“The warm monsoon blew gently from the east, wafting HMS Leopard into the bay of Pulo Batang.”
The Fortune of War by Patrick O’Brian (1979)
“…Survivability has increased during hibernation since the introduction of Dormitoria, efficient weight-gain regimes, and Morphenox, but superstition and fear remain.”
Early Riser, by Jasper Fforde
“So what did *you *do, Mary Jo?” called Ben in his crisp British accent.
— Storm Cursed, Patricia Briggs
“From above, from a distance, the marks in the dust formed a tight circle.”
- The Lost Man, by Jane Harper
“September 2005: Despite the velvet-flocked, gold-leaf splendor of the Metropol Hotel, the enduring fetor of Moscow clung to the drapes and lay thick on the carpet, an incense of fusel oil, boiled cabbage, and ruined pussy.”
– The Kremlin’s Candidate, by Jason Matthews
“As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things.”
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
The composer Giuseppe Verdi was not a man with particularly strong or sophisticated political views, but he was almost unerringly alert to the mood of his audiences; and when, at the beginning of 1861, just a few months after the extraordinary chain of events that had led, in what many observers felt had been a providential fashion, to the unification of Italy under King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia and his prime minister, Count Camillo Cavour, he was approached by the Imperial Theater of St. Petersburg to write a new opera, he quickly alighted for his subject on a play that had been written nearly thirty years earlier by a well-known Spanish writer and politician, the Duke of Rivas, Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino - Don Alvaro or the Force of Fate.
The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796 by Christopher Duggan
I’m pretty sure this is the longest sentence I’ve posted in this thread.
“I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.” (The Inverted World, Christopher Priest, 1974.)
I’m re-reading it now. Great line to make the reader think.
Nice. 
“It had started when Hattie was a little girl.” -The Invited, Jennifer McMahon
“Thalia Ng felt her weight increasing as the elevated sped down the spoke from the habitat’s docking hub.”
The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds
I woke in crisp white cotton sheets to the sound of skylarks, with the sun beaming through a window somewhere nearby. – Dark Intelligence, Neal Asher
“His real name was John Paul, inherited, along with a chip on the shoulder, from his father.”
John Paul Jones by Evan Thomas (2003)
“The three of us entered this universe two days ago, blue planet time, and parked the Mother Ship XKE behind the dirt-ball satellite they refer to as their Moon.”
Tranquility and Other Myths: Seventeen Stories of Light, Night, and the Writhing Shadows, edited by Donna Royston
“Nineteen minutes before her brain and her body parted ways, Tara Beckley’s concern was the cold.”
If She Wakes, by Michael Koryta
This is a beautiful library, timed perfectly, lush and American.
-The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 by Richard Brautigan
Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell.
-Normal People by Sally Rooney
Dr. Katya Vidović stands outside the hospital courtyard gate, watching the Reptile Man exercise his pets.
-What We Do with the Wreckage, stories by Kirsten Sundberg Lundstrum
“I fled, or at least, backed awkwardly away from journalism because I wanted the freedom to make things up.”
The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, by Neil Gaiman
“Science demands collaboration. There are no lone geniuses, never evil geniuses, and very rarely any heretical geniuses.”
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford (2016)
Travel Time between Miami, Florida and Tokyo, Japan, is about seventeen and a half hours - plenty of time to contemplate what I was getting myself into.
*Walking the Kiso Road. A modern -day exploration of old Japan. * William Scott Wilson.
“Were they truly intelligent? By themselves, that is? I don’t know and I don’t know how we can ever find out. I’m not a lab man; I’m an operator.”
The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein (1951)
“I did not scream when I came in the back door of Sal’s Saloon, where I work, to find Sal himself lying there on the floor of the stockroom, the color of blue ruin, fluids leaking from his various holes and puddling on the ground, including a little spot of blood by his head”
— “Noir” by Christopher Moore
Moore is one of my favorite writers and he is doing this one in the style of a Hammett or Chandler.
Honestly I don’t like the opening line all that much, but he said “lying” instead of “laying,” so I’m happy.