placed it on top of the last cardboard box, which I toted down the back steps to my car. I had been asked to turn in my office keys before I left, but I ignored the request. I didn't think Mac would press the point and I didn't think anyone would bother to have the locks changed. Screw 'em. I know hot to pick most locks, anyway."
~~ E is for Evidence by Sue Grafton

One morning a news crew from America was in the cafe around the corner from my flat. The reporter wore construction boots, jeans, and a bulletproof vest. I watched him with curiosity and scorn at his precautions, his self-conscious air of bravery. I thought, you're only flying in, you don't live here like I do.

Northern Spy by Flynn Berry

Friday the papers started printing the casualty lists, but Ezra's name was not there. "He's sartain safe," John Thane assured his wife, but he was thunderstruck Saturday at two solid pages of names in tiny type.

-- Boy in Blue by Royce Brier

The Painter's Brush is a look that doesn't take well to fancy embellishments. Trim it too much and you might end up with a Chevron (pg.32); let it grow too long and you'll have a full blown Horseshoe (pg.44) on your hands - or on your upper lip.

The Moustache Grower's Guide by Lucien Edwards

She hadn't known the baseball glove was a perfectly worn-in classic Rawlings. Or that Jay had been hoping Madison or Ryder might use it someday. All she'd seen was that it was old. And kinda moldy. She honestly hadn't thought he would notice it was gone.
~~ The Chicken Sisters by K J Dell'Antonia

We marched out of Rendsburg with our sea bags on our shoulders and our food bowls tucked under our arms. Our arrival in the small town of Gluckstadt was met by thousands of onlookers. No longer covered in powder residue and at last wearing clean clothes, we almost resembled human beings, so it wasn’t our appearance so much as our quantity that made an impact on the townsfolk.

We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen

>131 marell: I hope you're enjoying We, the Drowned. I absolutely loved it.

>132 rocketjk: Yes, I am. I have a feeling those 675 pages are going to fly by. I can hardly put it down.

When the children left the flat in Divis, Jean would tell them not to stray too far. "Don't wander away," she would say. "Stay close to home." Technically, there was not a war going on--the authorities insisted that this was simply a civil disturbance--but it certainly felt like a war. Michael would venture out with his friends and his siblings into an alien, unpredictable landscape. Even in the worst years of the Troubles, some children seemed to have no fear. After the shooting stopped and the fires died down, kids would scuttle outside and crawl through the skeletons of burned-out lorries, trampoline on rusted box-spring mattresses, or hid in a stray bathtub that lay abandoned amid the rubble.

-- Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

More relevant to the Rabbit Compliance Taskforce, Ross was by local statute an "Open Town" commercially, residentially and -- crucially -- for those on a day permit from Rabbit Colony One, eight miles to the east. Thanks to a well-intentioned by-law passed forty years before, busloads of rabbits could move between the two locations without identification checks, something of a headache for RabCoT as it made potential free movement of those in the banned Rabbit Underground that much easier. None of the other colonies enjoyed such freedoms, so it had long been assumed that Colony One was where the movement was based.

-- The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde

"What's worth a hundred dollars?" Jane asked
"Probably not even that much. Earlier today Donald came in asking me to let him know if I heard about a copy of the Strand Magazine that's for sale. According to the web page that I checked, those are worth a hundred bucks or so. Makes me wonder why, if Donald wanted one, he didn't just go to an online retailer and buy it."
~~ Elementary, She Read by Vicki Delany

"Sure," Ahmad said. "But at least tell me how much you've learned."
"Everything," Waller said. "Everything we've ever wanted to know."

-- Falling Toward Forever by Gordon Eklund

"The part Thomas played in his brother's imprisonment was dishonorable, but even so he was not a really bad boy. I believe this, and hope that in time you will come to believe it, too."
~~ The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King

Soon afterward on a soft July evening, in a clapboard summer house fifty miles north of Brooklyn, Emily was stricken with poliomyelitis. In twenty-four hours she journeyed from a life of piano lessons, swimming dates and gossip to an isolation ward in a municipal hospital, where she watched vermin cross unpainted walls and heard meningitis victims die. Within a month she was transferred to a private hospital, but it was two years before she could come home. The quadriceps muscle in her right leg was dead. When at length she was discharged, her walk, once airy, had become a sequence of lurches.

