Okay, so what's the first line in the book you are reading NOW?

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'A burning scrap of paper drifts down out of the rain. A magic carpet on fire. It falls with a hiss to the wet stones of the street.'

― Rumpie, Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:13 (twenty years ago)

While i read the Journal of Sensory Deprivation, Wanda, my former wife, read Elle.

― ai lien (kold_krush), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:16 (twenty years ago)

"Stroll up Unter Den Linden, past all those Schinckel buildings you're obliged to admire, and on to Museumsinsel, the island where Berlin was born."

― Adam In Real Life (nordicskilla), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:21 (twenty years ago)

Mother uttered a faint cry.

― jel -- (jel), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:28 (twenty years ago)

Imagine a New York City apartment at six in the morning.

― luna (luna.c), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:31 (twenty years ago)

Strange clouded fragments of an ancient glory,
Late lingerers of the company divine,
They breathe of that far world wherefrom they come,
Lost halls of heaven and Olympian air.

― andrew m. (andrewmorgan), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:35 (twenty years ago)

I like that, where is it from?

― Adam In Real Life (nordicskilla), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:36 (twenty years ago)

Vaughn died yesterday in his last car crash.

― David Merryweather Goes To Far (scarlet), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:36 (twenty years ago)

I like that, where is it from?

-- Adam In Real Life (adamr...), July 26th, 2005.

are you asking or is that the first line from your book? if you're asking, it's edith hamilton quoting homer (i think) in her _mythology: timeless tales of gods and heroes_.
if you weren't asking, i like that, where is it from?

― andrew m. (andrewmorgan), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:42 (twenty years ago)

'Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990's and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having being scared out of his skin.'

― Uncledoj, Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:44 (twenty years ago)

Not counting the intro:

"The study of musical sound is important only because music is important, and because the quality of sound is important to music."

― Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:46 (twenty years ago)

if you weren't asking, i like that, where is it from?

I was asking!

(that's not a line either)

(nor that)

(nor this)

― Adam In Real Life (nordicskilla), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:46 (twenty years ago)

My first impression was that the stranger's eyes were of an unusually light blue.

― Mädchen (Madchen), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:47 (twenty years ago)

I know what book Luna is reading. It's a great book.

― Paunchy Stratego (kenan), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:49 (twenty years ago)

"Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos."

― Paunchy Stratego (kenan), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:49 (twenty years ago)

to wound the autumnal city.
   So howled out for the world to give him a name.
   The in-dark answered with wind.
   All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank-clerks glancing at the clock at lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark woman in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you've held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute.

― Remy (x Jeremy), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 16:51 (twenty years ago)

Raggae has risen, against the odds, to wield a tremendous influence on contemporary popular culture.

― Boring Satanic Space Jazz (sexyDancer), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 17:33 (twenty years ago)

Are you Alex in SF?

― Adam In Real Life (nordicskilla), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 17:36 (twenty years ago)

Christmas Eve 1978, and I'm ten years old.

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 18:10 (twenty years ago)

Not like
A lone beautiful bird
These poems now rise in great white flocks
Against my mind's vast hills
Startled by God
Breaking a branch
When His foot
Touches
Earth
Near
Me.

― Laura H. (laurah), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 18:48 (twenty years ago)

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.

― rrrobyn (rrrobyn), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 21:19 (twenty years ago)

On March 10, 1914, militant suffragist Mary Richardson entered the National Gallery in London and, with an axe, slashed a Velazquez painting of a nude Venus.

― Cheeseburger-style funbox to GO! Fries come in regular and crepuscular size (Eas, Tuesday, 26 July 2005 21:24 (twenty years ago)

I started a new book today.
It begins:
"The worst times in European history were in the fourteenth century, during and after the Hundred Years War, in the seventeenth century at the time of the Thirty Years War, and in the first half of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century may be worse than any of these."

Another gloomy summer read.

― Cathy (Cathy), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 21:30 (twenty years ago)

Listen to my last words anywhere.

― Shakey Mo Collier, Tuesday, 26 July 2005 21:33 (twenty years ago)

The perspective of history begins with the origin of the earth, and develops through geological time until the stage is ultimately set for human evolution.

― Anti-Pope Consortium (noodle vague), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 21:41 (twenty years ago)

Listen to my last words anywhere.

Distance, distance, distance, I'm still moving...

― Cheeseburger-style funbox to GO! Fries come in regular and crepuscular size (Eas, Tuesday, 26 July 2005 21:53 (twenty years ago)

I came to New York to find myself and get a fresh start.

― Homosexual II (Homosexual II), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 21:57 (twenty years ago)

the other book i'm reading at the moment:

"What about a teakettle?"

