Fragments v. 2.0

[Wabbit]

A fragment of your book

Hi, an idea I had for a kinda little game.

Post a fragment of what you are reading right now. Where ever you are in your book, write down the last paragraph you read. We each will post the title and the paragraph that read and page number that it's on.

I thought it would be interesting to see what you are reading, to have a fragment of your book at this moment, and to see how the author writes. Maybe we find something we like! ( more to buy )

OK, I start.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Page 103

Florentio Ariza never had another opportunity to see or talk to Fermina Daza alone in the many chance encounters of their very long lives until fifty-one years and nine months and four days later, when he repeated his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love on ther first night as a widow.

 

[magemanda]

The Wrong Boy - Willy Russell. Page 408

'It seemed all wrong really; somewhere at the back of my head, it just seemed wrong, everybody dressed up like that and having a funeral for my Gran. It was a good job she was dead! That's what I said to them, in the back of the big black limousine; I said, "It's a good job my Gran's dead, isn't it?" '

 

[Lyra]

Blindness - Jose Saramago p181

The doctor's wife had no desire to kill, all she wanted was to get out as quickly as possible and, above all, not to leave a single blind woman behind. This one probably won't survivie, she thought as she dug the scissors into a man's chest. Another shot was heard, Let's go, let's go, said the doctor's wife,pushing any blind women whom she encountered ahead of her.

(anyone who has read this book knows that some paragraphs go on for pages so I just pick a little excerpt from the last page I read).

 

[Wabbit]

Sounds very interesting! Blindness is a book I must get around to reading. How are you finding it?

And... keep em comming! I like this

 

[Lyra]

I have slightly mixed feelings about it because I am finding the style of writing difficult but all the same I am engrossed and images from the book keep popping into my head during the day so that has to say something!

 

[veggietarrain]

Blood and Gold by Anne Rice

Page 478

I don't know whether she looked back at the face of the Mother and Father. I did not. I did not for one moment believe that either would prevent this dreadful expulsion.

Not a very exciting part, but you sort of have to know the series to know who the Mother and Father are... (Akasha and Enkil).

 

[Solid Snake]

Why did I have to have a dumb picnic with my pain-in-the-neck little brother and sister? Todd had a temper tantrum and as usual mother gave in to his wining and complaining. Now I had to go! Today was the first day of my summer break from the fourth grade. It was June 1978. I'd rather be at the lake on a hot day than going to brother and sister's babyish picnic. Mother and my sister, Angela were packing our food into a basket in the kitchen. Angela recently turned four years old. Todd was almost five.
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REVIEWS

Nathaniel Adams, age 9

This is a great book about three friends, Jeremy, Julie and Sean, and one bully named Robert. They do lots of fun things together during their summer vacation. Julie's mom thinks she's a tomboy, but really she just wants to be around Jeremy.

It's a good thing I got this book in the summer and didn't have school this morning, 'cause I stayed up till 1:36 a.m. reading it! There were a lot of funny things in this book. I really liked the chapter names. I think any kid would love to read this book, and I thought the maps were cool too!

Rita Hestand - a mother, grandmother, and children's book author

It's summertime in Stormville, New York. Jeremy Grabowski is now ten years old, and going into the fifth grade come fall. He's a delightful typical young man who sees the world through simple eyes. He has a five year old brother Todd, who drives him batty and a four year old sister who gets all of Mom's attention.

Jeremy is a perceptive young man who at first didn't listen to his own premonition about the blanket in the backyard where him and his siblings were gonna have a picnic and got stung by yellow jackets. Naturally Jeremy saw it as Todd's fault, and the fact that his mother was more worried about his sister than him had him wondering just how much she really cared.

Jeremy has lived in Stormville since he was very young, so when father announces they may move to Arizona Jeremy is upset. He loves hunting down frogs and toads for his own backyard, and he'd miss his friends, Sean and Julie if they moved. Sean always thought Jeremy was in love with Julie, but Jeremy admittedly didn't know what real love was yet.

The only thing Jeremy wouldn't miss is Robert, the bully. Robert had been in his class every year, and haunted him with his threats. Jeremy made sure he would avoid Robert almost at any cost. Robert was gonna be famous some day he proclaimed and Jeremy couldn't figure out how?

Sean was right to some extent about Jeremy and Julie. Julie had been the very first girl Jeremy had ever kissed. And most of the time he did really like her, because she was such a tomboy. He still liked her when she gave him a black eye with a baseball gone astray too.