-- The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

More pressingly, the colonies of the Chesapeake were faltering and needed manpower to cultivate tobacco. The colonies farther south were suited for sugarcane, rice, and cotton--crops with which the English had little experience, but that Africans had either cultivated in their native lands or were quick to master. "The colonists soon realized that without Africans and the skills that they brought, their enterprises would fail," wrote the anthropoogists Audrey and Brian Smedley.

-- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

That was the last slogan on the last slide oon the last PowerPoint. Something to take home with them, says Ed. Their new home, right here inside Consilience. And inside Positron, of course. Think of an egg, with a white and a yolk. (An egg came up onscreen, a knife cut it in half, lengthwise.) Consilience is the white. Positron is the yolk, and together they make the whole egg. The nest egg, says Ed, smiling. There's a final picture: a nest, with a golden egg shining within it.
~~ The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

"You'll learn better. Three or four good books and a bit of mystification, and people will take some notice. Putting a cat among the pigeons--I'm a great believer in that, because conventional people can't begin to cope. You're an example, Sheila, the minute you hear of something unorthodox you're helpless, you can't begin to cope. Always do what conventional people wouldn't do. It's the only way."

-- Homecomings by C.P. Snow

In 1847, when I was a country boy in my teens, I gathered a few dollars I had saved , said good-bye to my native village, and went to try my luck in the busy city of Boston. I found a place where I could lodge at ten cents a night and took my meals wherever I could get food cheapest. My money was gradually melting away, however, and my enthusiasm was on the wane when I ran across Charles Minot, who had known me when he was practicing law in my hometown of Haverhill. Now he was superintendent of the Boston and Maine Railroad and was known as one of the most capable and progressive men in Massachusetts.
“Hello, Charley,” he said. “When did you leave Haverhill? What are you here for?”
“Looking for something to do,” I answered gloomily,” and I’m tired of asking for a place.”
“Got any money?”
“Not very much.”
“Cheer up my boy,” he said cheerily, slipping a five-dollar bill into my hand. “How would you like to be a railroad man?”
“Like it?” I echoed. “Just give me a chance, sir.”
As a result of our meeting, I became baggagemaster of the train to Medford about five miles out of Boston. To start with, I worked at seventeen dollars a month, which seemed a princely sum to a poor boy who had been walking about the streets, homeless and almost penniless, a few days before. In four or five months my salary was raised. I drew thirty-five dollars a month, and I felt richer than I ever have felt since.

Workin' on the Railroad by Richard Reinhardt

Captain Pasley was in his new dugout writing his forms. Every last thing that came in and every last thing that went out was accounted for. Items and bodies. Captain Pasley, of course, was obliged to read all the letters the men sent home, and he did, word for blessed word. He thought it might break a man’s heart to read them sometimes; there was something awfully sad about some of the soldiers’ letters. They didn’t mean to make them sad, which gave their efforts to be manly and cheerful a melancholy tinge. But it had to be faced. God help them, they were funny enough efforts sometimes. Some men wrote a letter as formal as a bishop, some tried to write the inside of their heads, like that young Willie Dunne. It was a curiosity.

A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry

"I don't like the Gestapo involving themselves with our inquiries," said Goldsche. "I don't like it at all. Our judicial independence is always under threat from Himmler and his thugs."

-- A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr

During this era many towns across the country adopted policies forbidding African Americans from residing or even from being within town borders after dark. Although the policies were rarely formalized in ordinances, police and organized mobs enforced them. Some towns rang bells at sundown to warn African Americans to leave. Others posted signs at the town boundaries warning them not to remain after sundown.

-- The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition. My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of their children? Did the other slaves dare to allude to it, except in whispers among themselves? No, indeed! They knew too well the terrible consequences.

-- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild's ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details. Even when you are wrong, Especially then, in fact.

My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises by Fredrik Backman

Eventually, they were all there: Mendele Katshke, Yosele Deitch, Lazerel Kratzmich. Their current leader was one Berish Visoker, a tiny fellow with shifty eyes, a pointed, bald head, sharp nose and chin, and long arms like an ape. Berish Visoker, like Zeftel, came from Greater Poland. He dressed foppishly, with his colored trousers, yellow shoes, velvet vests, and embroidered shirts. A hat with a feather in it was always on his head. Especially high heels on his boots added to his stature. Berish was so skillful that he could steal a watch from a pickpocket. He knew Russian, Polish, and German, and was on good terms with the authorities, was, in fact, less thief than grafter and intermediary. Years ago he had served a prison term, not for theft but for having cheated a nobleman at a card game known as "Little Chain." Berish Visoker was as sharp at cards as Blind Mechl was at locks. But he was no match for Yasha. Yasha always showed Berish new tricks that baffled him. Even now he had several packs of cards in his pocket, both marked and unmarked. Berish was notoriously reckless. He could not stay in a chair. While everyone else sat around the table, he wriggled like a caged animal, or a wolf trying to bite his own tail. He cocked his head and spoke out of the side of his mouth. "When will you become one of us, eh?" he asked Yasha in his nasal tones. "Clasp my hand and join the brotherhood."

