what's the first sentence of the book you're reading? (do not read if you hate winkle-pickers)

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"in 1967, aged four, I spied a pair of winkle-pickers on a fellow bus-passenger."

http://www.tokyoclassified.com/.../345/pics/feature10.jpg

― dakatin, Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:03 (twenty-three years ago)

Having just finished it:

"This is the story of a dinner party."

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:04 (twenty-three years ago)

http://www.tokyoclassified.com/tokyofeaturestoriesarchive349/345/pics/feature10.jpg

― dakatin, Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:07 (twenty-three years ago)

"In the beginning was the word - surely one of the most magically resonant place-names in all history."

― DV (dirtyvicar), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:11 (twenty-three years ago)

"More than once during the chaotic week before the opening, Alan Solomon, the United States Commissioner for the Venice Biennale, had the distinct impression that too many people were trying in too many languages to tell him what to do."

― jones (actual), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:20 (twenty-three years ago)

"Zeke's probably got the only dog in the world that can walk sideway," Ned remarked to Tuxie Miller as they sat astride their horses, watching the cautious Zeke Proctor and his short, fat, black dog, Pete, sidestepping along in front of the dry goods store.

(from Zeke and Ned by Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana - I had pointed out previously that one of the two leads was named after an ILXer; as you can see above, there is another character also named after one of our leading members.)

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:21 (twenty-three years ago)

'I find it recorded in my notebook that it was a bleak and windy day towards the end of March in the year 1892.'

― David (David), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:23 (twenty-three years ago)

"I could hear them out in the kitchen." (A collection of short stories by the same author)

― Aaron A., Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:25 (twenty-three years ago)

"Essay 1, 'Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages', was read at the 1964 International Congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem."

oh wait, that's not the real beginning.

"What is it for words to mean what they do?"

wait, that's the introduction.

"Philosophers are fond of making claims concerning the properties a language must have if it is to be, even in principle, learnable."

― Josh (Josh), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:32 (twenty-three years ago)

"It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him..."

― jel -- (jel), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:36 (twenty-three years ago)

The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194-, at Oran.

― jamesmichaelward (jamesmichaelward), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:37 (twenty-three years ago)

"One grey morning the first snow began to fall in the Valley of the Moomins"

― jel -- (jel), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:42 (twenty-three years ago)

"Aragorn sped on up the hill."

― Stuart, Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:48 (twenty-three years ago)

I can't remember the first sentence of the book I'm reading (it's out in the car), but whoever wrote that thing about Kristiania, I totally agree.

― nickalicious (nickalicious), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:52 (twenty-three years ago)

"Deciding to study neuroanatomy is somewhat like agreeing to paint a large mural that you will spend the rest of your life carefully improving and refining."

― doctor love hewitt (doctor love hewitt), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 22:03 (twenty-three years ago)

"It is said that a man's best friend is his dog, but those of us who read fairy tales know better."

This is chapter one, not the introduction.

― Maria (Maria), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 22:24 (twenty-three years ago)

nickaliciois it was Knut Hamsun in Hunger.

― jel -- (jel), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 22:27 (twenty-three years ago)

"rivverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

I'm 19 pages away from finishing!

― Leee (Leee), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 22:30 (twenty-three years ago)

"Affinity towards string quartets, small jazz groups, dinner parties of no more than six people - distaste for symphonies, big bands, large parties - in this state I find myself: a committed chamber musician, unhappy in all crowds."

― Eyeball Kicks (Eyeball Kicks), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 22:37 (twenty-three years ago)

"In recent years there has been considerable speculation about the causes of the American Revolution, but less, perhaps, about its essential characteristics"

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 22:37 (twenty-three years ago)

"If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book."

― C J (C J), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 22:49 (twenty-three years ago)

"In the autumn of 1816, John Melmoth, a student in Trinity College, Dublin, quitted it to attend a dying uncle on whom his hopes for independence chiefly rested."

― philip (philip), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 22:57 (twenty-three years ago)

"it began as a mistake"

― donna (donna), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 23:40 (twenty-three years ago)

"The front page of a nineteenth-century copy of The Times is a printed rebuttal to the received image of Victorian entertainment."

― Tom (Groke), Wednesday, 27 November 2002 23:51 (twenty-three years ago)

he arrived in the village as a twelve-year old boy, from the direction of the open field, so that the river was on his left and the forest on his right, and before entering the village he walked through the unfenced graveyard along a pathway strewn with river sand, and his bare feet, insensitive to the sharp stones and broken glass, sensed the perennial chill of the earth.

― gareth (gareth), Thursday, 28 November 2002 00:21 (twenty-three years ago)

I inherited the house from my father

― RickyT (RickyT), Thursday, 28 November 2002 00:23 (twenty-three years ago)

"My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton."

― Douglas, Thursday, 28 November 2002 00:27 (twenty-three years ago)

"I am a citizen in the United States of America"

― Dom Passantino (Dom Passantino), Thursday, 28 November 2002 00:45 (twenty-three years ago)

"It doesn't seem right somehow, seeing that kid run across the football pitch with his head sprayed gold, turned into a robot, knowing he has to get home and scrape the paint off before his brain boils and head explodes."

― Poppy (poppy), Thursday, 28 November 2002 01:20 (twenty-three years ago)

"I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods."

― Ally (mlescaut), Thursday, 28 November 2002 01:22 (twenty-three years ago)

"One morning Gregorio awoke to discover he'd become a giant penis"

― Queen G (Queeng), Thursday, 28 November 2002 01:42 (twenty-three years ago)

"the bottoms" succeeded to "hell row"

― robin (robin), Thursday, 28 November 2002 01:59 (twenty-three years ago)

"Wadi Al-Uyoun: An outpouring of green amid the harsh, obdurate desert, as if it had burst from within the earth or fallen from the sky."

― Sean Carruthers (SeanC), Thursday, 28 November 2002 02:18 (twenty-three years ago)

"In a day in June, at the hour when London moves abroad in quest of lunch, a young man stood at the entrance of the Bandolero Restaurant looking earnestly up Shaftesbury Avenue -- a large young man in excellent condition, with a pleasant, good-humoured, brown, clean-cut face."

― j.lu (j.lu), Thursday, 28 November 2002 02:45 (twenty-three years ago)

"Waking this morning out of my sleep on a sudden, I did with my elbow hit my wife a great blow over her face and nose, which waked her with pain, at which I was sorry, and to sleep again."

