Thursday Thirteen--random first opening paragraphs
these are from books that I like, some on this computer, some on my shelves and a couple on Amazon. Book titles and authors underneath.
1. So there I was, sitting under a colorful, multi-striped beach umbrella on my grandmother’s casket in the middle of a deserted backwoods highway in northern Minnesota. Oh, and I was smoking pot. I knew it was my responsibility to get Gran back into the borrowed hearse, but I weighed maybe a hundred-twenty soaking wet…and I was indeed soaked. Couldn’t dance, didn’t feel like singing, and already had the pot on me, so seemed like a good idea at the time to just sit and watch the family drama unfold.
2. The education bestowed upon Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, althletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague that occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.
3. Discordant carnival music and the smell of burnt sugar, popcorn and axle grease drifted through the crisp fall air. In the dusk, the colored lights of the rusty rides shone in broken lines where bulbs were missing. Faded canvas tents housed games of chance, a fortune-teller, a fun house and freaks. Sarah walked the trash-strewn paths between booths and rides and wondered why she had come. She hated carnivals.
4."Eeeeeek! There it is again!" Meredith McKenna abruptly flew into the arms of Cristoval de Medina, her hunky next-door neighbor, plastering her ample curves against his hard muscled form. She further ensnared the scrumptious young Spaniard by wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his narrow waist.
5. In a city the size of New York it was easy to disappear. Or if not to disappear, to become transparent. To be seen through. The Banshee of the Clan O'Grady was almost invisible to the mourners emerging from St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Just as well, under the circumstances, he being a good three sheets to the wind and looking less like a terrifying apparition and more like a bundle of rags blown up against the walls of St. Patrick's. Uncombed hair, untied boots, his shirttails hanging half out.
6. It was my father's belief that nothing built character better than an after-school job. He himself had peddled newspapers and delivered groceries by bobsled, and look at him! My older sister, Lisa, and I decided that if hard work had forged his character, we wanted nothing to do with it. "Thanks but no thanks," we said.
7. It was during the fifth inning of a game against what translated loosely as the team from no particular location that Denny's Kelly, the shortstop, turned into a wolf.
8. Charlie Asher walked the earth like an ant walks on the surface of water, as if the slightest misstep might send him plummeting through the surface to be sucked to the depths below. Blessed with a Beta Male imagination, he spent much of his life squinting into the future so he might spot ways in which the world was conspiring to kill him--him; his wife Rachel; and now, newborn Sophie. But despite his attention, his paranoia, his ceaseless fretting from the moment Rachel peed a blue stripe on the pregnancy stick to the time they wheeled her into recovery at St. Francis Memorial, Death slipped in.
9. If you are an observant person addicted to washing your hands and face, you can hardly fail to have noticed the legend "Whitehand" imprinted on your basin and soapdish, and indeed, on every sort of crockery. Probably, if you thought about it at all, you imagined this was a trade-name, alluding to the effect of washing, but this is not really so at all. Mr. Whitehand is the kind American gentleman who supplies so many of us with these articles of toilet, and as a consequence Mr. Whitehand is rich if not beyond the feverish dreams of avarice, at any rate, as rich as avarice can possibly desire to be in its waking moments.
1o. When I was twelve years old, I accidentally substituted salt for sugar in a cake recipe. I baked the cake, iced the cake, and served it up. It looked like a cake, but as soon as you cut into it and took a taste, you knew something else was going on. People are like that, too. Sometimes you just can't tell what's on the inside from looking at the outside. Sometimes people are a big surprise, just like the salt cake. Sometimes the surprise turns out to be good. And sometimes the suprise turns out to be bad. And sometimes the surprise is just friggin' confusing.
11. “Get this thing off me!” Fanta slung an angry glare at the bartender as she plucked at the slimy, segmented tongue lapping around her forearm.
12. How easy it was to disappear: A thousand trains a day entered or left Chicago. Many of these trains brought single young women who had never even seen a city but now hoped to make on of the biggest and toughest their home. Jane Addams, the urban reformer who founded Chicago's Hull House, wrote, "Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs." The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses and weavers. The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit. But not always. On march 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of "our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable businessman who is on this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances."