-- The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Their sparsely furnished office across the street from the capitol was a chaotic mess of books, newspapers, and papers which were scattered everywhere. Neither partner had any aptitude for organization. Lincoln carried letters and memoranda on which he had jotted down ideas in the lining of his hat, which Herndon designated "His desk and his memorandum-book. (Indeed, he once informed an attorney that the purchase of a new hat accounted for his delay in answering a letter.) On the desk was a bundle of papers, tied with a string, with the notation, "When you can't find it anywhere else, look in this."

-- Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America by William E. Gienapp

11/06/14
Thursday afternoon

Catch up with email, catch up with Twitter, catch up with Facebook, catch up with Instagram, catch up with Pinterest, catch up with email. Catch up with Twitter, catch up with Facebook, catch up with Instagram, catch up with Pinterest, catch up with email, catch up with Twitter. Catch up with Facebook, catch up with Instagram, catch up with there's nothing new on Pinterest.

No.91/92: A Diary of a year on the Bus by Lauren Elkin

OK, cool. Let's try to get this going again!

"Deputy Wexler has seniority on me. And he's nursing a bum knee."

Gload snorted. A pale cloud formed from out of the dark of his cell. "Right. From chasing bad guys." He seemed incredulous. "That's what he honest to Christ said." He waited for Millimaki to say something but he did not. "Seems to get around on that war would pretty good unless somebody's watching him." He snorted again. Millimaki would come to understand in the coming weeks that this was what passed for a laugh from the old man.

-- The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan

... "Sir, it's Mr. Tompkins and we have a problem at your yeast factory. There's a fire ... Hold on, sir. I have to put you on hold while I run up another floor. The yeast is rising ... Sir, are you still there? The firefighters are on-site trying to contain the blaze ... Hold on, sir, I have to run up another flight of stairs ..."

I shouldn't Even Be Doing This! by Bob Newhart

"To marriage," Li Ang said. He was floating a finger's width above the chair; he could barely sense the weight of the bottle in his hands. He closed his eyes and drank. The morning sun glowed red against his lids; his ears were ringing. Only the sting of alcohol anchored him. "But Uncle Charlie," he said, letting go of each word carefully, as if it were a paper boat on the sea, "I don't know if I want a wife."

-- Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang

“Although athletic, Jimmy was a pianist and sang with the best of them — a member of the glee club throughout his college years, but today he stood shoulder to shoulder with the students. Finishing the song accompanied by a simple organ, Jimmy sang out in Japanese with his whole heart. He didn’t just sing the words, he meant them.

Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever.”

Wounded Tiger: A True Story by T. Martin Bennett

When we arrived at the spot, there was a great deal of other song in the woods - flycatchers, chickadees, water thrushes, ovenbirds, and even discordant cries of night herons flying over the creek. Finally the sound for which I'd been straining my ears - the short "Whew" that says veeries are about. And at last the songs began, the first so far off in the woods, or so faint that I had to hold my breath to hear at all. But oh - unmistakably! - a veery. Soon others began, some quite close to us. As perhaps you found, they never seem to sing in chorus, but responsively, one voice quickly answering another. And all that unearthly quality - "of a spirit not to be discovered" as Mr Halle said - was there. But one of the spirits revealed itself, for suddenly a slim little bird materialized on the branch of a dogwood, almost over our heads. Oh, how I wanted to sing, then and there. But that was not to be. In a minute or so it flew into a tangle of honeysuckle along the path.

