Don’t tell us why you love the book; SHOW us--in 100 words or less.

[Humble_Servant]

@Larry Borgia

From Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. A lot of you will know this one, It’s pretty famous, but here it is anyway.

He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as loking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Oh good! I recently misattributed the following from Bonfire of the Vanities to Amis, but it was the one Larry posted that I really meant–full circle achieved:

The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membraneous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membraneous sac was his head and the right side of his head was on the pillow and the yolk was as heavy as mercury and it rolled like mercury and it was pressing down on his right temple and his right eye and his right ear. If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac and his brains would fall out.

[Eonwe]

@mnemosyne

Sorry, but it’s going to be in the original French, as it should be, from Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

(translated by me, so sorry if it doesn’t match what you may have read:

I’ve never read this, and that has definitely inspired me to go find this book (in English… I’ve never learned French).

[Glassy]

@Eonwe

I’ve never read this, and that has definitely inspired me to go find this book (in English… I’ve never learned French).

Try to find Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand, and Stars, too. The man could really write.

[Raguleader]

Ashes of Victory by David Weber, the 9th book in the Honor Harrington series:

“Oops.”

[mnemosyne]

@Eonwe

I’ve never read this, and that has definitely inspired me to go find this book (in English… I’ve never learned French).

Whee! That’s fantastic. I was once told that it’s a book people should read many times in their lives - as a child, when you’re 20, when you’re 40 and on your deathbed. Myself, I probably average about 3 times a year. I have 3 copies of it in the house - one that I’ve pretty much read ragged, another that I gave my husband when we first started dating, and a third that I was given by a close friend on my wedding day.

It is easily available in English - I think I remember reading that only the Bible has been translated into more languages than Le Petit Prince. It’s english title, is, of course, The Little Prince. You’ll find it in the children’s section, since it is a children’s book, but with so much meaning, you might find it fits into many other moments of your life. Don’t let the drawings put you off.

Yay!

[Tracy_Lord]

Still Life With Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins:

If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.

This is the all-new Remington SL3, the machine that answers the question, “Which is harder, trying to read The Brothers Karamazov while listening to Stevie Wonder records or hunting for Easter eggs on a typewriter?” This is the cherry on top of the cowgirl. The burger served by the genius waitress. The Empire card.

I sense that the novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3–although it writes much faster than I can spell. And no matter that my typing finger was pinched last week by a giant land crab. This baby speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard.

[MaxTheVool]

Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogroves
And the momeraths, outgrabe
The Wedding Procession of the Rag Doll and the Broom Handle, and Who Was In It by Card Sandburg**:
The title and cover art together are worth 100 words or less

And, deservedly bashed as he frequently is, Robert Jordan can sure write when he isn’t busy describing women’s clothing… from The Eye of the World (and yes, this is more than 100 words… the entire passage is partway down the page here

“Is this what Aemon’s blood has come to?” The Aes Sedai’s voice was not loud, but it overwhelmed every other sound. “Little people squabbling for the right to hide like rabbits? You have forgotten who you were, forgotten what you were, but I had hoped some small part was left, some memory in blood and bone. Some shred to steel you for the long night coming.”

No one spoke. The two Coplins looked as if they never wanted to open their mouths again.

Bran said, “Forgotten who we were? We are who we always have been. Honest farmers and shepherds and craftsmen. Two Rivers folk.”

“To the south,” Moiraine said, "lies the river you call the White River, but far to the east of here men call it still by its rightful name. Manetherendrelle. In the Old Tongue, Waters of the Mountain Home. Sparkling waters that once coursed through a land of bravery and beauty. Two thousand years ago Manetherendrelle flowed by the walls of a mountain city so lovely to behold that Ogier stonemasons came to stare in wonder. Farms and villages covered this region, and that you call the Forest of Shadows, as well, and beyond. But all of those folk thought of themselves as the people of the Mountain Home, the people of Manetheren.

“Their king was Aemon al Caar al Thorin, Aemon son of Caar son of Thorin, and Eldrene ay Ellan ay Carlon was his Queen. Aemon, a man so fearless that the greatest compliment for courage any could give, even among his enemies, was to say a man had Aemon’s heart. Eldrene, so beautiful that it was said the flowers bloomed to make her smile. Bravery and beauty and wisdom and a love that death could not sunder. Weep, if you have a heart, for the loss of them, for the loss of even their memory. Weep, for the loss of their blood.”

[Lissla_Lissar]

Well, here we go.

Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variery-seeking of the spectator, the thrill-hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building in their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts."
-The Dispossessed

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance.
This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he
is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning.
I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction.
-Orthodoxy

[First_Amongst_Daves]

Great thread.

Martin Amis, Londpn Fields, 1989:

You don’t need much empathic talent to tell what Keith’s thinking. He doesn’t do that much thinking in the first place. The very difficulty, the disuse of the muscles, writes headlines on his forehead, and his tabloid face.

And the extraordinary metaphor on the last page, which I won’t give away even as a spoiler, gives me the chills.

William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive:

‘You ever see a Fujiwara HE fléchette? Hits something hard, it goes off. Hits something soft, like most of you, buddy, it goes in, then it goes off. Ten seconds later.’

‘Why?’

‘So you get time to think about it.’"

And my favourite novel, Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1782:

La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid.

[The_Why_Bird]

“I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.”

—Anais Nin, I don’t know the work, but this is one of the most expressive passages I ever read. It makes my heart beat so fast

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@First Amongst Daves

And my favourite novel, Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1782:

You mean Klingons are fans of Dangerous Liaisions?

[XaMcQ]

I am loving this thread! Earlier today I was thinking of starting a similar thread about words that I love, but this is much better!

---

“I think he is providing a foil for you, My Queen, and waiting for you to make your move.”

“I made it already,” said Attolia. “On my wedding night? You have no doubt heard of the events of our wedding night?”

Relius looked away. “He said that you… cried,” he said softly.

“But not that he cried as well,” said the queen, amused at the memory. “We were very lachrymose.”

“Is that what he told Dite in the garden?” Relius asked, fitting puzzle piece to puzzle piece.

“I think so. I haven’t asked either of them outright. Would you like to hear more romance of the evening? He told me that the Guard should be reduced by half, and I threw an ink jar at his head.”

“Is that when he cried?”

“He ducked,” said Attolia dryly.

Grown more confident of the queen’s humor, Relius said, “I had not pictured you for a fishwife.”

“Lo, the transforming power of love.”

*Megan Whalen Turner, * The King of Attolia

[Sassy]

Taraka wavered. His face and left arm became smoke.
“Sam . . .”
“What?”
“Which one is the right way?”
“Huh? You’re asking me that? How should I know?”
“Mortals call you Buddha.”
“That is only because they are afflicted with language and ignorance.”
“No. I have looked upon your flames and name you Lord of Light. You
bind them as you bound us, you loose them as you loosed us. Yours was the
power to lay a belief upon them. You are what you claimed to be.”
-Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

[Fiddle_Peghead]

“Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.”

Moby Dick - Herman Melville