13. Scholarship asks, thank God, no recompense but Truth. It is not for the sake of material reward that she (Scholarship) pursues her (Truth) through the undergrowth of Ignorance, shining on Obscurity the bright torch of Reason and clearing aside the tangled thorns of Error with the keen secateurs of Intellect. Nor is it for the sake of public glory and the applause of the multitude: the scholar is indifferent to vulgar acclaim. Nor is it even in the hope that those few intimate friends who have observed at first hand the labour of the chase will mark with a word or two of discerning congratulation in eventual achievement. Which is very fortunate, because they don't.
a lot of ebooks because I can copy and paste, okay?
1. Leaving Mama, Bobby Cole
2. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
3. Bone Deep, Bonnie Dee
4. Wicked Payback Daisy Dexter Dobbs
5. Of the Clan O'Grady, A M Riley
6. Dina, The Christmas Whore, essay by David Sedaris
7. The Baseball Wolf, short story by W.P. Kinsella
8. A Dirty Job, Christopher Moore.
9. The Freaks of Mayfair: The Perpendicular, E.F. Benson
10. Twelve Sharp, Janet Evanovich
11. Secrets, Volume 18, Red Sage [not sure of title of novella], Linda Gayle
12. The Devil in the White City: Murder Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, Erik Larson
13. Thus Was Adonis Murdered, Sarah Caudwell (one of the best read aloud books ever. Sob. I miss Caudwell.)
1. So there I was, sitting under a colorful, multi-striped beach umbrella on my grandmother’s casket in the middle of a deserted backwoods highway in northern Minnesota. Oh, and I was smoking pot. I knew it was my responsibility to get Gran back into the borrowed hearse, but I weighed maybe a hundred-twenty soaking wet…and I was indeed soaked. Couldn’t dance, didn’t feel like singing, and already had the pot on me, so seemed like a good idea at the time to just sit and watch the family drama unfold.
2. The education bestowed upon Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, althletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague that occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.
3. Discordant carnival music and the smell of burnt sugar, popcorn and axle grease drifted through the crisp fall air. In the dusk, the colored lights of the rusty rides shone in broken lines where bulbs were missing. Faded canvas tents housed games of chance, a fortune-teller, a fun house and freaks. Sarah walked the trash-strewn paths between booths and rides and wondered why she had come. She hated carnivals.
4."Eeeeeek! There it is again!" Meredith McKenna abruptly flew into the arms of Cristoval de Medina, her hunky next-door neighbor, plastering her ample curves against his hard muscled form. She further ensnared the scrumptious young Spaniard by wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his narrow waist.
5. In a city the size of New York it was easy to disappear. Or if not to disappear, to become transparent. To be seen through. The Banshee of the Clan O'Grady was almost invisible to the mourners emerging from St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Just as well, under the circumstances, he being a good three sheets to the wind and looking less like a terrifying apparition and more like a bundle of rags blown up against the walls of St. Patrick's. Uncombed hair, untied boots, his shirttails hanging half out.
6. It was my father's belief that nothing built character better than an after-school job. He himself had peddled newspapers and delivered groceries by bobsled, and look at him! My older sister, Lisa, and I decided that if hard work had forged his character, we wanted nothing to do with it. "Thanks but no thanks," we said.
7. It was during the fifth inning of a game against what translated loosely as the team from no particular location that Denny's Kelly, the shortstop, turned into a wolf.
8. Charlie Asher walked the earth like an ant walks on the surface of water, as if the slightest misstep might send him plummeting through the surface to be sucked to the depths below. Blessed with a Beta Male imagination, he spent much of his life squinting into the future so he might spot ways in which the world was conspiring to kill him--him; his wife Rachel; and now, newborn Sophie. But despite his attention, his paranoia, his ceaseless fretting from the moment Rachel peed a blue stripe on the pregnancy stick to the time they wheeled her into recovery at St. Francis Memorial, Death slipped in.
