Book Excerpt for the Day

    “Let’s go back to the very beginning then,” he said, opening a Spanish textbook that was clearly aimed at children.  “Counting to ten…”

    Further up the garden, Sheelagh was probably conjugating the imperfect subjunctive by now; she picked up foreign languages as easily as most people picked up colds.  Still, as long as one of us knew how to say, “Sir, could you kindly call an ambulance as my friend has just been electrocuted in the shower?”, I was happy enough.

    (from Backpacked by Catherine Ryan Howard)

 

    8*/10.  The full review is here.

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Bestsellers

Book Excerpt for the Day

    It left me thinking I couldn’t make a mistake, that I had to be precise and fine, which of course was no way to go after a batter—especially a batter with the pedigree of Wade Boggs.  No, he couldn’t hurt you with a single swing of the bat, not like Jim Rice or Don Baylor, but he could hurt you, make no mistake.  Death by a thousand paper cuts, by seeing-eye singles … that’s how a guy like Wade Boggs could hurt you.

    (from Game 7, 1986 by Ron Darling)

 

    8*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Book Excerpt for the Day

    The janitor was fatter on one side than the other.  His name was Shaibel.  Mr. Shaibel.  One day she was sent to the basement to clean the blackboard erasers by clomping them together, and she found him sitting on a metal stool near the furnace scowling over a green-and-white checkerboard in front of him.  But where the checkers should be there were little plastic things in funny shapes.  Some were larger than others.  There were more of the small ones than any of the others.  The janitor looked up at her.  She left in silence.

    (from The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis)

 

    8*/10.  The full review is here.

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Book Excerpt for the Day

    “How’re you feeling?”  (…)

    Cris said in a quiet voice, since loud sounds made funny white stars shoot across his vision.  “Day I mustered out of the Army, I downed a bottle of swill bourbon.  Woke up the next morning in underwear not my own, hugging a balsam on a Christmas tree farm.  This isn’t so bad.  Thanks for getting me back here.”

    “I knew you’d rather throw up at home,” Dria deadpanned.

    (from Pulp Reality 2 published by Charles Millhouse)

 

    8½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Social Distancing

Book Excerpt for the Day

    He seized it with both hands, with extraordinary violence, and tried to tear it off his own body, and, failing, punched it in an access of rage.

    “Easy!” I said.  “Be calm!  Take it easy!  I wouldn’t punch that leg like that.”

    “And why not?” he asked, irritably, belligerently.

    “Because it’s your leg,” I answered.  “Don’t you know your own leg?”

    He gazed at me with a look compounded of stupefaction, incredulity, terror and amusement, not unmixed with a jocular sort of suspicion.  “Ah Doc!”, he said.  “You’re fooling me!  You’re in cahoots with that nurse – you shouldn’t kid patients like this!”

    (from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks)

 

    9*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Book Excerpt for the Day

    “Maybe you can’t read so good.  You see that tape there, says crime scene and such?”

    “The bright yellow and black stuff?” I asked.

    “That’s it exactly.”

    “Yep.”

    “Well, that’s what we police use when we have a crime scene and we don’t want nosy private investigators stomping all over it in their big boots and contaminating everything,” he drawled.

    “What if I promise to walk on tippy toe?”

    “Then I promise I will stop bouncing you off walls just as soon as I think you’re not resisting arrest,” he said in a cheerful tone.

    (from Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher)

 

    8*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Book Excerpt for the Day

    The professor wore a white dinner-jacket, his hair was white, he had white morning stubble on his chin, and he carried a revolver in his hand which he pointed at Wormold.  Wormold saw that the woman behind him was very young and very pretty.  She stooped and turned off the gramophone.

    “Forgive me for calling on you at this hour,” Wormold said.  He had no idea how he should begin, and he was disquieted by the revolver.  Professors ought not to carry revolvers.

    (from Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene)

 

    6*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Book Excerpt for the Day

    “Some fools will claim these creatures washed up from the depths of the arctic sea.”

    “I know,” Naomi answered.  “No one will believe it at first.  But if enough people see it, a few reputable scientists might come forward to challenge what they think is a fake.  You’ve just got to do whatever you can to get it in front of the media.  And keep yourselves alive.”