― Arthur (Arthur), Thursday, 28 November 2002 03:53 (twenty-three years ago)

"Call me Ishmael."

― polyphonic (polyphonic), Thursday, 28 November 2002 03:59 (twenty-three years ago)

"Ich hatte einen Affen." er sagt.

― B, Thursday, 28 November 2002 04:41 (twenty-three years ago)

"These last few days I have thought and thought of the Nordland summer's endless day."

― spectra, Thursday, 28 November 2002 05:29 (twenty-three years ago)

Also "President Henault, remarking on royal surnames of honor how difficult it often is to ascertain not only why, but even when, they were conferred, takes occasion, in his sleek official way, to make a philosophical reflection."

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Thursday, 28 November 2002 05:32 (twenty-three years ago)

Ce n'est point un vain dèsir de gloire historique qui me met la plume á la main.

― daria g, Thursday, 28 November 2002 05:46 (twenty-three years ago)

aie ! silly html special characters. let's try again:

Ce n'est point un vain désir de gloire historique qui me met la plume à la main.

― daria g, Thursday, 28 November 2002 05:48 (twenty-three years ago)

"We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason."

― Dan I., Thursday, 28 November 2002 05:52 (twenty-three years ago)

"I picked up my red chenille suit, wig, and beard at one P.M. on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving."

― maura (maura), Thursday, 28 November 2002 06:12 (twenty-three years ago)

"It was the fattest butt in the land."

― Mike Hanle y (mike), Thursday, 28 November 2002 06:17 (twenty-three years ago)

KING
So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant
And breathe short-winded accents of new broils
To be commenced in strands afar remote.

― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Thursday, 28 November 2002 06:21 (twenty-three years ago)

polyphonic-what is that book like?
a friend of mine mentioned it recently,just as he was starting it,and it sounded intriuging,(he said "the whole book is a conversation between a man and a telepathic monkey",or something)and i forgot to ask him about it since,but someone told me the other day that he's read it several times since...

― robin (robin), Thursday, 28 November 2002 06:22 (twenty-three years ago)

Maura.....what book is that? I think I've read that.....or have I?

― B, Thursday, 28 November 2002 06:25 (twenty-three years ago)

"My friends were decent people, and I was raised, like my friends, to believe that Police were our friends and protectors--the Badge was a symbol of extremely high authority, perhaps the highest of all."

― M Matos (M Matos), Thursday, 28 November 2002 08:18 (twenty-three years ago)

rrrrr--that's "My parents," not "My friends."

― M Matos (M Matos), Thursday, 28 November 2002 08:18 (twenty-three years ago)

A man who no longer called himself Callum came to Aberdeen intent on ending on his life.

--69 Things to do with a Dead Princess, Stewart Home

― Mary (Mary), Thursday, 28 November 2002 09:11 (twenty-three years ago)

The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194- at Oran.
--La Peste, Albert Camus

― jason elliott, Thursday, 28 November 2002 09:28 (twenty-three years ago)

"Hi, my name is Linda, I'm forty five years old, and I'd like to tell you how I came to love dog cock so much" -- from Dog Gone Wife, author anonymous

― James Blount (James Blount), Thursday, 28 November 2002 09:43 (twenty-three years ago)

I want to tear down the exceptional preeminence now generally awarded to the self, and I pledge to be spurred on by concrete certainty, and not the caprice of an ideological ambush or a dazzling intellectual prank.

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Thursday, 28 November 2002 09:44 (twenty-three years ago)

james, the subject is most intriguing but i must ask, do the run on sentences continue?

― jason elliott, Thursday, 28 November 2002 09:50 (twenty-three years ago)

Favourite first lines:

"I am writing this sitting in the kitchen sink" - I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
"What's it going to be then, eh?" - Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
"It was the day before my ninetieth birthday and I was in bed with my catamite the Monsignor came to call" - Earthly Powers, ditto
"All happy families are alike. All unhappy ones are unhappy in their own way." - Anna Kareinina, Tolstoy
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. " - Lolita (obviously), Nabokov. (Hint: say "Lolita" and observe what your tongue does)
"By the time I was eighteen, I had travelled naked the length and breadth of Hungary" - Under The Frog, Tibor Fischer

― Bobo the Clown, Thursday, 28 November 2002 09:59 (twenty-three years ago)

"This book has two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the other an inhabitant of an age which they would call the distant future." (introduction)

"Observe now your own epoch of history as it appears to the Last Men." (chapter 1)

― Liz :x (Liz :x), Thursday, 28 November 2002 10:12 (twenty-three years ago)

"Cockfarmer!"

― rener (rener), Thursday, 28 November 2002 10:15 (twenty-three years ago)

that's the first sentence of the book i'm *writing*.

FSOTBIR: "In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army."

― rener (rener), Thursday, 28 November 2002 10:18 (twenty-three years ago)

If you were to touch the plinth upon which the equestrian statue of King Charles I is placed, at Charing Cross, your fingers might rest upon the projecting fossils of sea lilies, starfish or sea urchins.

― Sam (chirombo), Thursday, 28 November 2002 10:26 (twenty-three years ago)

"There is a long green chalk cliff where the Marlborough Downs rise abruptly, some 300 feet above the Vale of the White Horse and the flat country of the Thames Valley."

The rest of the book carries on in this irritating manner. I wish I was still reading King Harald's Saga, that would be much cooler.

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 28 November 2002 10:48 (twenty-three years ago)

"When I was almost fifteen my elder brother took me to a pub. This made me feel very bold, and I could hardly refuse the even more grown up offer of half a pint. I'd had bottled beer at home, but never draught bitter. The first sip was horrific. I vividly remember the shiver that went down my spine at the appalling bitterness of the stuff, and the dismay at which I registered the sheer quantity that was half a pint".

― Sarah (starry), Thursday, 28 November 2002 10:56 (twenty-three years ago)

When my workday is over, and I have closed my notebook, hidden my pen, and sawed holes in my rented canoe so that it cannot be found, I often like to spend the evening in conversation with my few surviving friends.

― Madchen (Madchen), Thursday, 28 November 2002 11:12 (twenty-three years ago)

This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century.

― toraneko (toraneko), Thursday, 28 November 2002 11:13 (twenty-three years ago)

(you have found the beer book Starry?)

