“On the eve of my twenty-fourth birthday I interview my mother.”
Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman
“As readers of Browsings will discover in the weeks to come, I’m pretty much what used to be called a ‘bookman’.”
Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books, by Michael Dirda
“How long had he been watching me? I wondered.”
A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon, edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger. (This is from the first story, “You’d Better Go in Disguise”, by Alan Bradley.)
“In the evening, we went to prayer meeting, had a spirited meeting.”
Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis, edited and with extensive background information by Karsonya Wise Whitehead.
“Pete was hauling ass.” - Heart Seizure, Bill Fitzhugh
“Uniformed LAPD Officer Joe Pike could hear the banda music even with the engine idling, the a.c. jacked to meat locker, and the two-way crackling callout codes to other units.”
– LA Requiem, by Robert Crais
“It is necessary to tell you about Roger Torraway.”
Man Plus, by Frederik Pohl
“Contemporary events differ from history in that we do not know the results they will produce.”
F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944).
“The Wealth of Nations is, without doubt, a book that changed the world.”
On The Wealth of Nations by P.J. O’Rourke
She came to him toward morning.
The Last Wish, by Andrzej Sapkowski
The idea of summer in the woods of Michigan, staying in a cabin on Cedar Lake, greatly appealed to Jacqueline Fournier.
Women of Valor: The Rochambelles on the WWII Front, by Ellen Hampton.
“Leo spun to life in late July in the restless waters of the far eastern Atlantic, about two hundred miles west of Cape Verde.”
Camino Winds, by John Grisham
“His coming into our classroom that morning was the only new thing.”
Feathers, by Jacqueline Woodson
“Beginning in July, 1837, Charles Darwin kept a small notebook, which he labeled “B,” devoted to the wildest idea he ever had.”
The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, by David Quammen
“On the morning of May 19, 2004, Carla Reed, a thirty-year-old kindergarten teacher from Ipswich, Massachusetts, a mother of three young children, woke up in bed with a headache.”
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.)
“Emily’s gone to take a shower. The room’s half-dark and I’m getting dressed, looking for a shirt with no blood on it, not having any luck.”
Cherry by Nico Walker
“It was from the air that the rawness of the land showed most: vast tracts where humanity had as yet made no difference, deserts unclaimed, stark as moons, scrag and woolwood thickets unexplored except by orbiting radar.”
Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh.
Alf grinned as he pushed open the whorehouse door into the damp London night.
The Case of the Spellbound Child (Elemental Masters #14), by Mercedes Lackey
O mighty caliph and commander of the faithful, I am humbled to be in the splendor of your presence; a man can hope for no greater blessing as long as he lives.
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
Commodore Eddie Cantrell looked past the bowsprit of the USE steam cruiser Intrepid into the nautical twilight brightening the eastern horizon.
1637: No Peace Beyond the Line by Eric Flint and Charles Gannon (advance reader copy, printed book comes out in November).
Thank you. I put that one on hold, too (along with 1636: The Atlantic Encounter and the two new Harry Dresdens).
Now we need a sequel to 1635: A Parcel of Rogues…