Bookflurries: Bookchat: Doors to Worlds
Wed Jan 16, 2008 at 04:59:13 PM PDT
Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
First sentences are doors to worlds.
-- Ursula K. Le Guin
One of the things that gives a big payoff to a dedicated reader is that moment when one sentence grabs hold and changes your way of thinking about something. It is a delight and forever after you are changed. Not only that, but it makes you go looking for more such quotations. This happened the other night to me when I was reading Passenger to Teheran by Vita Sackville-West who traveled there in 1926.
"But, for my part, I would not forgo the memory of an Egyptian dawn, and the flight of herons across the morning moon."*
Ah, sheer poetry and it reminds me of all the moons I have seen in the daytime and did not know what to call them. Now, I do. Of course there are noon moons and afternoon tea moons, but that moon that lingers in the paleness of dawn...exquisite. I am glad I read the book for that lovely image alone.
One other quote that spoke volumes:
page 143
Already the promise of summer hung over Persia...We no longer courted the sun, but darkened the house all day with reed blinds, raising them only in the evening when the snows of Demavend (the mountain) turned red, and the dark came quickly, and the little owls began to hoot, and the frogs hopped on the garden path, and the breeze rose and sighed in the planes.
*(in the introduction on page 29).
Some good quotes about writing and writers here:
http://book-smith.tripod.com/...
Never make excuses, never let them see you bleed, and never get separated from your baggage.
-- Wesley Price, "Three Rules of Professional Comportment for Writers" (Saturday Evening Post)
I always write from my own experiences whether I’ve had them or not.
-- Ron Carlson
I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
-- Elmore Leonard
I have a large number of books piled beside the computer that I stare at with longing eyes. I will begin one of them, tomorrow. Which shall it be? Which "door to the world" shall I open, next?
Here is a taste of each one.
I. "No," said Lea.
In the faint glow of the night light, a giant shadow climbed the wall behind her and leaned out across the ceiling with bristling black fangs. There was the sound of muted scuffling, and a noise like the rubbing of cardboard boxes. Something metallic banged jerkily against a hard surface. Little wooden balls clacked and crackled like gunfire. A slavering pack was licking at her thighs, snapping at her knees.
from Shadows of a Childhood by Elizabeth Gille, a fictional memoir of her life during WW II when she, age five and her sister age seven, were hidden and ultimately saved from the Nazis after their parents disappeared into the camps. Their mother was Irene Nemirovsky who wrote Suite Francaise and many other stories.
II. 1935
Come closer. This is not a story to go down easy, and the backwash still got hold of us today. The history of a family. The history of a country. From bondage to the joy of freedom, and almost ten hopeful years drinking up the promise of Reconstruction, and then back into the darkness, so fearsome don’t nobody want to talk about the scary time. Don’t nobody want to remember even now, decades removed, now things better some. Why stir up all that old mess from way back in 1873?
from the prologue of Red River by Lalita Tademy.
III. Preface
The silhouette of Alghera rises from the Mediterranean. My husband, Ed, and I are walking toward town just after noon, when sunlight slips straight through the clean water, rippling the bottom of the sea with ribbons of light.
"Limpida," he says, "chiara." Limpid, clear, the slow tide pushing the light in bright arcs across the sandy floor. Alghero, nominally an Italian town on the western edge of Sardinia, has colorful geometric-tiled cupolas, Catalan street names, Arabic flourishes in the cuisine. I feel a sudden attraction to Spain, to exotic Moorish courtyards, fountains that soothed those desert invaders, to the memory of a Latin man who once whispered to me, "Please share my darkness in Barcelona." A desire for some fierce, unnameable, dour, and dignified essence of Spain. I imagine walking there, along a whitewashed wall, peeling an orange, a book of Lorca’s poems in my pocket.
from A Year in the World by Frances Mayes.
IV. Introduction
In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers-and fortune hunters- than the lost city of Timbukto. For five centuries, legends about its wealth and culture had circulated from Venice to London. Like El Dorado in the Americas, Timbukto assumed the quality of a mythic dream hidden in the unseen sprawl of Africa, a city paved with gold that lay just beyond the next range of Mountains or a bit deeper in the unexplored African jungles.
from The Race for Timbukto by Frank T. Kryza
V. Summer, 1935
second paragraph...
When a breeze lifted the voile curtain enough for grainy light to spill in without casting shadows, barely visible objects began anchoring Antonia to the sensible world. Soon the gibbons would start whooping, and after that a pandemonium rip no one could sleep through, not owl-eyed student or newborn. Certainly not the zookeeper’s wife. All the usual domestic chores awaited her day, and she was clever with food, paintbrush, or needle. But she also had zoo problems of her own to solve, sometimes uncanny ones (such as hyena-cub soothing) that challenger her schooling and native gifts.
From The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman.
VI. Prologue page two
That moment , the music screeched to a halt. There was an ungodly collision of brass, reed, and percussion-trombones and piccolos skidded into cacophony, a tuba farted, and the hollow clang of a cymbal wavered out of the big top, over our heads and into oblivion.
Grady froze, crouched over his burger with his pinkies extended and lips spread wide.
I looked from side to side. No one moved a muscle-all eyes were directed at the big top. A few wisps of hay swirled lazily across the hard dirt.
"What is it? What’s going on?" I said.
"Shhh," Grady hissed.
The band started up again, playing "Stars and Stripes Forever"...
... "The Disaster March,"..."Means something’s gone bad-real bad."
"Like what?"
"Could be anything-fire in the big top, stampede, whatever...The poor rubes probably don’t even know it yet." He ducked under the hinged door and took off.
from Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
VII. Six years after the fact, Dr. Paul Edward Farmer reminded me, "We met because of a beheading, of all things."
from Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
VIII. On August 2, 1708, two privately owned men-of-war sailed from King’s Road, Bristol, bound first for Cork. With their sailing, the great cruising voyages began again for the first time since the days of Elizabeth. But in fact, there never was a voyage quite like this one...
...As they sailed from Bristol, they flew the Union Jack and the Red jack of the privateer. Privateers had been, and would continue to be, described-particularly by the Royal Navy-as pirates operating with a license. But this expedition attacked no neutral ports and shipping, much less allied ones, and it scrupulously adhered thoughout its operations to all the Articles of War and the commissions it had been given. Furthermore, in the greater part of the seas for which it was bound-seas still largely unknown-no Royal Navy ship had ever yet sailed, and none would for more than thirty years.
from The Privateers by MacLeish and Krieger
So what do you think I should read first? Please discuss in comments below. What are you reading or hoping to read, soon?
What quotes from a book you enjoyed stick in your mind or delighted you? What draws you into a book and causes you to buy it? Which world are you reading about right now?
plf515 has a wonderful book diary on Fridays early and all day
sarahnity’s booklist of DKos authors is here:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Readers are often stereotyped as closeted in a room full of books with no outside interests. This is so far from the truth it is hilarious. Please vote in the poll and comment below.