― Homosexual II (Homosexual II), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 21:58 (twenty years ago)

There was only one thought in Gabriel Cleary's mind, and it chilled him.

― Teh HoBB (the pirate king), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 22:04 (twenty years ago)

"Deaths and injuries on Britain's roads have been falling steadily since the war, even though today there are more vehicles on our roads than ever before."

(there's a (theoretical/imaginary) prize for the first person to identify the particular hell through which i'm putting myself.)

― grimly fiendish (grimlord), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 22:36 (twenty years ago)

Living Yoga is a powerful inspiration for those that want to have their cake and eat it too.

― Tannenbaum Schmidt (Nik), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 23:09 (twenty years ago)

'The primary meaning of the word 'equity' as it is used in this book and indeed in the Australian legal system should be clarified. By it is meant not the moral notion of 'equity' in any abstract or philosophical sense, but rather the specific jurisprudential notion of equity that entered legal institutional history through the original English High Court of Chancery.'

― gem (trisk), Tuesday, 26 July 2005 23:19 (twenty years ago)

He was facing Seventh Avenue, at Times Square

― Seuss, Wednesday, 27 July 2005 00:54 (twenty years ago)

There are times when what is to be said looks out of the past at you - looks out like someone at a window and you in the street as you walk along.

― milozauckerman (miloaukerman), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 01:33 (twenty years ago)

for school: "I have been interested in empires for a long time, but it has been a furtive and guilty interest."

for me: "I got a call at work, and it was my father."

― derrick (derrick), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 04:52 (twenty years ago)

Not counting the preface or the prologue-

"Just as the German Reformation was largely the work of a single individual, Martin Luther, so the Scottish Reformation was the achievement of one man of heroic will and tireless energy: John Knox."

(He must be of tireless energy to go around forever hitting ILX0rs in the head with his unmentionables.)

― It Is What A Man Does Which Demeans Him, Not What Is Done To Him (kate), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 06:48 (twenty years ago)

Loga had cracked like an egg.

― Onimo (GerryNemo), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 07:39 (twenty years ago)

Dear Alex,

You have I Have
Flown to Beijing walked to superdrug
Scaled th great wall De-scaled the kettle
observed the rich tapestry watched the eastenders omnibus.....
of chinese street life

― battlingspacemonkey (battlingspacemonkey), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 07:45 (twenty years ago)

At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet.

― Bill A (Bill A), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 07:45 (twenty years ago)

George Bernard Shaw described marriage as an institution that brings together two people under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive and most transient of passions. They are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition until death do them part."

and

Golden Age? In us?

― tokyo nursery school: afternoon session (rosemary), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 12:21 (twenty years ago)

If we're allowed screenplays:

"A Pinto station wagon rattles onto the Massachusetts Turnpike, past Weston, onto Interstate 95, and into the town of Wellsmith... past a gas station, a shack, and a goat."

― Markelby (Mark C), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 12:25 (twenty years ago)

This is a true story.

― ianinportland (ianinportland), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 17:58 (twenty years ago)

"Lev Glevo. Lev Glebovich? A name like that's enough to twist your tongue off, my dear fellow."

― The Lex (The Lex), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 18:02 (twenty years ago)

"Scrooge McDuck is the world's richest duck! He loves his money, all five multiplujillion, nine impossibidillion, seven fantasticatrillion dollars and sixteen cents of it!"

Plus SOMEBODY has to cop to it, so I will: "It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind."

― Douglas (Douglas), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 18:29 (twenty years ago)

Grimly - it's not The World According to Jeremy Clarkson is it?

― Cathy (Cathy), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 18:37 (twenty years ago)

"On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before."

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 18:43 (twenty years ago)

"We should never confuse history with nostalgia but, when we look at historical practice,it is very difficult to make sense of a lot of it without recourse to nostalgia"

― Raw Patrick (Raw Patrick), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 21:56 (twenty years ago)

"The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child"

― Bidfurd, Wednesday, 27 July 2005 22:17 (twenty years ago)

Budapest
Saturday, July 10, 1999

The sweet smell of a triple-crème torta hung in the air like a good idea.

― mookieproof (mookieproof), Wednesday, 27 July 2005 23:08 (twenty years ago)

An aristocrat was riding down the street in his carriage.

― ai lien (kold_krush), Thursday, 28 July 2005 12:43 (twenty years ago)

Skipping 71 messages at this point... Click here if you want to load them all.

"it worked -- the machine has been destroyed."

