“My home town was just a village of six hundred or so (and still is, although I have moved away), but we had the Internet just like the big cities, so my father and I got less and less personal mail.”
If It Bleeds by Stephen King
“Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge.”
The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd
“There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks.”
My Name Is Lucy Barton, a novel by Elizabeth Strout.
'It is an extraordinary thing," said Harold Shoosmith one breakfast time,‘but I seem to have lost my reading glasses.’
Friends at Thrush Green, by Miss Read
At dusk, the sky over Lake Geneva is the colour of blood in a glass of water.
Love, Sex, and Frankenstein by Caroline Lea
“‘Hello,’ I said. ‘My name is Gretchen Trujillo, and I will be killing you today.’”
The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi
The snow came on Twelfth Night.
The Year at Thrush Green, by Miss Read
“I tapped the address in my file with the lid of the pen I’d been chewing on.”
A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer, by Maxie Dara.
“I am not all here.”
Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons From a Writing Life, by Terry Brooks
“umber whunnnn
yerrrnnn umber whunnnn
fayunnnn
These sounds: even in the haze.”
– Misery, by Stephen King
(Not only is that the first sentence from the book but also the entirety of Chapter 1.)
“I had been urban-renewed right out of my office and had to move uptown.”
First sentence in Promised Land, the fourth of the Robert B. Parker Spenser novels, from 1976
The first day of term has a flavour that is all its own; a whiff of lazy days behind and a foretaste of the busy future.
Village School, by Miss Read
When World War II erupted in September 1939, it didn’t mean much to Germaine Tillion, who at that moment was living in a cave on the side of a cliff overlooking the Sahara.
The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp, by Lynne Olson
“Like all cockroaches, Shoebag was named after his place of birth.”
Shoebag, by Mary James
“Owls are probably the most distinctive order of birds in the world, with their upright bodies, big round heads, and enormous front-facing eyes–hard to mistake for any other creature.”
What an Owl Knows: The Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman.
I’m intrigued, but this guy wrote a lot of books. Where do I start?
“On 20 May 2119 I took the overnight ferry from Port Marlborough and arrived in the late afternoon at the small quay near Maentwrog-under-Sea that serves the Bodleian Snowdonia Library.”
Ian McEwen, What We Can Know
At the library. Grab three or four of his books, check them out, and take them home.
I strongly recommend Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life.
I like Bryson, but that one was such a big chunk, it defeated me.
Looking over the list of his books, I have read:
- The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
- Notes from a Small Island
- A Walk in the Woods
- A Short History of Nearly Everything
- In a Sunburned Country
I enjoyed them all, but If I were forced to choose one to start with, I guess it would be Thunderbolt.
mmm
“From my window, the deep solemn massive street.”
– Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood
Well before dawn on 21 February 1916, when powdery snow lightened the darkness shrouding the lines of trenches gashed across the face of northern France, a 15-inch Krupp naval gun fired the first shot in the battle of Verdun.
The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s by Piers Brendon
I read this before, back around the time it was published in 2002. But twenty years is long enough for a re-reading.
“A colony of moss does not speak or think in language.”
Bog Queen by Anna North