“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.”
It It Bleeds by Stephen King
I’ll spoiler tag mine, which may seem odd because it’s a first sentence, but it’s the 16th book in a series, so if someone’s reading the earlier ones and isn’t all caught up, there are a couple of minor spoilers in it…
“My brother ruined a perfectly good run by saying, ‘Justine is pregnant.’”
- Peace Talks, by Jim Butcher (book 16 of The Dresden Files)
“We arrive at the bungalow after midnight, Eddie snoring in his booster seat and Happisburgh lighthouse blinking in the distance.”
The Lamppost Huggers and Other Wretched Tales, by Christopher Stanley
“Come in,” Ed Piazza said, in response to a knock on his office door.
1636: The Atlantic Encounter, by Eric Flint and Walter H Hunt
September 5, 1990, 10:49 pm, Yokohama
A row of condominium buildings, each fourteen stories high, ran along the northern edge of the housing development next to the Sankeien garden.
- Ring, Koji Suzuki
“My name is Ishmael”
Moby Dick
Herman Melville
This book is so tedious. I have no intention of ever completing it.
Really? I hear it’s a whale of a good tale.
Saunders had been dead for almost two weeks now and, so far, he hadn’t enjoyed a minute of it.
Red Dwarf : Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers
“Here’s where I’m supposed to tell you about my family background and my childhood so you can speculate about why I turned out the way I did–so you can decide whether you want to blame heredity, environment, or alien abduction.”
Women Aren’t Supposed to Fly: The Memoirs of a Female Flight Surgeon, by Harriet A. Hall
I found it thoroughly enjoyable, but then I tend to like the classics. Give it a little more time.
“In 1815 Monsieur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne.”
– Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
And, uh, I think it’s actually “Call me Ishmael.”
Yes it is, come to think of it.
"On the side of a four-lane road, obscured by snowdrifts five feet high, sat a small coffee kiosk, its bright teal paint vibrant against the asphalt and gray big-box stores.
American Predator by Maureen Callahan
“I have no one to blame but myself.”
It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump by Stuart Stevens
“Charlie looked up at Saturn and its dazzling rings.”
The Long Sunset, by Jack McDevitt
“In a house, on a street, in a town ordinary enough in every aspect to cross over its own roots and become remarkable, there lived a girl named Katherine Victoria Lundy.”
In An Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire
“You know that thing they say about comedy being tragedy plus time?”
Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time, by Simon Garfield
"A hundred and fifty years before, when the parochial disagreements between Earth and Mars had been on the verge of war, the Belt had been a far horizon of tremendous mineral wealth beyond viable economic reach, and the outer planets had been beyond even the most unrealistic corporate dream. "
(I’m rereading Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey)
The Initiate Brother, by Sean Russell