Seduce me with Words.

My all-time fave:

Quote:

One morning Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams to find he had been turned into a large insect.

For anyone who doesn't know, that's the opening line from Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

Call me Ishmael.

I'm not sure how funny this will be when taken out of context, but this is my favorite scene from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's rollicking Good Omens:

Quote:

He sniffed. Something was burning--there was an unpleasant smell of scorched metal and rubber and leather.

"Excuse me," said a voice from behind him. R.P. Tyler turned around.

There was a large once-black car on fire in the lane and a man in sunglasses was leaning out of one window, saying through the smoke, "I'm sorry, I've managed to get a little lost. Can you direct me to Lower Tadfield Air Base? I'm know it's around here somewhere."

Your car is on fire.

No. Tyler just couldn't bring himself to say it. I mean, the man had to know that, didn't he? He was sitting in the middle of it. Possibly it was some kind of practical joke.

So instead he said, "I think you must have taken a wrong turn about a mile back. A signpost has blown down."

The stranger smiled. "That must be it," he said. The orange flames flickering below him gave him an almost infernal appearance.

The wind blew towards Tyler, across the car, and he felt his eyebrows frizzle.

Excuse me, young man, but your car is on fire and you're sitting in it without burning and incidentally it's red hot in places.

No.

Should he ask the man if he wanted him to phone the A.A.?

Instead he explained the route carefully, trying not to stare.

"That's terrific. Much obliged," said Crowley, as he began to wind up the window.

R.P. Tyler had to say something.

"Excuse me, young man," he said.

"Yes?"

I mean, it's not the kind of thing you don't notice, your car being on fire.

A tongue of flame licked across the charred dashboard.

"Funny weather we're having, isn't it?" he said, lamely.

"Is it?" said Crowley. "I honestly hadn't noticed." And he reversed back down the country lane in his burning car.

"That's probably because your car is on fire," said R.P. Tyler sharply.

I've just discovered this thread. I;ve only skimmed it, this morning. Will be back n the evening. I agree with gus's assessment of Tortilla Curtain. I have placed it on my bookshelf right next to The Grapes of Wrath.

On the morning Vera died I woke up very early. The birds had started, more of them and singing more loudly in our leafy suburb than in the country. They never sang like that outside Vera's windows in the Vale of Dedham. I lay there listening to something repeating itself monotonously. A thrush, it must have been, doing what Browning said it did and singing each song twice over. It was a Thursday in August, a hundred years ago. Not much more that a third of that, of course. It only feels so long.

In these circumstances alone one knows when someone is going to die. All other deaths can be predicted, conjectured, even anticipated with some certainty, but no to the hour, the minute, with no room for hope. Vera would die at eight o' clock and that was that.

So tempt me to read a book you really liked by giving me a paragraph or a couple of lines from it. It can be new or old, fiction or non, but one you really enjoyed and would want to share with others.

Here's one of my picks:

"A Walk In The Woods" by Bill Bryson:

( from page 5)

"Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, "Bear!" before sinking into troubled unconsciousness.

John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years older than I, for I was but ten: large and stout for his age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and large extremities. He gorged himself habitually at table, which made him bilious, and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks. He ought now to have been at school; but his mama had taken him home for a month or two, "on account of his delicate health." Mr. Miles, the master, affirmed that he would do very well if he had fewer cakes and sweetmeats sent him from home; but the mother's heart turned from an opinion so harsh, and inclined rather to the more refined idea that John's sallowness was owing to over-application and, perhaps, to pining after home.

John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an antipathy to me. He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week, nor once or twice in the day, but continually: every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh in my bones shrank when he came near. There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired, because I had no appeal whatever against either his menaces or his inflictions; the servants did not like to offend their young master by taking my part against him, and Mrs. Reed was blind and deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very presence, more frequently, however, behind her back.

edgarblythe wrote:

I've just discovered this thread. I;ve only skimmed it, this morning. Will be back n the evening. I agree with gus's assessment of Tortilla Curtain. I have placed it on my bookshelf right next to The Grapes of Wrath.

Hey Edgar, So do you match up novels like I do? If I think they have something in common I put them on the shelf next to each, sort of like blind dates. I've got "My Antonia" next to "Giants in The Earth" and "Gone With The Wind" next to "Cold Mountain". I think it goes back to my childhood when I thought books came alive at night and would talk to each other.

I read "Tortilla" at Gus' suggestion a year ago and enjoyed it. I think in between raising capybaras and plowing his swamp Gus teaches literature at some college. I think to really get at the core of TC you have to have a literary background, even more than a social conscience. "Grapes of Wrath" is one of those books I pull out when I feel the need to feel grateful.

But all this is small potatoes compared to 1009's fascinating and potentially malevolent toilet. A harmonious concordance of elegant form and vigorous function, flanked by rolls of tissue so soft as to be without the usual perforates for tearing, my toilet has above it this sign:

THIS TOILET IS CONNECTED TO A VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM. PLEASE DO NOT THROW INTO THE TOILET ANYTHING THAN ORDINARY TOILET WASTE AND TOILET PAPER

Yes that's right a vacuum toilet. And, as with the exhaust fan above, not a lightweight or unambitious vacuum. The toilet's flush produces a brief but traumatizing sound, a kind of held high-B gargle, as of some gastric disturbance on a cosmic scale. Along with this sound comes a concussive suction so awesomely powerful that it's both scary and strangely comforting--your waste seems less removed than hurled from you, and hurled with a velocity that lets you feel as though the waste is going to end up someplace so far away from you that it will have become an abstraction... a kind of existential-level sewage treatment.