― RickyT (RickyT), Thursday, 28 November 2002 11:17 (twenty-three years ago)

Yes, it was at bloody work after all that! I am lucky it was as my begging messages to the goat failed to elict a response. I've still not had a proper chance to read it yet, although I got through quite a bit at the bus stop today.

The book is Beer and Skittles by Richard Boston, BTW!

― Sarah (starry), Thursday, 28 November 2002 11:34 (twenty-three years ago)

"There was a banquet and people were talking and, as so often happens in accounts of banquets at this period, Socrates was there."

gareth - that sounds like the worst book in the world. Is it?

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Thursday, 28 November 2002 12:53 (twenty-three years ago)

haha! no. its ok, its a short story collection, some better than others, but it does feel like a stereotype of every russian book ever

― gareth (gareth), Thursday, 28 November 2002 13:11 (twenty-three years ago)

"I sing of knights and ladies, of love and arms, of courtly chivalry, of courageous deeds - all from the time when the Moors crossed the sea from Africa and wrought havoc in France."

― Mark C (Mark C), Thursday, 28 November 2002 17:55 (twenty-three years ago)

jason: Yes

― James Blount (James Blount), Thursday, 28 November 2002 19:25 (twenty-three years ago)

Bloody hell, I'm not reading a book right now. I just realised this. No wonder my life is so boring right now. The last thing I read was The Velvet Underground Companion, which I finished in the tourvan and now I don't have ANYTHING to read.

Which is probably why I've started *writing* another book instead, which is what I do when I don't have anything to read. The first line of that is:

"Julian stiffled a yawn."

― kate, Thursday, 28 November 2002 19:30 (twenty-three years ago)

Surely "Julian stiffled Pete Yorn."

― Tom (Groke), Thursday, 28 November 2002 19:34 (twenty-three years ago)

Write yer own damn slash, Tom!

― kate, Thursday, 28 November 2002 19:35 (twenty-three years ago)

actually andrew, that bakin book is a bit disappointing

― gareth (gareth), Thursday, 28 November 2002 19:44 (twenty-three years ago)

"What we take for virtues are often merely a collection of different acts and personal interests pieced together by chance or our own ingenuity and it is not always because of valour or chastity that men are valiant or women chaste."

― chris sallis, Thursday, 28 November 2002 20:14 (twenty-three years ago)

Chastity being the most desirable attribute in a woman, obviously.

― chris sallis, Thursday, 28 November 2002 20:16 (twenty-three years ago)

Before the Wright Brothers, before Bleriot, before Alcock and Brown but after the Montgolfier Brothers, there was Able Seaman Hermann, the fabulous and now forgotten Birdman of the Austrian Navy.

http://solair.eunet.yu/~janko/birdman.gif

― dakatin, Thursday, 28 November 2002 21:01 (twenty-three years ago)

the elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent.

― gareth (gareth), Friday, 29 November 2002 10:38 (twenty-three years ago)

two months pass...

In my younger and more vunerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

― weekly weekly, Sunday, 2 February 2003 02:13 (twenty-three years ago)

He-for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it-was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moorwhich swung from the rafters.

I've just started this book, hope it'll be good.

― fractal (fractal), Sunday, 2 February 2003 02:19 (twenty-three years ago)

"Entranced, he scribbled down the data he had collected, knowing full well that this was only the beginning."

from Herman M. Klesterman's Memoirs, Volume One

― kimberly felix jason dickerson (kfjd), Sunday, 2 February 2003 02:22 (twenty-three years ago)

"Mõista aga mõista, mis see on"

- the first line from the first novel by a rather good friend of mine (B*rk V*her, 'L*gulaul', 2002), but the going's rough... i'm stuck somewhere in the middle, quite helplessly

― t\'\'t (t\'\'t), Sunday, 2 February 2003 02:31 (twenty-three years ago)

Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone had hoped it would stay for the big weekend -- the weekend of the Yale game.

― Mary (Mary), Sunday, 2 February 2003 03:06 (twenty-three years ago)

Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust.

Minus points for 'blazing Mexican sun', Mr Greene.

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 2 February 2003 03:49 (twenty-three years ago)

For school: There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke.

For education: Augustine was born in Tagaste (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria) in 354 and died almost seventy-six years later in Hippo Regius (modern Annaba) on the Mediterranean coast sixty miles away.

For fun: Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf's cloak.

― Maria (Maria), Sunday, 2 February 2003 03:53 (twenty-three years ago)

'the blazing'

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 2 February 2003 12:42 (twenty-three years ago)

"buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego"

"It was winter over Paris's Belleville quarter and there were five characters"

"Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard a great din on the road outside his office"

― jel -- (jel), Sunday, 2 February 2003 13:33 (twenty-three years ago)

The Roebuck (where else?) was not Sileen's kind of boozer.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Sunday, 2 February 2003 13:47 (twenty-three years ago)

das liebesverbot, the first of wagner's operas performed in his lifetime, makes use of a libretto whose subeject matter was taken from shakespeare's measure for measure, with the difference that, in wagner own words, 'the hypocrite was bought to book solely by the avenging power of love itself', instead of being unmasked by a political authority.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Sunday, 2 February 2003 14:24 (twenty-three years ago)

"My grandfather worked for a toffee company."

― Lara (Lara), Sunday, 2 February 2003 15:09 (twenty-three years ago)

"It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton."

― dog latin (dog latin), Sunday, 2 February 2003 22:04 (twenty-three years ago)

"ok. come in"

― isadora (isadora), Sunday, 2 February 2003 22:29 (twenty-three years ago)

She passed for a widow when she went to Tordoch.

― David (David), Sunday, 2 February 2003 22:33 (twenty-three years ago)

They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds.

― Ess Kay (esskay), Sunday, 2 February 2003 22:35 (twenty-three years ago)

"Cum ipsi (majores homines) appellabant rem aliquem, et cum secundum eam vocem corpus ad aliquid movebant, videbam, et tenebam hoc ab eis vocari rem illam, quod sonabant, cum eam vellent ostendere."

i miss josh :(

― mark s (mark s), Sunday, 2 February 2003 22:44 (twenty-three years ago)

"The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him "WILD THING!" and Max said "I'll eat you up!" so he was sent to bed without eating anything."

― luna (luna.c), Sunday, 2 February 2003 23:10 (twenty-three years ago)

One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it---it was the black kitten's fault entirely.

