(Thread idea stolen from another board.)
It’s 1537 and I’m in a Benedictine monastery with Matthew Shardlake, one of Cromwell’s Commissioners. We’re trying to solve a murder. It’s winter and it’s snowing, but the monastery is comfortable and the food is pretty good.
Where are you?
[The book is Dissolution by C. J. Sansom]
Gandalf and Pippin are leaving Isengard after Pippin’s experience with the palantir. LOTR:TTT, about to start book 4.
I’m halfway through Anatoly Zhigulin’s novel **Chornie Kamni ** about life in Soviet prison camps. In the years following WWII, the camps were run either by vori (thieves, who followed a certain code) and suki (“bitches” who did not). Vori and suki hated each other, and if a member of one group found himself in a camp controlled by the other, his death would be as horrible as it was punctual.
Zhigulin, who is neither a thief nor a bitch, has found himself in a prison camp controlled by an exceptionally cruel bitch. One day, a bunch of ex-soldiers who’d seen action in the war managed to disarm and capture the bitch, and I’ve just finished the part where they tied him up and fed him feet first into a woodchipper at the slowest setting possible.
I’ll tell you what, studying Russian and reading Russian lit has done wonders to put my problems working at a boring library into perspective.
It’s the late fifties or early sixties and Laura Bush (well, no, more like her facsimile, one Alice Lindgren), still in small town Wisconsin, has just gotten into a car accident, killing her childhood crush.
ETA: Awesome thread idea, AuntiePam!
It is 1542, I am with Luis De Moscoso in east Texas, we are about to turn around and head back to the Mississippi river and escape this “God-forsaken” land.
From the book A Voyage Long and Strange
Miyamoto Musashi, has just finished destroying the leaders of the Yoshioka School, and is currently trying to make things right with Otsu. Meanwhile, Matahachi has determined that he has been betrayed by his childhood friend, and is coniving with his evil mother to destroy Musashi and clear the Ho’niden name once and for all.
MUSASHI
Yesterday it was 1969. I came back from Hamburger Hill in the A Shau Valley to Ithaca, NY in 1982 where I’m being stalked by my past. A few years passed and today it’s 1972. Now, I’m somewhere up in the Cascade mountains with two 17 year old boys .
(The Names of the Dead, Stewart O’Nan and The Other, David Guterson)
I am in a canoe, somewhere on the Mackenzie River headed toward the Arctic Circle. I have just set off again, with no particular destination, after spending two weeks with Gidéon, a gold panner who had not seen another soul for 22 days. He cried when I sketched his portrait because he had not realized how old he truly was (La montagne secrète)
and
I am arriving in Moscow on the morning train to ask my sister in law if she will marry me (Anna Karenina)
and
irl I am in the dining room, waiting for the pizzas that the kids and I have cooked together from scratch and admiring Auntie Pam and the Straight Dope Message Board.
I … I don’t know. I’m reading a book of collected stories, and I just finished one about being in a mental institution, and I’m about to start one that might be about Emmett Till, but I’m not positive.
I guess I’m nowhere. Wow, this feels weird. It’s like an out of body experience!
It is the 41st millenium, on the hive world Thracian Primaris. A group of Inquisitors, aided by Arbites and space marines, are about to enter the palace where an escaped psyker is holed up.
Malleus, by Dan Abnett
Rereading Cryptonomicon (I think I’ll buy Anathem tomorrow). Randy is in Kinakuta and has just realized that Epiphyte (2) is involved with heavy-duty criminals. Lawrence has just returned to Bletchley Park from Outer Qyghlm. Bobby Shaftoe and Enoch Root have just been captured/rescued by a German U-boat.
Dorothy Gael has just died in the nursing home, and the orderly who befriended her and realized she was THE Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz broke up with his fiancee and left for the Army.
I’m reading Was: A Novel by Geoff Ryman, a different imagining of the Oz story and how it came to be written.
It’s Day 23 of the Endurance 50 and I’m in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Running my 23rd marathon in 23 consecutive days with 27 more to go.
50-50 by Dean Karnazes.
They’ve cut off both of Mike’s arms. It took him a month to recover from the surgeries enough to try to escape the clinic. He was caught and now they are going to cut off both of his legs.
The book is The Jigsaw Man by Gord Rollo.
Zhaneel and Amberdrake have just found out about the importance of the eclipse to the Haighlei people.
-The White Gryphon, Mercedes Lackey
Chapter 12.
It’s October 26, 1881, and I am in Tombstone, Arizona.
As the haze of gunsmoke clears away I see the McLaury brothers, Tom and Frank, and Billy Clanton, dead, and Virgil and Morgan Earp wounded.
“Telegraph days” by Larry McMurtry
Mr. Weston’s ball at the Crown has finally come off thanks to the return of Frank Churchill, and Harriet Smith has just been snubbed by Mr. Elton. Thankfully, she is rescued by the gallant Mr. Knightley, an act which thoroughly pleases Miss Emma Woodhouse.
Emma, Jane Austen
It is 1680 in the Siamese secondary capital of Lopburi, and the king of Siam, Phra Narai, has just received two French clerics for an audience to discuss sending Siamese ambassadors to the court of France. They are trying to decide which gifts to send to Louis XIV; one of the clerics, Fr Gayme, has suggested some Chinese and Japanese lacquer furniture, but the king is more in favor of something that the French have never seen-- he first thinks of sending a rhinocerous, but there are none available, so he then hits on the idea of sending two young elephants, a male and a female. Unfortunately this is not really practical for such a long distance, but the clerics assure the King that his intentions are truly magnificent.