What a delight this book was to be taken through so many childhood memories of the 1970's with a little boy who enjoyed it so thoroughly. We experience Jeremy's embarrassment in wearing his neighbor's clothes, to his lying about the raisin cake. We go through traumatics of Todd not wanting to go to kindergarten to premonitions of a car accident. Mr. Carlson delights us with childlike whimsy and memories to look back on. A touching and humorous tale told from a children's point of view. The illustrations are unique drawings that depict the setting perfectly an add to the perfection of the book. What a wonderful book to read and reread. Even the parents will love this book and want to read it again. From poetry to humor this one has it all. You won't soon forget Jeremy Grabowski's Crazy Summer in Stormville!
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ABOUT

Jeremy Grabowski's Crazy Summer in Stormville!
An out of the ordinary story about a ten-year-old boy's crazy summer!

Is Stormville a fun place to live? It sure is! It's 1978.

Ten-year-old, Jeremy Grabowski wonders if he'll make it through the summer.

Will his family move far away to Arizona? What could Jeremy do to stop them?

He has a stubborn little brother and babied sister. Julie, who lives next door, has a crush on him. She wants to be president and liberate the women of the world.


Robert, a bully in the neighborhood, thinks he's going to be a world famous movie star. He'd do anything to be world famous! All Jeremy can do is wish Robert were a dream, not real! How will Jeremy deal with someone bigger and stronger than him? He's even worse than everyone else put together!

Fortunately, Sean lives down the street and is Jeremy's friend.

Jeremy's parents are also a problem in his life.

What about the other people in the neighborhood?

Can a ten-year-old have a sixth sense and tell the future?

Maybe Jeremy will get through the summer. Maybe everyone in Jeremy's world will make him go crazy! Find out if he's taken away in a straightjacket to the nut house!
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Hope this is not too long.

 

[Irene Wilde]

This from Italo Calvino's "Cosmicomics" --

"I put my hands to my deafened ears, and at the same moment I also felt the need to cover my nose and mouth, so as not to breathe the heady blend of oxygen and nitrogen that surrounded me, but strongest of all was the impuls to cover my eyes, which seemed ready to explode."

Fantastic book, btw. Written with such charm and intelligence that it's a shame it's only 153 pages long.

Irene Wilde

 

[bobbyburns]

from the mystery science theater 3000 amazing colossal episode guide:

"who is miles o'keefe? is he tarzan, the monosyllabic simian-lover who abhors a shower? no, that's too simple is he ator, the fighting eagle, protector of the weak, florious warrior, fleet of foot, quick with a sword, true to the core? no, that's actually a little too complex. my guess is that he's somewhere in the middle. I believe miles to be an amiable enough guy, never gonna bring home a pulitzer, likes his beer, runs a lot, been married a couple of times, calls his girlfriend 'my old lady,' is a funny drunk, can't really tell a joke. and that's why we love him.

"one thing I know for certain--the man could beat me up. oh, I might get in a lucky punch or two, I might even be able to wrestle him momentarily to the ground, but in the end miles would thrash me. he probably wouldn't hurt me badly. he'd let me know he won, but most likely wouldn't break anything. come to think of it, he'd probably jab me expertly in the solar plexus two or three times until I crumpled to the ground and threw up on myself. then he'd help me to my feet and buy me a beer. and as I sat nursing my sam adams, face dirty, hair mussed, smelling of bile and sick, the lovely ladies would flock around miles and he'd carry them off and he'd love them, oh, how he'd love them. me, I'd go home, wash the filth off, microwave a burrito and watch marker while miles took the world's loveliest creatures on a guided tour through whole nebulaes of ecstacy."

 

[chehughes]

The Wrong Boy - Willy Russell. Page 408

Excellent.Love that book,i hope everyone here intends to read it soon.

how abou this from Jake Arnotts True crime (from the long firm trilogy)
page65
The snow has started to fall.Yes,the weather forecast is right for once:snow is general all over Essex.Watch it through the window.White dots against the black.Like an old telly gone on the blink.Interference like the fuzziness in my head.
The phone goes and I sort of jump a bit.Im so fucking edgy.Pick it up.
"yeah?"
"Gaz?"
Its Beardsley.
"yeah.what?"
"The coma girls dead"
"yeah?"
"yeah."
"so?"
"look,Gaz,this isnt good.No.this is verybad.....................

 

[dele]

"So died the Three, and those who had hoped to rise with them were sent into exile. From this day on Tzu Hsi assumed publicly the title of Empress Mother, which the dying Emperor in Jehol had bestowed upon her. Thus began the reign of the young Emperor but all knew that whatever her propriety and her courtesy to all, the Empress Mother reigned supreme."

-Buck, Pearl. Imperial Woman. New York: The John Day Company, 1956. 176.

 

[RainbowGurl]

Oliver Twist (Page 59)

The old gentleman bowed respectfully, and advancing to the magistrate's desk, said, suiting the action to the word, "That is my name and address sir." He then withdrew a pace or two, and with another polite and gentlemanly inclination of the head waited to be questioned.