― caitlin (caitlin), Sunday, 2 February 2003 23:19 (twenty-three years ago)

First sentence of preface: "About a month after my arrival in Gapun, I was solemnly informed that I was a ghost."

First sentence of Introduction: "Papua New Guinea has the provocative distinction of being the most linguistically diverse country on earth."

First sentence proper: "Bonika emerges through the doorway of her house, balancing a wooden plate of food on her head."

I ask you, what book needs both a preface and an introduction?

― M, Monday, 3 February 2003 01:58 (twenty-three years ago)

"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."

― Curtis Stephens, Monday, 3 February 2003 02:22 (twenty-three years ago)

"Know thy enemy" Sun Tzu's timeless injunction in the Art of War applies as well to New Zealanders facing the brushtail possum as it did to Chinese against invading horder in the sixth century bc.

― isadora (isadora), Monday, 3 February 2003 04:02 (twenty-three years ago)

"Some women, it is said, like to cook."

"These are the times that try a girl's soul."

― rosemary (rosemary), Monday, 3 February 2003 04:05 (twenty-three years ago)

"This Dictionary of the English language is an entirely new work and it represent in many respects a notable departure from previous British and American lexicographical practice."

― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Monday, 3 February 2003 20:15 (twenty-three years ago)

"it represents," that is

― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Monday, 3 February 2003 20:15 (twenty-three years ago)

"Everyone is out to get you: Do not tell them the name of this book you are now reading or give them any lines from this book."

― Andy Vicious (Oops), Monday, 3 February 2003 20:22 (twenty-three years ago)

"Perestroika erupted into the public lavatory on Tverskoy Boulevard from several directions at once."

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 3 February 2003 20:29 (twenty-three years ago)

Frank, does it abandon that dreary alphabetical order thing?

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Monday, 3 February 2003 21:04 (twenty-three years ago)

"Why are so many fears in the air, and so many of them unfounded?"

― Sean Carruthers (SeanC), Monday, 3 February 2003 21:13 (twenty-three years ago)

Voila!: An Introduction to French, Fourth Edition, is a complete program for teaching introductory French at the college level.

― Amateurist (amateurist), Monday, 3 February 2003 21:16 (twenty-three years ago)

I can't recall the exact line, but it's to do with Pippin.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 3 February 2003 21:19 (twenty-three years ago)

I recognize a number of these, and almost recognize a fair number more. I have a few books in progress:

"Review my childhood?"

"The early electric people had domesticated the wild ass."

"Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar."

and of course

"A barometric low hung over the Atlantic."

― Paul Eater (eater), Monday, 3 February 2003 21:29 (twenty-three years ago)

America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best apadted to telling the lies we like to hear and pretend we beleive.

― anthony easton (anthony), Monday, 3 February 2003 21:35 (twenty-three years ago)

"It had been an unhappy day for little Kay Harker."

Thomas Disch, anthony?

― thom west (thom w), Monday, 3 February 2003 22:10 (twenty-three years ago)

one month passes...

I started drinking in the day, and by the time I got to the supermarket I was so loaded I needed a cart to stand up.
-- Niagara by Mary Woronov

― Mary (Mary), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 08:03 (twenty-three years ago)

yep thom

― anthony easton (anthony), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 08:06 (twenty-three years ago)

Rattisbon Anno ~~Dommini~~ Domini mense
decembri mclv Cronicle of Baudolino of the fammily of Aulario.

― Ed (dali), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 08:24 (twenty-three years ago)

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

― Alfie (Alfie), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 08:30 (twenty-three years ago)

people pls identify authors!

― Mary (Mary), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 10:02 (twenty-three years ago)

Alfie's above is Murakami.

This is one of the most unpromising first lines ever:
"At 1900 hours, ship's time, I made my way to the launching bay."

It's from Solaris by Stanislaw Lem and it gets better, kinda.

― Archel (Archel), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 10:07 (twenty-three years ago)

Perl is a language for getting your job done.

(I hate Larry Wall.)

― Sam (chirombo), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 12:43 (twenty-three years ago)

Ed's is Baudolino by Umberto Eco, which I just finished. I just started Will Self's How The Dead Live: "We old women are easily erased from the picture of the last century."

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 13:00 (twenty-three years ago)

to my shame I'm not reading it in Italian

― Ed (dali), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 13:05 (twenty-three years ago)

Book finished this morning: When Lauren was a small girl, she would stand in the Kansas fields and call the cats.

Book started this morning: Harold Ross died December 6, 1951, exactly one month after his fifty-ninth birthday.

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 13:07 (twenty-three years ago)

Of all the high players this country ever sees, there is no doubt but that the guy they call The Sky is the highest.

― Pete (Pete), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 13:15 (twenty-three years ago)

No one knows how many football fans there are.

― Tom (Groke), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 13:24 (twenty-three years ago)

The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset.

― Nicole (Nicole), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 13:26 (twenty-three years ago)

He'd cut His throat with the knife.

Alan Warner

Yesterday's would have been better though.

― chris (chris), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 13:37 (twenty-three years ago)

"Ersuchen um Zusammenfassung Akte M/1993/GH 22 223 für Parlamentssekretär des Verteidigungsministers"

― Wintermute (Wintermute), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 13:45 (twenty-three years ago)

"Sixty-eight long-haired soldiers trudged across the border from southern Vietnam." [N.B. these are not American soldiers, I can't stand Vietnam war books]

― J0hn Darn1elle (J0hn Darn1elle), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 14:54 (twenty-three years ago)

"Jackson was lying on the kitchen counter allowing his father to change his diapers when a mysterious silver fountain rose up from between his thighs"

― rosemary (rosemary), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 15:56 (twenty-three years ago)

imagine this. Overnight, god changes the hearts of the majority of officals in the vatican.
the silence of sodom

a merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
do androids dream of electric sheep

Sooner or later it was bound to happen.
rendezvous with rama.

― anthony easton (anthony), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 16:06 (twenty-three years ago)

When was it clear that Martha Critchton Walker was the antagonist?

AS Byatt - Sugar and Other Stories

― Anna (Anna), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 16:18 (twenty-three years ago)

I see somebody is reading The Man Who Was Thursday. :-) I really must do so too.

Actually, what AM I reading right now? I think I'm on temporary hold for some reason, weird.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 16:19 (twenty-three years ago)

"He has the ability to imagine himself a minor incident in the lives of others."

― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 16:22 (twenty-three years ago)

"This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch." -Walker Percy, The Moviegoer.

― hstencil, Wednesday, 19 March 2003 16:23 (twenty-three years ago)

Andy V, or anyone, what book is this from? "Everyone is out to get you: Do not tell them the name of this book you are now reading or give them any lines from this book."

― Paula G., Wednesday, 19 March 2003 18:12 (twenty-three years ago)

In the Summer of 1990, a rumour was doing the rounds in Moscow: Honecker was taking Jews from the Soviet Union, by way of a kind of compensation for East Germany's never having paid its share of German payments to Israel. Snappy, huh? It's from "Russian Disco" by Wladimir Kaminer. I wish I was called Wladimir.

― Tag (Tag), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 18:27 (twenty-three years ago)

Just finished:

"Dear Morrissey"

Just started:

"Las Vegas is my kind of town.

Which is a pity because I was sitting in a gentrified bar on Great Victoria Street, Belfast's Golden Mile, or kilometre, and not that golden, waiting to meet the shitehawk who'd cheated me out of thousands"

― ailsa (ailsa), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 18:44 (twenty-three years ago)

"We have no more beginnings."

George Steiner, Grammars of Creation, a book with no foreword, no introduction, no table of contents, and no blurb, so I'm fifty pages in and still trying to decide what it's about -- which is kind of fun.

― Tep (ktepi), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 18:48 (twenty-three years ago)

"Irreversible drug-induced brain damage is not necessarily the 'life sentence' it may seem!"

― dave q, Wednesday, 19 March 2003 18:53 (twenty-three years ago)

"Business law and, more generally, the legal environment of business have universal applicability."

It's finals week, can you tell?

― mike a (mike a), Wednesday, 19 March 2003 18:54 (twenty-three years ago)

I am now reading the book that RickyT was reading back in November. Not the same copy, though. It's 'The House of Doctor Dee' by Peter Ackroyd.

― Liz :x (Liz :x), Thursday, 20 March 2003 11:01 (twenty-three years ago)

two weeks pass...

"The door that opened to me on the top floor of a new building gave access to a big, glass-roofed studio, as vast as a covered market."

(Colette's "The Pure and the Impure" begins with a description of an opium den.)

― Sarah McLUsky (coco), Wednesday, 9 April 2003 17:10 (twenty-three years ago)

"Kublai Kahn does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his."

(Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino)

― Mark C (Mark C), Wednesday, 9 April 2003 17:16 (twenty-three years ago)

"It is customary for those who wish to gain the favour of a prince to endeavour to do so by offering him gifts of those things which they hold most precious, or in which they know him to take especial delight."

― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Wednesday, 9 April 2003 21:58 (twenty-three years ago)

Machiavelli, Justyn? Or just a take-off? Hard work, but really quite something. At least it's short.

― Mark C (Mark C), Wednesday, 9 April 2003 22:01 (twenty-three years ago)

yeah, it's the real thing. I've tried to read it three times already without getting beyond the second chapter. maybe I've just got the wrong translation, since everyone else thinks it's so great.

― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Thursday, 10 April 2003 08:01 (twenty-three years ago)

"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day."

― j.a.e., Thursday, 10 April 2003 08:05 (twenty-three years ago)

Persist if you can. It's fascinating stuff, dry in parts but so wicked. You may not be hugely entertained, but you'll feel you've achieved something when you finish it.

Of course, I only read it cos I did a degree in Italian.

― Mark C (Mark C), Thursday, 10 April 2003 10:45 (twenty-three years ago)

"Dortmunder blew his nose." (his first appearance!)

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Thursday, 10 April 2003 19:36 (twenty-three years ago)

and it's a story that might bore you but you don't have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or, actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, at Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin's room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Junior or Senior and usually sometimes at her boyfriend's place off-campus, to who she thought was a Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed to Get Screwed Party, or a towny.

--The Rules of Attraction, BEE

― Mary (Mary), Saturday, 19 April 2003 16:44 (twenty-three years ago)

"In the Dark Ages, when Celtic bards sat round their fires and told tales, 'The Matter of Britain was the chief object of care.'"

― rosemary (rosemary), Saturday, 19 April 2003 16:53 (twenty-three years ago)

four weeks pass...

"My father had a face that could stop a clock."

― Nunya Binnis, Sunday, 18 May 2003 21:47 (twenty-two years ago)

'We suffer.'

― Ferg (Ferg), Sunday, 18 May 2003 21:53 (twenty-two years ago)

"I'm not, by nature, a betting man."

― Frühlingsmute (Wintermute), Sunday, 18 May 2003 21:54 (twenty-two years ago)

"In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling starmists waver and part..."

Yeah, I feel like a dork now.

― David Beckhouse (David Beckhouse), Sunday, 18 May 2003 22:01 (twenty-two years ago)

"A nervous participant was ordered to aim and shoot a pistol at an East Indian man he had never even met."

― slutsky (slutsky), Monday, 19 May 2003 02:53 (twenty-two years ago)

three months pass...

"Gentle reader, what, may you ask, was the origin of this book?"

― Girolamo Savonarola, Sunday, 7 September 2003 03:36 (twenty-two years ago)

"The play -- for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper -- was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch."

Is that an attention grabber or WHAT??

― jewelly (jewelly), Sunday, 7 September 2003 03:45 (twenty-two years ago)

"I am writing this with my left hand, though I am strongly right-handed".

- preface to "Anthropologist on Mars", Oliver Sacks.

― Trayce (trayce), Sunday, 7 September 2003 04:05 (twenty-two years ago)

"What?"

― Tep (ktepi), Sunday, 7 September 2003 04:07 (twenty-two years ago)

(If you somehow manage to guess what book I'm reading, it's only because you're hiding in my pants or something, so get the hell out, Chuckles.)

― Tep (ktepi), Sunday, 7 September 2003 04:08 (twenty-two years ago)

"Farmer Brown has a problem.
His cows like to type.
All day long he hears:

click, clack, moo.
click, clack, moo.
clickety, clack, moo."

― luna (luna.c), Sunday, 7 September 2003 04:43 (twenty-two years ago)

"When I listen to the sons born after World War II, born to the fathers who won that war, I sometimes find myself in a reverie, conjured out of my own recollections and theirs."

