September 2011
29 posts
4 tags
The Kitchen Counter Cooking School / Kathleen...
Normally, I do not stalk people in grocery stores.
I confess to the occasional practice of supermarket voyeurism. But who doesn’t sometimes notice the curious collections of fellow shoppers, then contemplate what they may reveal about them?
What goes on in the home of a hunched, graying woman with nineteen cans of cat food, iceberg lettuce, a family pack of steaks, and a copy of In...
4 tags
The City & The City / China Mieville
I could not see the street or much of the estate. We were enclosed in dirt-coloured blocks, from the window out of which leaned vested men and women with morning hair and mugs of drink, eating breakfast and watching us. This open ground between the buildings had once been sculpted. It pitched like a golf course—a child’s mimicking of of geography. Maybe they had been gong to wood it...
5 tags
“Relationships are ropes that bind. Love is a noose.”
– The Way of Shadows / Brent Weeks
4 tags
The Way of Shadows / Brent Weeks
Kylar couldn’t wear his courier disguise into the Warrens—couriers never went into the Warrens—so he headed to an east side safe house on a block crowded with the tiny homes of artisans and those servants not housed at their lords’ estates. He rounded the corner and ran straight into a girl. She would have gone sprawling if he hadn’t grabbed her arms to catch...
5 tags
Monstrous Regiment / Terry Pratchett
Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so. It was supposed to be her crowning glory, and everyone said it was beautiful, but she generally wore it in a net when she was working. She’d always told herself it was wasted on her. Yet she was careful to see that the long golden coils all landed on the small sheet spread...
6 tags
Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti /...
The tent is draped with strings of bare bulbs, with bits of mirror tied here and there to make it sparkle. (It doesn’t look shabby until you’ve already paid.)
You pay your admission to a man who looks like he could knock out a steer, but it is a slight young man who hands you your ticket: printed on thick, clean paper, one corner embossed in gold ink with a griffin whose mechanical...
7 tags
White Noise / Don DeLillo
The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationary and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with...
4 tags
Armageddon in Retrospect / Kurt Vonnegut
Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him.
It was music.
I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.
Armageddon in Retrospect / Kurt Vonnegut
5 tags
The Edge of the World / Kevin J. Anderson
These foreign seas looked much the same as the waters of home, but Criston Vora knew the lands were different, the people were different, and their religion was contrary to everything he had been taught in the Aidenist kirk. For a twenty-year-old sailor eager to see the world, those differences could be either wondrous or frightening—-he wouldn’t know which until he met the people...
2 tags
Justine / Lawrence Durrell
The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes …
I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child—Melissa’s child. I do not know why I use the word...
4 tags
Brooklyn Was Mine: Essays / Various
At twenty-one I moved to Brooklyn hoping that it would be the last move I would ever make—that it would, with the gradual accumulation of time, memory, and possessions, become that place I instinctively reverted back to when asked, “So, where are you from?” I was born in Ethiopia like my parents and their parents before them, but it would be a lie to say I was from Ethiopia,...
4 tags
The Sign of Four / Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp...
7 tags
Looking Backward 2000 - 1887 / Edward Bellamy
I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. “What!” you say. “Eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course.” I beg your pardon, but there is no mistake. It was about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east wind of Boston, which,...
3 tags
On Canaan's Side / Sebastian Barry
Bill is gone.
What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking? It might not be much more than silence, and certainly a small slight sound.
When I was four I owned a porcelain doll given me by a strange agency. My mother’s sister, who lived down in Wicklow, had kept it from her own childhood and that of her sister, and gave it to me as a sort of keepsake of my mother. At...
4 tags
Ready Player One / Ernest Cline
I was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire in one of the neighboring stacks. The shots were followed by a few minutes of muffled shouting and screaming, then silence.
Gunfire wasn’t uncommon in the stacks, but it still shook me up. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, so I decided to kill the remaining hours until dawn by brushing up on a few coin-op classics....
6 tags
City of Glass / Paul Auster
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might...
6 tags
Travels with Charley / John Steinbeck
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s...
6 tags
From Russia with Love / Ian Fleming
The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.
He might have been drowned and fished out of the pool and laid out on the grass to dry while the police or the next-of-kin were summoned. Even the little pile of objects in the grass beside his head might have been his personal effects, meticulously assembled in full view so that no one should think...
5 tags
Heart of Veridon / Tim Akers
I was on the Glory of Day when she fell out of the sky. I rode the flames and shattered gears down into the cold, dark Reine, survived because I was only half-alive to begin with. Two times I’ve been dragged out of the wreckage of a zepliner, two times I’ve walked away. This time I was just a passenger. The first time I was a captain, Pilot, and only survivor. The sky doesn’t...
6 tags
Here is New York / E.B. White
Every block or two, in most residential sections of New York, is a little main street. A man starts for work in the morning and before he has gone two hundred yards he has completed half a dozen missions: bought a paper, left a pair of shoes to be soled, picked up a pack of cigarettes, ordered a bottle of whiskey to be dispatched in the opposite direction against his home-coming, written a...
8 tags
James and the Giant Peach / Roald Dahl
Until he was four years old, James Henry Trotter had had a happy life. He lived peacefully with his mother and father in a beautiful house beside the sea. There was always plenty of other children for him to play with, and there was the sandy beach for him to run about on, and the ocean to paddle in. It was the perfect life for a small boy.
Then, one day, James’s mother and father went...
7 tags
Cory Doctorow on Self-Publishing, Jesse Ball on...
Cory Doctorow, author, blogger, and co-editor of the wildly popular pop culture website BoingBoing, is also a columnist for the science fiction magazine Locus. In his most recent article, Why Should Anyone Care?, he gives thought to his self-published short story collection With a Little Help that came out in December of 2010.
Over the past two years there’s been a steady increase in both...
7 tags
Old Man's War / John Scalzi
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.
Visiting Kathy’s grave was the less dramatic of the two. She’s buried in Harris Creek Cemetery, not more than a mile down the road from where I live and where we raised our family. Getting her into the cemetery was more difficult than perhaps it should have been; neither of us...
8 tags
5 tags
“He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive...”
– The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy / Douglas Adams
5 tags
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy / Douglas...
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet...
6 tags
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz / L. Frank Baum
She was awakened by a shock, so sudden and severe that if Dorothy had not been lying on the soft bed she might have been hurt. As it was, the jar made her catch her breath and wonder what had happened; and Toto put his cold little nose into her face and whined dismally. Dorothy sat up and noticed that the house was not moving; nor was it dark, for the bright sunshine came in at the window,...
4 tags
Zero History / William Gibson
Inchmale haled a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she’d first known this city.
Pearlescent silver, this one. Glyphed in Prussian blue, advertising something German, banking services or business software; a smoother simulacrum of its black ancestors, its faux-leather upholstrey a shade of orthopedic fawn.
“Their money’s heavy,” he said, dropping...
3 tags
The Time Machine / H.G. Wells
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and...