9. If you are an observant person addicted to washing your hands and face, you can hardly fail to have noticed the legend "Whitehand" imprinted on your basin and soapdish, and indeed, on every sort of crockery. Probably, if you thought about it at all, you imagined this was a trade-name, alluding to the effect of washing, but this is not really so at all. Mr. Whitehand is the kind American gentleman who supplies so many of us with these articles of toilet, and as a consequence Mr. Whitehand is rich if not beyond the feverish dreams of avarice, at any rate, as rich as avarice can possibly desire to be in its waking moments.
1o. When I was twelve years old, I accidentally substituted salt for sugar in a cake recipe. I baked the cake, iced the cake, and served it up. It looked like a cake, but as soon as you cut into it and took a taste, you knew something else was going on. People are like that, too. Sometimes you just can't tell what's on the inside from looking at the outside. Sometimes people are a big surprise, just like the salt cake. Sometimes the surprise turns out to be good. And sometimes the suprise turns out to be bad. And sometimes the surprise is just friggin' confusing.
11. “Get this thing off me!” Fanta slung an angry glare at the bartender as she plucked at the slimy, segmented tongue lapping around her forearm.
12. How easy it was to disappear: A thousand trains a day entered or left Chicago. Many of these trains brought single young women who had never even seen a city but now hoped to make on of the biggest and toughest their home. Jane Addams, the urban reformer who founded Chicago's Hull House, wrote, "Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs." The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses and weavers. The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit. But not always. On march 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of "our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable businessman who is on this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances."
13. Scholarship asks, thank God, no recompense but Truth. It is not for the sake of material reward that she (Scholarship) pursues her (Truth) through the undergrowth of Ignorance, shining on Obscurity the bright torch of Reason and clearing aside the tangled thorns of Error with the keen secateurs of Intellect. Nor is it for the sake of public glory and the applause of the multitude: the scholar is indifferent to vulgar acclaim. Nor is it even in the hope that those few intimate friends who have observed at first hand the labour of the chase will mark with a word or two of discerning congratulation in eventual achievement. Which is very fortunate, because they don't.
a lot of ebooks because I can copy and paste, okay?
1. Leaving Mama, Bobby Cole
2. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
3. Bone Deep, Bonnie Dee
4. Wicked Payback Daisy Dexter Dobbs
5. Of the Clan O'Grady, A M Riley
6. Dina, The Christmas Whore, essay by David Sedaris
7. The Baseball Wolf, short story by W.P. Kinsella
8. A Dirty Job, Christopher Moore.
9. The Freaks of Mayfair: The Perpendicular, E.F. Benson
10. Twelve Sharp, Janet Evanovich
11. Secrets, Volume 18, Red Sage [not sure of title of novella], Linda Gayle
12. The Devil in the White City: Murder Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, Erik Larson
13. Thus Was Adonis Murdered, Sarah Caudwell (one of the best read aloud books ever. Sob. I miss Caudwell.)
Thank heavens you posted the sources, because that Cold Comfort Farm paragraph was going to drive me nuts otherwise. It was riiiight there on the tip of my memory, but I couldn't quite catch it :).
ReplyDeleteI didn't recognize a single one of 'em, but I loved 10 and 11.
ReplyDeleteBut #3, opening a story with the word "discordant" -- boy, that takes balls.
It was the Christopher Moore one that reminded you of me, right? 'Cuase there's no way you could have known about the beach/pot/funeral incident of my youth.
ReplyDelete5&4, I was tempted to mix them up, but I kept pulling sort of obscure books off my shelves. Pretty good recognition of Cold Comfort Farm!
ReplyDeleteDoug--I haven't actually read 9. I'll wait until the local library has it. But I do think Evanovich is fun.
BSC, yup it was Moore. You introduced me to him. His books, anyway. So you're Bobby Cole? Funny, I thought she lived in Kansas. or maybe it's Oklahoma. She keeps moving around. . .
Well, at least my memory's not completely gone. The only one I recognized was also the only one I've read. (#10)
ReplyDeleteSecrets is up to volume 18?? Guess I need to go buy more books.
I recognized two of my favorites before I even checked them! Cold Comfort Farm and Thus Was Adonis Murdered. Ah, Sarah Caudwell. I think I have to go dig that book out and read it again.
ReplyDelete