― Kenan Hebert (kenan), Sunday, 7 September 2003 05:05 (twenty-two years ago)

"I have sat with friends-and I mean very close friends-on those long nights at the Pines, listening to the ocean dancing about our mysterious island, and on those long days at the brunch table, trying to remember to be urbane, and on those odd and ironic afternoons of confessing feelings of such intimate enthusiasm or disappointment that one regrets having made them for the rest of one's life"

― tokyo rosemary (rosemary), Sunday, 7 September 2003 05:27 (twenty-two years ago)

"I had never thought, until a few years ago, that I would write a biography of Hitler".

― m.s (m .s), Sunday, 7 September 2003 05:30 (twenty-two years ago)

first sentence of book I am writing: "Early evening, 1 March, 1988."

first sentence of book I am glancing through: "My earliest memory of hearing music, the mesmerizing kind that takes hold of you and won't let go, is sitting at the top of the stairs in the tiny townhouse I grew up in to listen to 'Golden Slumbers.'"

― M Matos (M Matos), Sunday, 7 September 2003 05:33 (twenty-two years ago)

(working in a 2ndhndbkstr has destroyed my ability to stick to one book)

"John, 18, hated his face."
&
"Ela has the tightest cunt in the world."
&
"Two glass panes with dirt between and little tunnels from cell to cell : when I was a kid I had an ant colony."

― etc, Sunday, 7 September 2003 06:08 (twenty-two years ago)

First lines are great to read - theyre often the hardest thing to get "right" in writing so I like to know whats out there.

― Trayce (trayce), Sunday, 7 September 2003 08:27 (twenty-two years ago)

tell us what books these are, people ;_;

― thom west (thom w), Sunday, 7 September 2003 14:26 (twenty-two years ago)

"In the days following the presidential election, there were so many stories of African Americans erased from voter rolls you might think they were targeted by some kind of racial computer program. They were."

― Chris Barrus (Chris Barrus), Sunday, 7 September 2003 16:58 (twenty-two years ago)

"May 95, I'm in the James Dean suite, better known as two shoe boxes at the back of the Hotel Iroquois on West 44th Street in Manhattan, and life has definitely lost its colour"

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 7 September 2003 17:36 (twenty-two years ago)

I have a favorite first sentence, from The Church of Dead Girls-- an extremely elegant and intelligent and oddly poetic sort of thriller. I'm not sure these are the exact words cuz I loaned my copy out and haven't gotten it back yet but it went something like:

This is how they looked: three dead girls arranged on three straight-backed chairs.

― jewelly (jewelly), Sunday, 7 September 2003 18:09 (twenty-two years ago)

"In the beginning was the word - surely one of the most magically resonant place-names in all history"

That's strangely familiar. Is it from something by Neil Gaiman?

***

Moi:
"From the beginning of his professional life, as a fledgling art and film critic at the New Republic in 1942, Manny Farber's prose was unflaggingly humorous, swift, relentlessly declarative, and everywhere intricately constructed."

and

"My name is Gideon Clarke, and, like my father before me, I have on more than one occasion been physically ejected from the corporate offices of the Chicago Cubs Baseball Club, which are located at Wrigley Field, 1060 West Addison, in Chicago."

― miloauckerman (miloauckerman), Sunday, 7 September 2003 18:16 (twenty-two years ago)

W.P. Kinsella, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (milo's second one, I mean).

― Tep (ktepi), Sunday, 7 September 2003 18:18 (twenty-two years ago)

Oh, right, what books they are: the first is Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies and Tep is, of course, correct on the second.

― miloauckerman (miloauckerman), Sunday, 7 September 2003 18:23 (twenty-two years ago)

"Bad films, like all of life's trials, are hard to endure in solitude."

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 7 September 2003 20:34 (twenty-two years ago)

On an April night almost midpoint in the Eighteenth Century, in the county of Orange and the colony of Virginia, Jacob Pollroot tasted his death a moment before swallowing it.

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Sunday, 7 September 2003 20:39 (twenty-two years ago)

Fine. So certain individuals (*coughs*) would like me to check out this thread. First off, I'll post the first sentence from one of the books I've been perusing lately:

"UNIX is a popular operating system in the engineering world and has been growing in popularity lately in the business world."

Interesting? No? Thought not. ;)

I'd post the first sentence from the entertaining, "take me away from it all" bit of reading I've been doing lately, but I don't know if I'd have Ned's permission to do so.

Now that I've posted, I'll read what *you* guys have submitted. Once I've come back, that is.

― Just Deanna (Dee the Lurker), Sunday, 7 September 2003 20:50 (twenty-two years ago)

I don't know if I'd have Ned's permission to do so.

Oh, go for it.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 7 September 2003 21:05 (twenty-two years ago)

"Late evening, near a bridge, over the Danube Canal. The PROSTITUTE. The SOLDIER."

― s1utsky (slutsky), Sunday, 7 September 2003 21:18 (twenty-two years ago)

"Bodies have become the objects of intense cultural, philosophical, and feminist fascination within a remarkably short period of time".

― The Lady Ms Lurex (lucylurex), Sunday, 7 September 2003 21:37 (twenty-two years ago)

"Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most commonly diagnosed behavior disorder in North America, occurring in 3% to 8% of school children, and in a smaller proportion of adults."

-from the rollicking romp entitled : Contemporary Diagnosis and Management of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder 2nd edition by L. Eugene Arnold M.D. I hear Arnold is going to star in the movie version. ;-)

― Orbit (Orbit), Sunday, 7 September 2003 22:32 (twenty-two years ago)

Oh, go for it.

Hurrah! I'll go for the bit that *isn't* the quote from a music lyric.

"Tim Regis lay flat on his back and let it unfold around him, again."

I have read the story the above comes from a total of five times, I'll have you know. If it were ever to be published, I'd be one of the first in the city to purchase a copy of it, and I'd recommend it to as many people as possible. It is one of my favorite things to read.

― Just Deanna (Dee the Lurker), Monday, 8 September 2003 00:58 (twenty-two years ago)

"I did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn't a girl anymore and hadn't long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father's gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests."

Javiar Marias, "A Heart So White"

(Tough going at first, due to long, multi-claused, comma-spliced sentences, and paragraphs that go on for pages, but now, at page 204, turning really brilliant, with everything coming together in a fugue-like way.)

― Marcel Post (Marcel Post), Monday, 8 September 2003 02:06 (twenty-two years ago)

"It's not the photographs that got small".

