The Next Best Book Club discussion

I'm a bit slow in posting here... Over 1/2 done with the book and I'm just now posting the opening paragraph... ;)

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

"I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years."

Martin Misunderstood ~ Karin Slaughter

Martin Reed had decided long ago that he was born into the wrong body. He often wondered how different his fate would have been if that amorphous lump that stared vacantly from his first photograpgh at the hospital had shown even the slightest bit of potential. But, no, it was clearly not meant to be. The picture of baby Martin, thrusting himself into the air like a bloated seal, wet, pink lips parted, chin sliding into his neck even then, and - perhaps worst of all - the words 'Mama's Little Angel' emblazoned over his grayish, hairless head, would be one that would haunt him throughout his entire life.

Fiona wrote: "Fiona wrote: "The Anatomy of Deception - Lawerence Goldstone

March 14. 1889

For days, clouds had hung over the frigid city, promising snow, an ephemeral late winter veneer of white, but the tempe..."

Its to do with a part that has to do with a diary in the beginnning Fi.

It was, took me over a week due to being ill as well. But it comes high;y recdommended to me as well.

The Witch's Trinity ~ Erika Mailman

It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Treves, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother's womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees, nein, men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasture-land, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beats of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, bother internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacramount of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and damage to very many.

- FROM THE PAPAL, BULL OF INNOCENT VIII, 1484

In the fleeting seconds of final memory, the image that will become Burma is the sun and a woman's parasol. He was wondering which visions would remain--the Salween's coursing coffee flow after a storm, the predawn palisades of fishing nets, the glow of ground tumeric, the weep of jungle vines.

The Piano Tuner A Novel by Daniel Mason

I came into the world one Tuesday in the autumn of 1880, in San Francisco, in the home of my maternal grandparents. While inside that labyrinthine wood house my mother panted and pushed, her valiant heart and desperate bones laboring to open a way out to me, the savage life of the Chinese quarter was seething outside, with its unforgettable aroma of exotic food, its deafening torrent of shouted dialects, its inexhaustible swarms of human bees hurrying back and forth. I was born in the early morning, but in Chinatown the clocks obey no rules, and at that hour the market, the cart traffic, the woeful barking of caged dogs awaiting the butcher's cleaver, were beginning to heat up.

Portrait in Sepia A Novel by Isabel Allende

That's only the first little bit of the first paragraph. It's about a page long.

Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody's always going on about--he wasn't no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Lucivar Yaslana, the Eyrien half-breed, watched the guards drag the sobbing man to the boat. He felt no sympathy for the condemned man who had led the aborted slave revolt. In the Territory called Pruul, sympathy was a luxury no slave could afford.

Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop

This is from the first chapter, not the prologue.

BAYZHIG
Ever since the beginning these twins are sewing. One sews with light and one with dark. The first twin's beads are cut-glass whites and pales, and the other twin's beads are glittering deep red and blue-black indigo. One twin uses an awl made of an otter's sharpened penis bone, the other uses that of a bear. They sew with a single sinew thread, in, out, fast and furious, each trying to set one more bead into the pattern than her sister, each trying to upset the balance of the world.

The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich

I’d always said that if and when the aliens actually landed, it would be a let-down. I mean, after War of the Worlds, Close Encounters, and E.T., there was no way they could live up to the image in the public’s mind, good or bad.

I’d also said that they would look nothing like the aliens of the movies, and that they would not have come to A) kill us, B) take over our planet and enslave us, C) save us from ourselves à la The Day the Earth Stood Still, or D) have sex with Earthwomen. I mean, I realize it’s hard to find someone nice, but would aliens really come thousands of light-years just to find a date? Plus, it seemed just as likely they’d be attracted to wart hogs. Or yucca. Or air-conditioning units.

I’ve also always thought A) and B) were highly unlikely since imperialist invader types would probably be too busy invading their next-door neighbors and being invaded by other invader types to have time to go after an out-of-the-way place like Earth, and as to C), I’m wary of people or aliens who say they’ve come to save you, as witness Reverend Thresher. And it seemed to me that aliens who were capable of building the spaceships necessary to cross all those light-years would necessarily have complex civilizations and therefore motives for coming more complicated than merely incinerating Washington or phoning home.

All Seated on the Ground by Connie Willis

The little village of Obscurity is remarkable only for its unremarkableness. Passed over for inclusion into almost every publication from the The Domesday Book to Thirty Places Not Worth Visiting in Berkshire, the hamlet is also a cartographic omission, an honor it shares with the neighboring villages of Hiding and Cognito. Indeed, the status of Obscurity was once thought so tenuous that some of the more philosophically inclined residents considered the possibility that since the village didn't exist, they might not exist either, and hurriedly placed "existential question of being" on the parish council agenda, where it still resides, after much unresolved discussion, between "church roof fund" and "any other business."

