“My lifelong love of children’s books begins on a humid day in Flushing, Queens.”
Steeped in Stories: Timeless Children’s Novels to Refresh Our Tired Souls, by Mitali Perkins.
“The night breeze off the sea riffled through the bone orchard, playing softly in the ghastly white fruits, making the solid ones clatter while the long bones chimed and fluted.”
The Bone Orchard, by Sara A. Mueller
“More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.”
The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson
“His arrival in Philadelphia is one of the most famous scenes in autobiographical literature: the bedraggled 17-year-old runaway, cheeky yet with a pretense of humility, straggling off the boat and buying three puffy rolls as he wanders up Market Street.”
Benjamin Franklin – An American Life by Walter Isaacson
“If one wishes to gaze upon the most marvelous landscape in the world, one must go to the topmost story of the Tower of Victory in Chitor.”
The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges
As with most of the Japanese-held islands they assaulted in their long, brutal trek across the Pacific, virtually none of the GIs and Marines assigned to invade Okinawa had ever heard of the place until a few weeks before they landed there.
The Ultimate Battle: Okinawa 1945 – the Last Epic Struggle of World War II, by Bill Sloan
Saipan
June 17, 1944
The flies were everywhere.
The Twilight Warriors: The Deadliest Naval Battle of World War II and the Men Who Fought It, by Robert Gandt
Two books about Okinawa, one covering the whole battle from both American and Japanese viewpoints, and one focusing on the fighter pilots aboard USS Intrepid (CV-11).
“It was one of those raw, windy, dreary Monday afternoons in February when gloom settled over the land and seasonal depression was rampant.”
Sparring Partners, by John Grisham
“Lenore had carefully chosen what to wear but felt dissatisfied.”
When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson, edited by Ellen Datlow.
(Note that the above line is from the first story, “Funeral Birds” by M. Rickert.)
“The famous Left Bank, which includes the Quartier Latin and Montparnasse, I had left behind me.”
Back to Montparnasse, Glimpses of Broadway in Bohemia. by Sisley Huddleston
“Dashiell Hammett, the bestselling creator of Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man, was one of the twentieth century’s most entertaining authors, and one of its most influential.”
– Lost Stories, a collection of 21 Dashiell Hammett stories never seen again after their original publishings.
The Moon.
Shackleton Crater.
Lunar latitude 90 degrees south.
Date: 2069.
At the exact moment of the centenary, the depths of Shackleton Crater at the Moon’s south pole went dark, as they had been for billions of years before humans arrived.
Space 2069: After Apollo: Back to the Moon, to Mars, and Beyond, by David Whitehouse
“After my junior year at Princeton, it another desultory academic lay-by, I decided I might as well go into the army and get it over with.”
Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter, by Frank Deford.
“Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly normal home or office.”
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (from the short story “Go Carolina”)
Anna Essinger, the accomplished headmistress of a progressive boarding school in southern Germany, was not a woman prone to alarm or overreaction.
The School That Escaped the Nazis: The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler, by Deborah Cadbury
“And where is home this week?”
Stand Tall by Joan Bauer
“Brilliant shards of crimson and gold pierced the eastern sky as dawn broke over Cambrai.”
The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, by Lindsey Fitzharris.
“How did the Marquis de Lafayette win over the stingiest, crankiest tax protesters in the history of the world?”
Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, by Saarah Vowell
“There were unexpected difficulties,” said the dark gray blur.
Provenance, by Ann Leckie
In the spring of 1944, outside the farming hamlet of Sussac in south-central France, an old water mill, long disused, rumbled back to life.
Scholars of Mayhem: My Father’s Secret War in Nazi-Occupied France, by Daniel C Guiet and Timothy K Smith
Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it was created at all and didn’t just start, as it were, unofficially, it came into being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago.
Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
It was unusually quiet that Saturday morning at the upstate New York weekly newspaper where I worked part time as a copy boy.
Passing Gas And Other Towns Along the American Highway, by Mary Gladstone