I'm not nearly as good at chess as I am at Ping-Pong, but I'm pretty good. Most of the time on the Nadir I play chess with myself (not as dull as it may sound), for I have determined that--no offense--the sorts of people who go on 7NC Megacruises tend not to be very good chess players.

Today, however, is the day that I am mated in 23 moves by a nine-year-old girl. Let's not spend a lot of time on this. The girl's name is Deirdre. She's one of the very few little kids on board not tucked out of sight in Deck 4's Daycare Grotto. Deirdre's mom never leaves her in the Grotto but also never leaves her side, and has the lipless and flinty-eyed look of a parent whose kid is preternaturally good at something.

[...]

We start. I push some pawns forward and she develops a knight. Deirdre's mom watches the whole game from a standing position behind the kid's seat, motionless except for her eyes. I know within seconds that I despise this mom. She's like some kind of stage-mother of chess. Deirdre seems like an OK type, though--I've played precocious kids before, and at least Deirdre doesn't hoot or smirk. If anything, she seems a little sad that I don't turn out to be more of a stretch for her.

My first inkling of trouble is one the fourth move, when I fianchetto and Deirdre knows what I'm doing is fianchettoing and uses the term correctly, again calling me Mister. The second ominous clue is the way her little hand keeps flailing out to the side of the board after she moves, a sign that she's used to a speed clock. She swoops in with her developed QK and forks my queen on the twelfth move and after that it's only a matter of time. It doesn't really matter. I didn't even start playing chess until my late twenties. On move 17 three desperately old and related-looking people at the jigsaw puzzle table kind of totter over and watch as I hang my rook and the serious carnage starts. It doesn't really matter. Neither Deirdre nor the hideous mom smiles when it's over; I smile enough for everybody. None of us says anything about maybe playing again tomorrow.

Genesis
Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father like to watch the wrestling, my mother like to wrestle; it didn't matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.

She hung the largest sheets on the the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Consevative candidate in the window.

She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies.

Enemies were: The Devil (in his many forms)
Next Door
Sex (in its many forms)
Slugs

Friends were: God
Our dog
Auntie Madge
The novels of Charlotte Bronte
Slug pellets-
and me, at first. I had been brought in to join her in a tag match against the 'Rest of the World'. She had a mysterious attitude toward the begetting of children; it wasn't that she couldn't do it, more that she didn't want to do it. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first. So she did the next best thing and arranged for a foundling. That was me...

She always prayed in exactly the same way. First of all she thanked God that she had lived to see another day, and then she thanked God for sparing the world another day. Then she spoke of her enemies, which was the nearest thing she had to a catechism.

As soon as 'Vengeance is mine saith the Lord' boomed through the wall into the kitchen, I put the kettle on. The time it took to boil the water and brew the tea was just about the legnth of her final item, the sick list. She was very regular. I put the milk in, in she came, and taking a great gulp of tea said one of three things:
"The lord is good' (steely-eyed into the back yard)
"What sort of tea is this?" (steely-eyed at me)
"Who was the oldest man in the Bible?"
No. 3 of course, had a number of variations, but it was always a Bible quiz question.

My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal, part pirate.

I have no father. There's nothing unusual about that-even children who do have fathers are often surprised to see them. My own father came out of the sea and went back that way. He was crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass. His splintered hull shored him for long enough to drop anchor inside my mother.
Shoals of babies vied for life.
I won.

I lived in a house cut steep into the bank. The chairs had to be nailed to the floor, and we were never allowed to eat spaghetti. We ate food that stuck to the plate-shepherd's pie, goulash, rosotto, scrambled egg. We tried peas once-what a disaster-and sometimes we still find them, dusty and green in the corners of the room.

Some people are raised on a hill, others in the valley. Most of us are brought up on the flat. I came at life at an angle, and that's how I've lived ever since.

They say you can tell something of a person's life by observing their body. This is certainly true of my dog. My dog has back legs shorter than his front legs, on account of always digging in at one end, and always scrambling up at the other. On ground level he walks with a kind of bounce that adds to his cheerfulness. He doesn't know that other dogs' legs are the same length all the way round. If he thinks at all, he thinks that every dog is like him, and so he suffers none of the morbid introspection of the human race, which notes every curve from the norm with fear or punishment.

"You're not like other children," said my mother. "And if you can't survive in this world, you had better make a world of your own." The eccentricities she described as mine were really her own. She was the one who hated going out. She was the one who couldn't live in the world she had been given. She longed for me to be free, and did everything she could to make sure it never happened. We were strapped together like it or not. We were climbing partners. And then she fell.

The contributions of citizens working outside established news organizations have not been limited to the disclosure of discrete facts and one-time events. For instance, bloggers - including some active duty military personnel - have provided important coverage of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, often supplying information that could not be obtained by mainstream journalists.

Here are two passages from David Foster Wallace's short story "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," taken from his collection of the same title.

Strange country that gives the man it nourishes both his splendour and his misery! It is not surprising that the sensual riches granted to a sensitive man of these regions should coincide with the most extreme destitution. No truth fails to carry with it its bitterness. How can one be surprised then, if I never feel more affection for the face of this country than amidst its poorest men?