― Ste, Thursday, 19 April 2007 12:34 (eighteen years ago)

"Our starting point is a red-brick pub built at the end of the nineteenth century. A road sign affixed to its wall points the direction of our journey: B480 Cowley."

― The Wayward Johnny B, Thursday, 19 April 2007 12:36 (eighteen years ago)

"One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary."

― Matt #2, Thursday, 19 April 2007 12:37 (eighteen years ago)

"Scene 1: On a cold and sunny morning in october 1985, John Whittaker entered his office in the molecular biology building of the Institut Pasteur in Paris and switched on his Eclipse MV/800 computer"

― Alan, Thursday, 19 April 2007 12:38 (eighteen years ago)

Lurking in a little English country church, at Preston Bissett in Buckinghamshire, is an object lesson in the difficulty of understanding the religious outlook of past generations.

― Masonic Boom, Thursday, 19 April 2007 12:39 (eighteen years ago)

I know what Matt #2 is reading!

― braveclub, Thursday, 19 April 2007 12:40 (eighteen years ago)

ditto

― Alan, Thursday, 19 April 2007 12:40 (eighteen years ago)

That makes three of us

― Tom D., Thursday, 19 April 2007 12:42 (eighteen years ago)

Four of us. I think i know what braveclub is reading, but not sure.

What i am reading :

"A green hunting cap squeezedthe top of the fleshy balloon of a head."

― Jibe, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:05 (eighteen years ago)

Google tells me i was right about what braveclub is reading.

― Jibe, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:06 (eighteen years ago)

I'm intruiged as to what Ste's might be.

― chap, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:12 (eighteen years ago)

Yeah, I spotted Braveclub's, too.

― Masonic Boom, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:13 (eighteen years ago)

well, tbh its a comic.

xp

― Ste, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:13 (eighteen years ago)

"Thick weather in the chops of the Channel and a dirty night, with the strong north-east wind bringing rain from the low sky and racing cloud: Ushant somewhere away on the starboard bow, the Scillies to larboard, but never a light, never a star to be seen; and no observation for the last four days."

― rener, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:20 (eighteen years ago)

"Evening, and a lowly servant sat beneath the Rashomon, waiting for the rain to end."

JohnnyB, you wouldn't be reading Isolarion by any chance?

― ledge, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:22 (eighteen years ago)

I have no hesitation in admitting that the older I get the more London becomes an obsession with me, so much so that I find myself ill at ease elsewhere, a feeling familiar to Dr Johnson.

― Ned Trifle II, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:27 (eighteen years ago)

"The Victorians are still with us."

Boring first line, eh?

― Groke, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:31 (eighteen years ago)

After a tedious confinement to a country hut, where I dwelt like Diogenes in his tub, taking as much delight in my books as an alchemist does in his bellows, I tired with seven years' search after knowledge, and began to reckon with myself for my time and examine what a Solomon my diligent enquiry into the uncertain guesses of our forefathers had made me.

― Ned Trifle II, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:31 (eighteen years ago)

As American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center's North Tower and United Airlines Flight 175 sliced through Tower Two, three people who had never met had their day of reckoning.

― Oilyrags, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:31 (eighteen years ago)

xpost

I'm always reading about eight books at a time but those two are my favourites.

Groke, you're gonna have to tell us what that book is - 'cos it's gonna bug me otherwise.

― Ned Trifle II, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:33 (eighteen years ago)

matt #2: the greenish dead eye of the tv tube.

and jibe is reading an old favourite of mine.

mine is: 'All this happened, more or less.'

― estela, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:35 (eighteen years ago)

It's The Victorians by A N Wilson. It's quite good actually! Elegantly written and it's made me grin a lot more often than most history books, generally at the bits involving Gladstone, who Wilson is plainly exasperated by.

― Groke, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:35 (eighteen years ago)

MORAL philosophy, or the science of human nature, may be treated after two different manners; each of which has its peculiar merit, and may contribute to the entertainment, instruction, and reformation of mankind.

― Frogman Henry, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:37 (eighteen years ago)

Deep in the jungle, up to a height of 4,800 metres, the San Martin and Cashiriari fields in Camisea are home to one of the most important non-associated natural gas reserves in Latin America.

― Grandpont Genie, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:39 (eighteen years ago)

Some of those books sound amazing. I wish I knew what they were. Except for Rener's. I can make a reasonable guess as to what it might be.

My current one is:

"Imagine that you have to break someone's arm."

― accentmonkey, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:39 (eighteen years ago)

"It appears from tradition, as well as some parish registers still extant, that the lands of Dalcastle (or Dalchastel, as it is often spelled) were possessed by a family of the name of Colwan, about one hundred and fifty years ago, and for at least a century previous to that period."