The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde

I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don't want to be married to him any more. David isn't even in the car park with me. He's at home, looking after the kids, and I have only called him to remind him that he should write a note for Molly's class teacher. The other bit just sort of...slips out. This is a mistake, obviously. Even though I am, apparently, and to my immense surprise, the kind of person who tells her husband that she doesnät want to be married to him any more, I really didn't think that I was the kind of person to say so in a car park, on a mobile phone. That particular self-assessment will now have to be revised, clearly. I can describe myself as the kind of person who doesn't forget names, for example, because I have remembered names thousands of times and forgotten them only once or twice. But for the majority of people, marriage-ending conversations happen only once, if at all. If you choose to conduct yours on a mobile phone, in a Leeds car park, then you cannot really claim that it is unrepresentative, in the same way that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't really claim that shooting presidents wasn't like him at all. Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.
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How to Be Good by Nick Hornby

January 8th, 1919

Theodore is in the ground.

The words as I write them make as little sense as did the sight of his coffin descending into a patch of sandy soil near Sagamore Hill, the place he loved more than any. As I stood there this afternoon, in the cold January wind that blew off Long Island Sound, I thought to myself: Of course it's a joke. Of course he'll burst the lid open, blind us all with that ridiculous grin and split our ears with a high-pitched bark of laughter. Then he'll exclaim that there's work to do - "action to get!" - and we'll all be martialed to the task of protecting some obscure species of newt from the ravages of a predatory industrial giant bent on planting a fetid factory on the little reptile's breeding ground. I was not alone in such fantasies; everyone at the funeral expected something of the kind, it was plain on their faces. All reports indicate that most of the country and much of the world feel the same way. The notion of Theodore Roosevelt being gone is that - unacceptable.

The Alienist, by Caleb Carr

I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have no husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for. My crown passes to my nephew.

Til We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market. It was our family's last day in Arizona, where I'd lived half my life and raised two kids for the whole of theirs. Now we were moving away forever, taking our nostalgic inventory of the things we would never see again: the bush where the roadrunner built a nest and fed lizards to her weird-looking babies; the tree Camille crashed into learning to ride a bike; the exact spot where Lily touched a dead snake. Our driveway was just the first tributary on a memory river sweeping us out.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

I used to love this season. The wood stacked by the door, the tang of its sap still speaking of forest. The hay made, all golden in the low afternoon light. The rumble of the apples tumbling into the cellar bins. Smells and sights and sounds that said this year it would be all right" there'd be food and warmth for the babies by the time the snows came. I used to love to walk in the apple orchard at this time of the year, to feel the soft give underfoot when I trod on a fallen fruit. Thick sweet scents of rotting apple and wet wood. This year, the hay stooks are few and the wood pile scant, and neither matters much to me.


Year of Wonders

Fahrenheit 451

It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conducter playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

Paulette Lestafier wasn't as crazy as they said. Sure, she knew what day it was, since that was all she had left to do now. Count the days, wait for them, and forget. She knew for certain that today was Wednesday. And what's more, she was ready. She had put her coat on, found her basket, and gathered all of her discount coupons together. She could even hear Yvonne's car in the distance ... But what can you do? The cat had been outside the door, hungry, and it was while she was leaning over to put his bowl back on the floor that she fell and banged her head against the bottom step.

Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda

Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of the melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively. In order to make my point understood without question. I have no words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences. And that's why I'm here now waiting for Denny to come home - he should be here soon - lying on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor in a puddle of my own urine.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

On 11th November 1997, Veronika decided that the moment to kill herself had - at last!- arrived. She carefully cleaned the room that she rented in a convent, turned off the heating, brushed her teeth and laydown.

Veronika decides to die - Paulo Cohelo

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

There are some men who enter a woman's life and screw it up forever. Joseph Morelli did this to me - not forever, but periodically.

One for the Money by Janet Evanovich

The train growled to a halt. Gray steam belched from its heaving engine into the white sky, and the twenty-four freight carriages behind bucked and rattled as they lurched shrieking to a standstill. The sound of horses and of shouted commands echoed across the stillness of the empty frozen landscape.

"Why have we stopped?" Valentina Friis whispered to her husband.

The Russian Concubine by Kate Furnivall

The Rest of Her Life by Laura Moriarty

Several times that summer, Leigh further tormented herself by considering all the ways the accident might never have happened. She thought of the stray dog, and how its presence had, in a sense, decided everything. If there had been no dog, there would have been no accident. If the dog would have stayed home where it belonged, if it would have had a more responsible owner, if it wouldn't have dug under a fence or slipped through an open door, it would not have followed some scent this way and that until it ended up in the middle of Commerce Street at that particular time on that particular afternoon. Leigh's daughter would most likely have driven home without incident, and Bethany Cleese would still be alive.