― The Lady Ms Lurex (lucylurex), Monday, 8 September 2003 02:29 (twenty-two years ago)

"Miss Iona was walking to work."

― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Monday, 8 September 2003 03:43 (twenty-two years ago)

"There was no time for shoes if I wanted the hooker to live."

If you know what that is, get out of Tep's pants.

― Leee (Leee), Monday, 8 September 2003 05:05 (twenty-two years ago)

Aww come on...

― luna (luna.c), Monday, 8 September 2003 05:07 (twenty-two years ago)

Hee. That's maybe my best sentence ever.

Aimee, my pants aren't steel, you wouldn't like it there.

― Tep (ktepi), Monday, 8 September 2003 05:55 (twenty-two years ago)

You don't know... I might have a steel pants fetish!

― luna (luna.c), Monday, 8 September 2003 05:57 (twenty-two years ago)

"The Mississippi is well worth reading about."

― thom west (thom w), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 00:51 (twenty-two years ago)

We were in Ancoats, a district just north of Manchester city centre, looking for evidence of ruin and industrial decay.

― Mary (Mary), Monday, 22 September 2003 18:16 (twenty-two years ago)

I'll begin with babbling and doodling.

― cybele (cybele), Monday, 22 September 2003 19:15 (twenty-two years ago)

Modern European and American history is centered around the effort to gain freedom from the economic, political, and spiritual shackles that have bound men.

― g--ff c-nn-n (gcannon), Monday, 22 September 2003 19:28 (twenty-two years ago)

This book is the first devoted to the work of Peter Saville.

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Monday, 22 September 2003 19:31 (twenty-two years ago)

"The reader must begin this book with an act of faith and end it with an act of charity."

(first to guess the book
wins a custom-made haiku
courtesy of me)

― Haikunym (Haikunym), Monday, 22 September 2003 20:06 (twenty-two years ago)

Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth.

― Girolamo Savonarola, Monday, 22 September 2003 20:08 (twenty-two years ago)

Jack says hi, btw.

― Girolamo Savonarola, Monday, 22 September 2003 20:08 (twenty-two years ago)

damn that was too quick
I will try but your huge name
screws syllable counts:

1498:
I can't smell spring anymore;
oh that too-cruel rope!

― Haikunym (Haikunym), Monday, 22 September 2003 20:37 (twenty-two years ago)

"The eighty-odd years between 1843, when a new, indigenous style of music-making first came to the attention of the American general public, and the early 1920s, when its full spectrum--black and white, urban and rural, sopisticated as silk lingerie and crude as cotton overalls--finally made it on record for all to hear, are the caveman period of American music."

― M Matos (M Matos), Monday, 22 September 2003 20:46 (twenty-two years ago)

This book is the first devoted to the work of Peter Saville.

Ya lucky duck. Is it as brilliant as I would hope it is?

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 22 September 2003 20:54 (twenty-two years ago)

I very highly recommend it. It is utterly fantastic and a complete inspiration. I regret not flying out for the show...

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Monday, 22 September 2003 21:03 (twenty-two years ago)

Why do heterosexual women have sex with men?

― tokyo rosemary (rosemary), Monday, 22 September 2003 21:51 (twenty-two years ago)

Hoy, mamá ha muerto.

― Francis Watlington (Francis Watlington), Monday, 22 September 2003 22:29 (twenty-two years ago)

My cover-to-cover reading has dropped like a stone :/ I'm on the same book I was on a couple weeks ago, which opens with:

"It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties."

― Tep (ktepi), Monday, 22 September 2003 22:32 (twenty-two years ago)

this week i am reading three books:

'towards three o'clock of an afternoon in the month of october, in the year 1844, a man about sixty years of age, though most persons would have thought him older, was passing along the boulevard italiens, his nose to the scent, his lips hypocritical, like a merchant who has just concluded a sharp bergain, or a young man who comes out of a boudoir well satisfied with himself.'

and

'it was conscious of a luminous and infinite haze, as if it were floating, godlike, alpha and omega, over a sea of vapor and looking down; then less happily after an interval of obscure duration, of murmured sounds and peripheral shadows, which reduced the impression of boundless space and empire to something much more contracted and unaccomodating.'

and

'at the little town of vevey, in switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel.'

none of them are particularly good first sentences!! some of these are very good though i dont know any of the last few, i wonder if anyone knows mine!!

― trife (simon_tr), Tuesday, 23 September 2003 00:35 (twenty-two years ago)

When one looks south from Granada across the red towers of the Alhambra one sees a range of mountains known as the Sierra Nevada which have snow on them all the year round.

― hstencil, Tuesday, 23 September 2003 00:41 (twenty-two years ago)

god that middle one makes it look like im reading bad sci fi or something... heres some more recent ones

"'whats your first memory?' someone would ask. and she would reply 'i dont remember'"

'the bottoms succeeded to 'hell row'. hell row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on greenhill lane'

'CLOV (fixed gaze, tonelessly): finished, its finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. (pause.) grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, theres a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. (pause.) i cant be punished anymore.'

'this morning i got a note from my aunt telling me to come to lunch. i know what this means'

and, as always

'i am going to call my autobiography 'the fermata', even though 'fermata' is only one of the many names i have for the fold. 'fold' is, obviously, another.'

these are a lot easier than my current ones!!

― trife (simon_tr), Tuesday, 23 September 2003 00:44 (twenty-two years ago)

a lot of mine seem so unsatisfying!! i really dont like naturist descriptive first sentences, i like them to be idealogy or dialogue or some gripping plot element, not 'the house sat on a hill next to a winding creek' etc etc etc

― trife (simon_tr), Tuesday, 23 September 2003 00:45 (twenty-two years ago)

did you like The Moviegoer, trife?

― hstencil, Tuesday, 23 September 2003 00:46 (twenty-two years ago)

'The other night I had a dream that I was sitting on the sidewalk on Moody Street, Pawktucketville, Lowell, Mass., with a pencil and paper in my hand saying to myself "Describe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk, also the iron pickets of Textile Institute, or the doorway where Lousy and you and G.J.'s always sittin and dont stop to think of words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better - and let your mind off yourself in this work"'

― MarkH (MarkH), Tuesday, 23 September 2003 08:03 (twenty-two years ago)

'That the number of our members be unlimited'

― Ricardo (RickyT), Tuesday, 23 September 2003 08:09 (twenty-two years ago)

"I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world - spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley - is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins."