 

[Stewart]

Giordana Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition - Frances A. Yates - p125-126

The Hermetic writer is certainly here very close in spirit to the Syrian monk, and it is no wonder that Ficino was impressed by the way Hermes Trismegistus confirms Saint Dionysius on No Name yet All Names.​

There is a negative theology also in the Hebrew Cabalistic mysticism, for the Ensoph, out of which the ten Sephiroth emerge, is the Nothing, the unnameable, unknown Deus Absconditus, and the highest and most remote Sephiroth, Keter or the Crown, disappears into the Nothing. So that here, too, though there are as it were Ten Names in the Sephiroth, the highest is the Nothing or the No Name.​

I cannot find that Pico anywhere relates the Ensoph to the Dionysian negative theology, though the fifteenth Orphic conclusion is significant:​

Idem est nox apud Orpheum, & Ensoph in Cabala​

It would be but a short step, in Pico's mind, from the Orphic nox to the Dionysian darkness. There is a similar mystical conception in the Platonic conclusions:​

Ideo amor ab Orpheo sine oculis dicitur, quia est supra intellectum.​

This describes in terms of the blind Cupid the same "negative" experience as that of which Dionysius speaks.​

It is the only clue to Pico's synthesis that he makes it on a mystical level, the many Names which he collects from all philosophies and religions being at the bottom all one in the No Name. And the great Christian authority on the via negativa was Pseudo-Dionysius.​

 

[Ashlea]

A community of but one sex would be a blind world. When in 1940 I was in Berlin, engaged by three Scandanavian papers to write about Nazi Germany, woman -- and the whole world of woman -- was so emphatically subdued that I might indeed have been walking about in such a one-sexed community.

--Shadows in the Grass, by Isak Dinesin (published together with Out of Africa.)

 

[graydaisy]

joel gazed down on the jumbled green, trying to picture the music room and dancers ("Angela Lee played the harp," Miss Amy was saying, "and Mr. Casey the piano, and Jesus Fever, though he'd never studied, the violin, and Randolph the Elder sang; had the finest male voice in the state, everyone said so"), but the willows were willows and the goldenrod goldenrod and the dancers dead and lost. The yellow tabby slunk through the lilac into tall, concealing grass, and the garden was glazed and secret and still.

"Other Voices, Other Rooms" by Truman Capote
chapter 2 p.49 Vintage International

 

[Wabbit]

I liked the writing from that fragment you posted

 

[True@1stLight]

Was by Geoff Ryman pg. 27

"I will wait, Dorothy promised Aunty Em. I will wait until you are sick and old, and I'll put lye soap in your eyes, and I'll take some shears and I'll cut all your hair off, and you won't be able to do a thing, and I'll say, It's for your own good, Aunty Em, because you're dirty. And I'll just let you cry.

Dorothy had learned how to hate."

 

[True@1stLight]

Fantastic book, btw. Written with such charm and intelligence that it's a shame it's only 153 pages long.

Irene Wilde

Isn't it!? I can't wait to read If on a Winter's Night A Traveler....

I just wanted to post one of my favorite excerpts.... pg. 78 Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino.

"....the lands that had emerged were a limited phenomenon: they were going to disappear just as they had cropped up or, in any event, they would be subject to constant changes: volcanoes, glaciations, earthquakes, upheavals, changes of climate and of vegetation. And our life in the midst of all this would have to face constant transformations, in the course of which whole races would disappear, and the only survivors would be those who were prepared to change the bases of their existence so radically that the reasons why living was beautiful would be completely overwhelmed and forgotten."

 

[Jenem]

I have slightly mixed feelings about it because I am finding the style of writing difficult but all the same I am engrossed and images from the book keep popping into my head during the day so that has to say something!

Lyra, I'm reading Blindness right now, too. I'm just at the beginning when they start quarantine (so not as far as you). I have the same feelings as you on the book - the writing style is strange and takes some getting used to. I finally figured out that with each run-on sentence of dialogue the next capitalized word that starts a speakers sentence is the other person speaking. For the most part that's how it works. I don't think I described it well - but you must know what I mean. The story is fascinating, I'm really enjoying it. It is somewhat reminscent of "Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham - which is one of my favorites.

 

[fluffy bunny]

Good idea you Wascally Wabbit


[snip]
Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and incertainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear. Justine died, she rested, and I was alive. The blood flowed freely in my veins, but a weight of despair and remorse pressed on my heart which nothing could remove. Sleep fled from my eyes; I wandered like an evil spirit, for I had committed deeds of mischief beyond description horrible, and more, much more (I persuaded myself) was yet behind. Yet my heart overflowed with kindness and the love of virtue. I had begun life with benevolent intentions and thirsted for the moment when I should put them in practice and make myself useful to my fellow beings. Now all was blasted; instead of that serenity of conscience which allowed me to look back upon the past with self-satisfaction, and from thence to gather promise of new hopes, I was seized by remorse and the sense of guilt, which hurried me away to a hell of intense tortures such as no language can describe.
[/snip]