"Do your neighbors burn one another alive?" was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

So this is what it feels like to be hunted. My spine is pressed up against the bark of a pine tree. My heart hammers against my rib cage with astonishing force. Here they come again. Here comes the big dented Chevy pickup with its engine roaring and its high-beam lights swinging through the darkness and the trees. The men in the truck are drunk and they have rifles and now there are other men on foot looking for me with flashlights.

God's Middle Finger Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre by Richard Grant

The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland


A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on the outside - pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. The want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cast members of Rent, Vaclav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty or more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens - four dowager and three regnant - and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman

I've already read this book, I hope it's okay >.<
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Pretties by Scott Westerfeld
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(The actual first paragraph is only one sentence, so I'll put first two)
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Chapter Title: Criminal

Getting dressed was always the hardest part of the afternoon.
The invitation to Valentino Mansion said semiformal, but it was the semi part that was tricky. Like a night without a party, "semi" opened up too many possibilities. Bad enough for boys, for whom it could mean jacket and tie (skipping the tie with certain kinds of collars), or all white and shirtsleeves (but only on summer afternoons), or any number of longcoats, waistcoats, tailcoats, kilts, or really nice sweaters. For girls, though, the definition simply exploded, as definitions usually did here in New Pretty Town.

Watership Down
by Richard Adams

Then primroses were over. Towards the edge of the wood, where the ground became open and sloped down to an old fence and a brambly ditch beyond, only a few fading patches of pale yellow still showed among the dog's mercury and oak-tree roots. On the other side of the fence, the upper part of the field was full of rabbit-holes. In places the grass was gone altogether and everywhere there were clusters of dry droppings, through which nothing but the ragwort would grow. A hundred yards away, at the bottom of the slope, ran the brook, no more than three feet wide, half-choked with king-cups, water-cress and blue brook-lime. The cart-track crossed by a brick culvert and climbed the opposite slope to a five-barred gate in the thorn hedge. The gate led into the lane.

It was almost as if she were waiting, hanging there in the painted darkness. The small Baroque church of Santa Giuliana in Trastervere huddled in a corner of the warm Roman night. The streets were blue and motionless, illuminated only by the hushed light of a street lamp from the square nearby.

Then there was a sound. Inside the church.

It was the faintest scream of metal on metal, barely perceptible in daylight but now like a shriek of white against black. Then it stopped. The sound had been only momentary but it echoed.

The Art Thief
Noah Charney

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. I make no claims to have a life in Christ, or with Christ--and certainly not for Christ, which I've heard some zealots claim. I'm not very sophisticated in my knowledge of the Old Testament, and I've not read the New Testament since my Sunday school days, except for those passages that I hear read aloud to me when I go to church. I'm somewhat more familiar with the passages from the Bible that appear in the book of Common Prayer; I read my prayer book often, and my Bible only on holy days--the prayer book is so much more orderly.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

One September morning in 1433, a thin man with a hooked nose and sallow skin could have been seen walking towards the steps of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence. His name was Cosimo de' Medici; and he was said to be one of the richest men in the world. As he entered the palace gate an official came up to him and asked him to wait in the courtyard: he would be taken up to the Council Chamber as soon as the meeting being held there was over. A few minutes later the captain of the guard told him to follow him up the stairs; but, instead of being shown into the Council Chamber, Cosimo de' Medici was escorted up into the bell-tower and pushed into a cramped cell known as the Alberghettino - the Little Inn - the door of which was shut and locked behind him. Through the narrow slit of its single window, so he later recorded, he looked down upon the city.

The House of Medici Its Rise and Fall, by Christopher Hibbert.

I just started reading Chokeand the first paragraph really hooked me!

"If you are going to read this, don't bother. After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece. Save yourself. There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair. You're not getting any younger."

The Girl with No Shadow A Novel- Joanne Harris

It is a relatively little-known fact that, over the course of a single year, about twenty million letters are delivered to the dead. People forget to stop the mail-those grieving widows and prospective heirs-and so magazine subscriptions remain uncanceled; distant friends unnotified; library fines unpaid. That's twenty million circulars, bank statements, credit cards, love letters, junk mail, greetings, gossip, and bills dropping daily onto doormats or parquet floors, thrust casually through railings, wedged into letter boxes, accumulating in stairwells, left unwanted on porches and steps, never to reach the addressee. The dead don't care. More importantly, neither do the living. The living just follow their petty concerns, quite unaware that very close by, a miracle is taking place. The dead are coming back to life.