― Hanna (Hanna), Tuesday, 23 September 2003 10:59 (twenty-two years ago)

'it was twenty years ago today so sang the *other* fab four
but the analogy datewise is hard to ignore'.

― piscesboy, Tuesday, 23 September 2003 11:37 (twenty-two years ago)

'The story of Ireland has often been written as a morality tale...'

I have 'finished' it today.

― the pinefox, Tuesday, 23 September 2003 15:34 (twenty-two years ago)

Don't tell me how it ends!

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Tuesday, 23 September 2003 15:57 (twenty-two years ago)

"All roads lead to Jimi Hendrix."
-- Greg Tate, Midnight LIghtning, p.1

I've only just begun reading it.

(And for Andrew F, in case he would(n't) want to know - this book ends on p.152, with the line "because they'd all have pretty distinct personalities" ;)

― t\'\'t (t\'\'t), Saturday, 27 September 2003 21:45 (twenty-two years ago)

"Just beyond the narrow passage separating two mesas where Otowi Bridge spans the Rio Grande, New Mexico State Road 502, one of the most spectacular highways in the country, begins its steep ascent up Pajarito Plateau, home of Los Alamos National Laboratory."
-- A Passage Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer, by George Johnson.

"Adolph Gouda: Loyal and hard-working Newsteam 17 cameraman who accompanies Sally Vaccuum on field assignments."
-- The Tick: Circus Maximus Redux

― Lord Custos Omicron (Lord Custos Omicron), Saturday, 27 September 2003 21:54 (twenty-two years ago)

i hardly recognise any of these,other than cannery row (trife) and beckett,endgame i think (also trife)
what the hell is dave q's?
"Irreversible drug-induced brain damage is not necessarily the 'life sentence' it may seem!"

-- dave q (scrape10...), March 19th, 2003.

i love this thread,i wish people would post the names of the books though...

― robin (robin), Saturday, 27 September 2003 22:34 (twenty-two years ago)

"to begin,the art of jigsaw puzzles seems of little substance,easily exhausted,wholly dealt with by a basic introduction to gestalt:the perceived object-we may be dealing with a perceptual act,the acquisition of a skill,a physiological system,or as in the present case,a wooden jigsaw puzzle-"fuck that,that's only about a third of the sentence but i'm not arsed with the rest
its from life:a user's manual by georges perec,which i am really enjoying...

― robin (robin), Saturday, 27 September 2003 22:39 (twenty-two years ago)

actually that's from the "preamble"
the first sentence proper is
"Yes,it could begin this way,right here,just like that,in a rather slow and ponderous way,in this neutral place that belongs to all and to none,where people pass by almost without seeing each other,where the life of the building regularly and distantly sounds"

― robin (robin), Saturday, 27 September 2003 22:41 (twenty-two years ago)

(correction of mistakes: Midnight Lightning ends on page 157, tho. as i notice, having finished reading it today)

― t\'\'t (t\'\'t), Sunday, 28 September 2003 11:03 (twenty-two years ago)

'A screaming comes across the sky'

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Sunday, 28 September 2003 11:29 (twenty-two years ago)

two of them: "Like a match struck in a darkened room: "

and

"In July 1966, Disc and Music Echo magazine invited Ray Davies to review Revolver, the new album by the Beatles."

― M Matos (M Matos), Sunday, 28 September 2003 20:43 (twenty-two years ago)

first from Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, second from Andy Miller's 33 1/3: The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society

― M Matos (M Matos), Sunday, 28 September 2003 20:58 (twenty-two years ago)

Manchester Pop City -- David Halsam

― Mary (Mary), Monday, 29 September 2003 02:29 (twenty-two years ago)

five years pass...

I'm sure this has been done but search didn't turn up. New decade (close, probably), new thread.

Page 21, sentence 11.

"Her daemon changed yet again, and became a goldfinch, pecking at invisible crumbs on the tabletop."

― Bella Swan Song (Susan), Friday, 21 November 2008 15:13 (seventeen years ago)

Well the "are you sure?" search found something but posted the post I was going to make on my new thread. Looks dumb now. I revived it b/c of the note going around on FB right now and b/c it's Friday and I'm slacking horrible.

Page 21, sentence 11!

― Bella Swan Song (Susan), Friday, 21 November 2008 15:15 (seventeen years ago)

"Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered."

- The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon

― Law-Thug for Chiquita Bananas (Pancakes Hackman), Friday, 21 November 2008 15:19 (seventeen years ago)

Ol' Winkle Picks

― I've encountered Whiney on numerous message boards and (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, 21 November 2008 15:46 (seventeen years ago)

First sentence of Introduction:
All summer long Grandpa remains in the basement, two pounds of cremated ash in a plain cardboard cylinder.

First sentence of Chapter 1:
During the last month of the driest winter in a hundred years, I go to the wettest spot in continental America, looking for truth from the sky and the sea.

― gabbneb, Friday, 21 November 2008 15:50 (seventeen years ago)

"He was struggling in every direction, he was the centre of the writhing and kicking knot of his own body."

― What a broad smile! It is like a delta! (Marcello Carlin), Friday, 21 November 2008 15:50 (seventeen years ago)

(different book)

Prologue:
The premise of this book is that human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations amid which we pass our days--pain, desire, pleasure, fear--into a story.

― gabbneb, Friday, 21 November 2008 15:56 (seventeen years ago)

Chapter 1:
Let me begin by proposing to do something that the historian Alan Taylor has recently described as "quaint."

― gabbneb, Friday, 21 November 2008 15:57 (seventeen years ago)

"I go to the basement and open my ruck."

― Ismael Klata, Friday, 21 November 2008 16:05 (seventeen years ago)

"The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium."

― Dr Morbius, Friday, 21 November 2008 16:22 (seventeen years ago)

On the southern coast of Turkey, in the middle of the fifth century A.D., a Christian priest of the shrine of Saint Thecla at Seleucia (now Meryemlik, near Silifke) decided to write an improved version of the legend of the virgin saint.

― Euler, Friday, 21 November 2008 16:28 (seventeen years ago)

"It is two months since the death of my second mother, the only friend and protectrss I ever had."

― President Keyes, Friday, 21 November 2008 16:57 (seventeen years ago)

protectress

― President Keyes, Friday, 21 November 2008 16:58 (seventeen years ago)

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