    Mikhailov snorted.  “The first should not be difficult.  I am not so certain about the second.”

    (from Season of the Harvest by Michael R. Hicks)

 

    7*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Book Excerpt for the Day

    “These are about one day old.”  Peck points out a cluster of maggots, maybe twenty or thirty, feeding side by side, packed in close.  They’re easy to miss, because all that can be seen of them is their tail ends.  Insects take oxygen through openings in the exoskeleton called spiracles.  In the larvae, there are, specifically, anal spiracles.  On top of its other charms, the maggot breathes through its ass.  It is a handy evolutionary adaptation if, as Peck puts it, “you spend your whole day with your head buried in slimy dead flesh.

    (from Grunt by Mary Roach)

 

    9*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Worst Ending

    Robin Cook's Chromsome 6.  Worst ending to an otherwise good novel ever.

Book Excerpt for the Day

     “We’re the military.  We remember everything.  For instance, we remember how the Russians defeated Napoleon and his Grande Armée after he invaded Moscow in 1812 with overwhelming force.”

    The robot was silent.  It stared into Stern’s eyes without expression.  Stern blinked first, necessarily.

    “They burned everything, Dr. Kline,” he continued, voice dropping.  “They destroyed their own homes to starve out the enemy.  Without shelter, the French troops froze.  Without anything to eat, they starved.”

    “And so did the Russian peasants,” replied Kline.

    (from The Andromeda Evolution by Daniel H. Wilson)

 

    8*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Book Excerpt for the Day

    “Can you lift this, or should I work a pulley?”

    “I think I can get it, but be ready to spot me so I don’t drop it.”

    “There isn’t enough room in here for me to jump in and catch squat.  I’ll be right behind you watching it fall.”

    “Have I mentioned what a treat it is to work with you, Lyons?”

    “Hasn’t come up,” she answered.

    “Imagine that.”

    (from The Years Ran Like Rabbits by Anna Taylor)

    7*/10.  The complete review is here.

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To Reread or not To Reread

    I've reread Brave New World, Waiting For Godot, and Slaughterhouse Five. That's about it. Why read something a second time when there are zillions of interesting books out there that you haven't touched yet?

Book Excerpt for the Day

    “You drunk?” Thomas said.

    “Drunk on the love of a good woman,” Pirmin said slapping Thomas on the arm with one of his huge hands.

    “Found out her name yet?  Perhaps she had time to shout it at your back while you were riding away in the dark.”

    (from Altdorf – The Forest Knights by J.K. Swift)

    8*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Book Excerpt for the Day

    Say a soft American Prayer

    A quiet animal sigh

    for the strong plane

    landing

    We rode on opium tires

    from the colossal

    airport chess game

    at dawn, new from glass

    in the broken night

    landed then in quiet

    fog, beside the times

    out of this strange river

    (from Wilderness – Volume 1 by Jim Morrison)

    5½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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Reading Stats - 2019

Reading stats for 2019:
Books read: 72
Words read: 25,262 (per Goodreads)
Shortest book: 75 pages (Carl Sandburg)
Longest book: 1,252 pages (Brandon Sanderson)
Non-Fiction: 9
Female Authors: 15
Poetry: 1
(Auto)Biographies: 2
New Authors: 34
Highbrow Lit: 3 (Proust, Hawthorne, Barzun)

Books I've Really Read

    I've read the three in the lower row, on the left side.  And the other two in the lower row are both on my TBR shelf.

Book Excerpt for the Day

    This is not a cheerful book, but history has a way of intruding upon the present, and perhaps those who read it will have a clearer understanding of what the American Indian is, by knowing what he was.  They may be surprised to hear words of gentle reasonableness coming from the mouths of Indians stereotyped in the American myth as ruthless savages. (…) The Indians knew that life was equated with the earth and its resources, that America was a paradise, and they could not comprehend why the intruders from the East were determined to destroy all that was Indian as well as America itself.

    And if the readers of this book should ever chance to see the poverty, the hopelessness, and the squalor of a modern Indian reservation, they may find it possible to truly understand the reasons why.

(Dee Brown, in the introduction to this book)

    (from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown)

  9½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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