I was in the middle of the incredible miracle from God when I first saw the angel Raphael. Majesty from Joy. Intelligent communication from a being from nowhere I had ever experienced. I was clutching the hand of my husband after a seemingly endless mental analytical preparation to get myself to walk across the atrium inside of a mall. My heart rate was rapid. Fear overtaking me. Surely I could get to the other side of the large open space without dying. Past the strangers. Past the escalator Into the artery that led to the movie theatre. Agoraphobia mushroomed. Giant waves of fear heaving up and down within me. Step. Step,step. My feet were lead weights. Then my world changed - by the hand of God. I sensed somethiong hovering above my head. Fear made me react quickly. I instinctively looked up while lowering my body in a defensive bracing for a physical blow which was my post traumatic stress syndrom from being hit unexpectedly while growing up.
I saw an angel. The hair stood straight up on my arms in an electrical sensory response and from an electrical being interacting with my heartstrings, and it was divine and unexplainable.

Communions With Christ by Sharon Ellis Amazon.com Barnes&Noble.com Target.com

When summer comes to the North Woods, time slows down. And some days it stops altogether. The sky, gray and lowering for much of the year, becomes an ocean of blue, so vast and brilliant you can't help but stop what you're doing--pinning wet sheets to the line maybe, or shucking a bushel of corn on the back steps--to stare up at it. Locusts whir in the birches, coaxing you out of the sun and under the boughs, and the heat stills the air, heavy and sweet with the scent of balsam.

A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, "That afternoon when I met so-and-so...was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon. I expect you might put down your teacup and say, "Well now, which was it? Was it the best or the worst? Because it can't possibly have been both!"

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

The Palace of Whitehall
February 14, 1601
Midnight

He will make a good death, they say. The better for him, for he could never make a good life. Nature made him a king among men, and offered him a king's fortune, too. But Cecil, always the wisest of my counselors, called him "the Wild Horse," and true it was he never could be backed or broken.

I, Elizabeth A Novel, by Rosalind Miles

Who speaks? It is her voice in my head. I fear it will not stop until I stop. It talks to me as a I haul myself along these cobbled streets, telling me things I do not want to hear. Sometimes I answer,protest aloud, demanding to be left in peace.

Shroud by John Banville

The Knight turned towards the Holy Hitler chapel which in the orientation of this church lay in the western arm of the Swastika, and with the customary loud impressive chords on the organ and a long roll on the sacred drums, the Creed began. Hermann was sitting in the Goebbels chapel in the northern arm, whence he could conveniently watch the handsome boy with the long fair silky hair, who had been singing the solos. He had to turn towards the west when the Knight turned. He could no longer see the boy except with a sidelong glance, and though gazing at lovely youths in church was not even conventionally condemned, any position during the singing of the Creed except that of attention-eyes-front was sacrilegious.

(only half the first paragraph...)

Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin

She lay on her back fastened by leather straps to a narrow bed with a steel frame. The harness was tight across her rib cage. Her hands were manacled to the sides of the bed.

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.

Of course, Tally thought, you'd have to feed your cat only salmon-flavored cat food for a while, to get the pinks right. The scudding clouds did look a bit fishy, rippled into scales by a high-altitude wind. As the light faded, deep blue gaps of night peered through like an upside-down ocean, bottomless and cold.

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Year of the Cock The Remarkable True Account of a Married Man Who Left His Wife and Paid the Price by Alan Wieder

IT'S DAY FIVE and I don't want to be here or anywhere else.

Being back here is doing me no good at all. I am not the man she once loved, nor even the one who walked out the door. I am not a man at all. I've made yet another wrong turn in this ruinous year and I should leave tonight, while she sleeps, write a pretty note and split forever.

He had lived for thirty-four years and had never noticed how many shades of color streaked the early morning sky. But this was his last sunrise, and suddenly the horizon seemed incredibly detailed and bright.

Prague Counterpoint by Bodie Thoene

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren't rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn't begun yet. July, well, July's really fine: there's no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June's best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September's a billion years away.

Something Wicked This Way Comes-Ray Bradbury

Mary DiNunzio sat across from the old men, deciding which one to shoot first. Her father, Matty DiNunzio, was the natural choice because he was the most stubborn, but his three friends were tied for second. They sat next to him at the conference table, trinity of Tonys-- Pigeon Tony Lucia, Tony-From-Down-The-Block LoMonaco, and Tony Two Feet Pensiera, who was called Feet, making him the only man in South Philly whose nickname had a nickname.

Lady Killer by Lisa Scottoline

Interesting how some books open with a sunrise or sunset.