Always, Rachel - Rachel Carson

The weather was mostly clear and cold; sometimes sunny at midday, but always cold. Here and there in the soil of the hill-sides you found the green beaks of wild crocuses or irises poking through; evidently spring was coming, but coming very slowly. The nights were colder than ever. Coming off guard in the small hours we used to rake together what was left of the cook-house fire and then stand in the red-hot embers. It was bad for your boots, but it was very good for your feet. But there were mornings when the sight of the dawn among the mountain-tops made it almost worthwhile to be out of bed at godless hours. I hate mountains, even from a spectacular point of view. But sometimes the dawn breaking behind the hill-tops in our rear, the first narrow streaks of gold, like swords slitting the darkness, and then the growing light and the seas of carmine cloud stretching away into inconceivable distances, were worth watching even when you had been up all night, when your legs were numb from the knees down and you were sullenly reflecting that there was no hope of food for another three hours. I saw the dawn oftener during this campaign then during the rest of my life put together -- or during the part that is to come, I hope.

-- Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

When I wake early - and the birds wake me - I lie and watch the brass handles on the cupboards grow clear; then the basin; then the towel-horse. As each thing in the bedroom grows clear, my heart beats quicker. I feel my body harden, and become pink, yellow, brown. My hands pass over my legs and body. I feel its slopes, its thinness. I love to hear the gong roar through the house and the stir begin - here a thud, there a patter. Doors slam, water rushes. Here is another day, here is another day, I cry, as my feet touch the floor.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

What could I do but bow acceptance? It was Mr. Hawkins’s interest, not mine, and I had to think of him, not myself; and besides, while Count Dracula was speaking, there was that in his eyes and in his bearing which made me remember that I was a prisoner, and that if I wished it I could have no choice. The Count saw his victory in my bow, and his mastery in the trouble of my face, for he began at once to use them, but in his own smooth, resistless way.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

>159 marell: Ah, cool! I always liked this thread. Sure, let's get it going again. Here's my current one:

"Really? 'Quite bright'? Wow. You know, Braden, it's always been my goal, my aim in life you might say, to one day, if I work hard enough, read enough books and make enough money, to maybe, one day, attain the lofty position of being able to sit down to dinner with 'quite bright' twenty-six-year-old actors on a regular basis. That's the Algonquin I was always shooting for. 'Quite bright' no less. I hated quite bright twenty-six-year-olds when I was one."

Straight White Male by John Niven

>160 rocketjk: Yes! I’d love to get it going again. This is a favorite of mine too.

Benya took a growing pride in the beauty of Silver Socks. If her hooves seemed worn or ill-shod or sore, he called in ‘Tufty’ Grishchuk, the farrier with a patchy, crusty face. If she was not herself, he consulted Lampadnik, the battalion vet. He spent hours grooming her chestnut coat till it gleamed, and polishing her accoutrements — the pommel of her saddle and the handle of his sabre. There is, he thought, no tonic for being a ruined man, like the love of a horse. Sometimes he just sat in her stable and let her nuzzle him.

Red Sky at Noon by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Course 6
THE SKY IS FALLING

Confit Poussin "lollypops", sauted Chicken Liver, Talikser-&Cranberry jelly, Beetroot powder, and Micro Herbs.

~

ANTRICA ENTORIA VRICCIO, 2014

Tasting Menu: A Short Story by Stuart MacBride

The objective of all this effort was to secure the port of Cherbourg and to create a beachhead sufficiently large to absorb the incoming stream of American reinforcements and serve as a base for an offensive through France. SHAEF's detailed projections of future activity - where the front lines would be on such-and-such a date - were already wrong on June 7. That was inevitable.

Citizen Soldiers

“What all does Delhi’s ‘top cop’ have to say on the matter?” As ever when Puri referred to the chief, his voice was loaded with sarcasm.

The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing: From the Files of Vish Puri, Most Private Investigator by Tarquin Hall

I don't know what the hell I thought I was going to do. I couldn't have gotten them out. The water was deep. I dove down and saw the Pierce, big and black, still sinking way below me. It looked huge in the water, a big block, and the headlights were still on. Then I saw Reb swimming up like in slow motion, drifting up through the water, and he had Marthella by the arm. She looked like a rag doll in the gray water, not moving or helping him. I thought she was dead. I swam toward them and surfaced right after. They were gasping and coughing water. I held them both up and then we swam back, Reb and me holding Marthella. We got to the rocks--that rock ledge under the drop-off. Mitch, get her out of here for me. Take her to my father. We were all shivering and spitting water. I took her, pulled her up over the rocks, and Reb lay down where he was, didn't move, didn't watch us go.

-- Machine Dreams by Jayne Anne Phillips

OCTOBER 22, 2108. Roomba recall. After a rogue Roomba is blamed for the gruesome deaths of two seniors who fell asleep on a shag rug, 155,000 of the popular free-range biovac house helpers are pulled from hardware and pet store shelves.