― Jaq, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:44 (eighteen years ago)

"Over ten years ago I stumbled upon an incredible discovery - a clue hidden in an ancient map, which though it did not lead to buried treasure suggested that the history of the world as it has been known and handed down for centuries would have to be radically revised."

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:46 (eighteen years ago)

All this happened, more or less...

One of my favourite books ever, not only for it's content but because (as has been said by others elsewhere) it made me want to read more, at a time (for me anyway, back in my mid teens) when there was a whole load of other distractions.

― Ned Trifle II, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:49 (eighteen years ago)

'The text of this short book needs some explanation.'

thrills

― That one guy that quit, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:49 (eighteen years ago)

Frogman Henry - good choice! Hume da man!

― ledge, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:50 (eighteen years ago)

I think you'll guess mine, TOGTQ (xp)

― Tom D., Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:51 (eighteen years ago)

"It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk, and face this learned audience."

pretty dull, really

― bernard snowy, Thursday, 19 April 2007 13:55 (eighteen years ago)

slightly more interesting one I picked up at the bookstore and very nearly bought:

"'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'"

― bernard snowy, Thursday, 19 April 2007 14:00 (eighteen years ago)

It's The Victorians by A N Wilson. It's quite good actually! Elegantly written and it's made me grin a lot more often than most history books, generally at the bits involving Gladstone, who Wilson is plainly exasperated by.

-- Groke, Thursday, April 19, 2007 1:35 PM (22 minutes ago)

Of course. I picked that up the bookshop the other day but bought the Alain De Bottom book on architecture which I quite wish I hadn't really as it's not really..er..rocking my world.

― Ned Trifle II, Thursday, 19 April 2007 14:01 (eighteen years ago)

"'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'"

I saw this on display recently and found it hard to imagine the trouble it caused, not it itself, but the trouble it found itself in...you understand what i trying to say...

― Ned Trifle II, Thursday, 19 April 2007 14:07 (eighteen years ago)

I was travelling alone, no destination in mind.

Sounds boring but actually very good!

― ENBB, Thursday, 19 April 2007 14:09 (eighteen years ago)

"The whole thing began with a blunder on my part, an entirely innocent piece of clumsiness, a gaffe, as the French call it."

― Michael White, Thursday, 19 April 2007 14:14 (eighteen years ago)

"In the early nineteen seventies, a British photo retoucher named Robert Stevens arrived in south Florida to take a job at the National Enquirer, which is published in Palm Beach County."

― kenan, Thursday, 19 April 2007 14:15 (eighteen years ago)

Some of those books sound amazing. I wish I knew what they were. Except for Rener's. I can make a reasonable guess as to what it might be.

Yarr.

― rener, Thursday, 19 April 2007 14:17 (eighteen years ago)

"Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the trees caligraphic."

― the sir weeze, Thursday, 19 April 2007 14:44 (eighteen years ago)

'All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths."

― gem, Thursday, 19 April 2007 15:04 (eighteen years ago)

"In the biggest, brownest muddiest river in Africa, two crocodiles lay with their heads just above the water"

― Mark C, Thursday, 19 April 2007 17:17 (eighteen years ago)

My achievements are a matter of history. A record. I am the voice and conscience of civilized Europe. I am one of the great inventors of my age. I am a child of the century and as old as the century.

― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 19 April 2007 17:21 (eighteen years ago)

"riverrun, 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."

― max, Thursday, 19 April 2007 17:26 (eighteen years ago)

I love how you can google any of these and find out what the book is.

― kenan, Thursday, 19 April 2007 17:27 (eighteen years ago)

Shakey Mo that's Moorcock isn't it? I read it when I was 14 or so but the "child of the century and as old as the century" has really stuck in my head ever since.

At 14 tbh I cared more about the fairly wild sex scenes.

― Groke, Thursday, 19 April 2007 17:43 (eighteen years ago)

"They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face."

― wmlynch, Thursday, 19 April 2007 17:46 (eighteen years ago)

ledge, I am indeed reading Isolarion, and enjoying it very much. I like being shown things that I've seen a thousand times but never seen before, if that makes sense. There's something extra cool about travel books about places you've been.

― The Wayward Johnny B, Thursday, 19 April 2007 21:17 (eighteen years ago)

haha yes it is Moorcock but the book came out last year. It's the conlusion of the Pyat quartet, which I have been eagerly awaiting for years...

I see someone's reading Finnegan's Wake (no googling necessary!)

― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 19 April 2007 21:19 (eighteen years ago)

"I am unpacking my library".

― admrl, Thursday, 19 April 2007 21:22 (eighteen years ago)

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