“Roughly 26 million years ago, something happened over the sands of the Libyan Desert, the bleak, impossibly dry landscape that marks the eastern edge of the Sahara.”
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, by Steven Johnson
" Once our father bought a convertible. "
~~ A Home At The End Of The World. By Michael Cunningham.
“She was fourteen years old and sure that if she shut her eyes tight and concentrated she could see the stars through the roof.”–The Redeemer by Jo Nesbo
“My birth was a political act.”
Austral by Paul McAuley.
I finally finished that Massie book on the precursors to World War I a week ago, so now it’s King Coal by Upton Sinclair.
The town of Pedro stood on the side of the mountain country; a straggling assemblage of stores and saloons from which a number of branch railroads ran up into the canyons, feeding the coal-camps.
Tuesday at dawn, Los Angeles Trembled.
Dean Koontz, Whispers
“Journeys to nearby stars are not only possible, they could be done in under a decade.”
(Either that line, or “Jerry Redlands opened his eyes in freefall.”)
The Pentagon War (which is kinda cheating; I’m reading the book because I’m still writing it.)
“Magnifique!” ejaculated the Countess de Coude, beneath her breath.
- The Return of Tarzan
We hanged him in front of Kingsbridge Cathedral.
A Column of Fire, by Ken Follett
“In the darkness it came.”
The Science of Monsters: The Origins of the Creatures We Love to Fear, by Matt Kaplan
Jori and his cousin were cutting up, tossing snowballs at passing cars.
Evicted by Matthew Desmond
“The satellite radio was playing soft jazz, a compromise.”
– The Whistler, by John Grisham
It rained like we were a splatter of bird shit God was trying to hose off his deck.
- What the Hell Did I Just Read: a novel of cosmic horror, by David Wong
“Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place.”
Not exactly an opening sentence that pulls you in. Actually, the first thirty pages or so are pretty dry, as Dostoevsky insists on filling you in on a whole bunch of background on the father and the three brothers before the story proper begins. If you can get through that, it picks up from there.
Silvered with frost, the geometric patterns on the kennel windowpane displayed Nature’s gift for design.
“The Hounds and the Fury” by Rita Mae Brown
That actually is the sort of sentence that grabs me and pulls me in. I’ve not read The Brothers Karamazov yet, but I pland to sometime. Enjoyed Crime and Punishment.
“The body of an unidentified woman was found in an alley behind a butcher shop in Hollywood today.”
Design for Dying by Renee Patrick
“In one way, at least, our lives really are like movies.”
– Revival, by Stephen King
“The education bestowed upon Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.”
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
“Bosch was in cell 3 of the old San Fernando jail, looking through files from one of the Esme Tavares boxes, when a heads-up text came in from Bella Lourdes over in the detective bureau.”
– Two Kinds of Truth, by Michael Connelly