Tomorrowing by Terry Bisson

(initial touchstone was incorrect)

His face was like a searchlight. He looked at Holman and tapped the bottom of the boiler gauge glass. “Stim dead!” Then he tapped the steam space above the water in the glass. “Stim live!” “Stim live!” It was wonderful to see his face. He was just realizing in his own fashion the life-and-death cycle of the steam, endlessly repeated, and how it tied together pumps, piping and heat exchangers into the big magic. He looked like Columbus discovering America.

The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna

VARYA. {Frightened} I’m going, I’m going.... Oh, little mother, at home there’s nothing for the servants to eat, and you gave him gold.

LUBOV. What is to be done with such a fool as I am! At home I’ll give you everything I’ve got. Ermolai Alexeyevitch, lend me some more!...

LOPAKHIN. Very well.

almost at the end of Act 2, The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, translated by Julius West

"Let me entreat you," cried Mr. Elton; "it would indeed be a delight! Let me entreat you, Miss Woodhouse, to exercise so charming a talent in favor of your friend. I know what your drawings are. How could you suppose me ignorant? Is not this room rich in specimens of your landscapes and flowers: and has not Mrs. Weston some inimitable figure-pieces in her drawing room, at Randalls?"

-- Emma by Jane Austen (Penguin Classics edition)

In a very real sense, then, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot of will not read. To have read Gulliver's Travels is to have had the experience, with Jonathan Swift, of turning sick at one's stomach at the conduct of the human race; to read Huckleberry Finn is to feel what it is like to drift down the Mississippi River on a raft; to have read Byron is to have suffered with him his rebellions and neuroses and to have enjoyed with him his nosethumbing at society; to have read Native Son is to know how it feels to be frustrated in the particular way in which many Negroes in Chicago are frustrated. This is the great task that affective communication performs: it enables us to feel how others felt about life, even if they lived thousands of miles away and centuries ago. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

S.I.Hayakawa, Language of Thought and Action(1952).

A Book Addict's Treasury by Julie Rugg

They went in, lighted a candle, and in a moment had a charcoal fire blazing in the tiny hearth. First of all, Benedikt took care of Gnarly. He went to the spring for water, for the hut had been built over a vein of water that never froze. While Gnarly drank, he took a bunch of hay out of the sack, shook it up; cleaned as best he could, the ice from Gnarly’s hoofs; and then he rubbed them and his legs with tallow—good old Gnarly.

The Good Shepherd by Gunnar Gunnarsson

It would take too long to describe to you everything that I went through since the day I lost my wife, my mistress, and my business. One minute I was bound to mundane society with a thousand threads, or chains, and the next I was cut off from everything and everybody. The first thing I did that morning was to turn everything I had into traveler's checks. The bank tellers wondered why I was buying them in such large amounts. They asked where I was headed and I told them I was going on a round-the-world trip, with stops in many countries. They all said the same thing--that they envied me. One girl asked me if my wife was going along, and I told her I was a widower. In a sense, this wasn't a lie. I felt that my whole world had died.

-- The Penitent by Isaac B. Singer

The next week when Shamuel returns from the provision store and empties his sack, he says in his usual manner, “Matches. Two is coconut oil. Three is bitter gourd. Garlic, four. Malayala Manorama—“ setting the paper down as though it’s another vegetable. He can barely conceal his delight when she clutches the paper to herself, elated. “ Weekly it will come,” he says, proud to have pleased her. She knows that only her husband could have arranged this.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

And there she was standing over her porridge, sticking more and more brushwood under the pan; it crackled and crackled, and steadily the smoke grew thicker and thicker.

-- Independent People by Halldor Laxness

>175 rocketjk: This sounds like a wonderful book. My library has it as well as Iceland’s Bell.

Just finished this.

“Brad frowned, and Priya watched as he shoveled the stir-fry into his mouth. He didn’t appear to enjoy it, but maybe he was just distracted about the failed science project. “We should go away,” he said suddenly, chewing furiously. He took another sip of water, and locked eyes with her. “ You, Elliot, and me. We should get away.”

Open House by Katie Sise

>176 marell: Yes, it's wonderful, though not quick reading. And the protagonist is not always particularly pleasant. But the writing is superb.

>178 rocketjk: The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley is really wonderful and told in the style of the Old Norse sagas.

>179 marell: One of these days!

“Yam said Boon was bad luck,” Ma went on. “Cursed, and that’s why you don’t want him back on your boat.”

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng