| The Brothers K | David James Duncan | Papa is in his easy chair, reading the Sunday sports page. I am
lying across his lap. | Buy | |
| Slayground | Richard Stark | Parker jumped out of the Ford with a gun in one hand and the packet of explosive in the other. | Buy | |
| The Green Eagle Score | Richard Stark | Parker looked in at the beach and there was a guy in a black suit standing there, surrounded by all the bodies in bathing suits. | Buy | |
| The Sour Lemon Score | Richard Stark | Parker put the revolver away and looked out the windshield. | Buy | |
| The Rare Coin Score | Richard Stark | Parker spent two weeks on the white sand beach at Biloxi, and on a white sandy bitch named Belle, but he was restless, and one day without thinking about it he checked out and sent a forwarding address to Handy McKay and moved on to New Orleans. | Buy | |
| The Black Ice Score | Richard Stark | Parker walked into his hotel room, and there was a guy in there going through his suitcase laid out on his bed. | Buy | |
| Three Junes | Julia Glass | Paul chose Greece for its predictable whiteness: the blanching
heat by day, the rush of stars at night, the glint of the
lime-washed houses crowding its coast. | Buy | |
| The Fortunate Youth | William John Locke | Paul Kegworthy lived with his mother, Mrs. Button, his
stepfather, Mr. Button, and six little Buttons, his half brothers
and sisters. His was not an ideal home; it consisted in a
bedroom, a kitchen and a scullery in a grimy little house in a
grimy street made up of rows of exactly similar grimy little
houses, and forming one of a hundred similar streets in a
northern manufacturing town. Mr. and Mrs. Button worked in a
factory and took in as lodgers grimy single men who also worked
in factories. They were not a model couple; they were rather, in
fact, the scandal of Budge Street, which did not itself enjoy, in
Bludston, a reputation for holiness. | Buy | |
| To Be the Best | Barbara Taylor Bradford | Paula left Pennistone Royal just before dawn. | Buy | |
| To Be the Best | Barbara Taylor Bradford | Paula walked into her private office at the London store with her
usual briskness, and after removing several folders from her
briefcase, she sat down at the antique partners' desk in the
corner. It was precisely at this moment that she noticed the
buff-colored envelope propped against the antique porcelain lamp. | Buy | |
| Penrod | Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) | Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at
Duke, his wistful dog. | Buy | |
| True Grit | Charles Portis | People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. | Buy | |
| The Midlander | Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) | People used to say of the two Oliphant brothers that Harlan
Oliphant looked as if he lived in the Oliphant's house, but Dan
didn't. | Buy | |
| The Shelters of Stone | Jean M Auel | People were gathering on the limestone ledge, looking down at them warily. | Buy | |
| Little House on the Prairie | Laura Ingalls Wilder | Pet and Patty began to trot briskly, as if they were glad, too.
Laura held tight to the wagon bow and stood up in the jolting
wagon. Beyond Pa's shoulder and far across the waves of green
grass she could see the trees, and they were not like any trees
she had seen before. They were no taller than bushes. | Buy | |
| Second Generation | Howard Fast | Pete Lomas' mackerel drifter was an old, converted, coal-fired
steam tug of a hundred and twenty-two tons, purchased as war
surplus in 1919. | Buy | |
| Fail-Safe | Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler | Peter Buck walked up to the N Street entrance of the While House.
It was one of the hard, deceptive, crystal days of early spring.
The obelisk of the Washington Monument was white and glittering.
Tourists hurried rather than shuffled past the White House.
Official limousines went by with their windows rolled up and
their back-seat occupants thumbing through papers, their
chesterfield collars up. The air was marvelously clear and full
of sun, but it was cold. | Buy | |
| Something of Value | Robert Chester Ruark | Peter McKenzie stripped off his faded shorts and his green drill
shirt and reached for a bowl of ocher mud which had been softened
to a pliant paste with water. He smeared the mud over his face,
neck, and shoulders, until his sunburned skin was dyed a deep
coppery red. | Buy | |
| Peter | Francis Hopkinson Smith | Peter was still poring over his ledger one dark afternoon in
December, his bald head glistening like a huge ostrich egg under
the flare of the overhead gas jets, when Patrick, the night
watchman, catching sight of my face peering through the outer
grating, opened the door of the Bank. | Buy | |
| We the Living | Ayn Rand | Petrograd smelt of carbolic acid. | Buy | |
| As For Me and My House | Sinclair Ross | Philip has thrown himself across the bed and fallen asleep, his clothes on still, one of his long legs dangling on the floor. | Buy | |
| The Dark Frigate | Charles Boardman Hawes | Philip Marsham was bred to the sea as far back as the days when
he was cutting his milk teeth, and he never thought he should
leave it; but leave it he did, and once and again, as I shall
tell you. | Buy | |
| The House of a Thousand Candles | Meredith Nicholson | Pickering's letter bringing news of my grandfather's death found
me at Naples early in October. | Buy | |
| Valdez Is Coming | Elmore Leonard | Picture the ground rising on the east side of the pasture with scrub trees thick on the slope and pines higher up. | Buy | |
| Before Adam | Jack London | Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I
wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my
dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen
in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making of
my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later
convincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature
unnatural and accursed. | Buy | |
| A Gentleman of Courage | James Oliver Curwood | Pierre Gourdon had the love of God in his heart, a man's love for
a man's God, and it seemed to him that in this golden sunset of a
July afternoon the great Canadian wilderness all abut him was
whispering softly the truth of his faith and his creed. | Buy | |
| The Return of the King | J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien) | Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf's cloak. He
wondered if he was awake or still sleeping, still in the
swift-moving dream in which he had been wrapped so long since the
great ride began. The dark world was rushing by and the wind
sang loudly in his ears. He could see nothing but the wheeling
stars, and away to his right vast shadows against the sky where
the mountains of the South marched past. Sleepily he tried to
reckon the time and stages of their journey, but his memory was
drowsy and uncertain. | Buy | |
| The Royal Box | Frances Parkinson Keyes | Police Constable Fergus Gilpin, one of several P.C.'s taking
incoming calls in the underground "nerve center" of New Scotland
Yard, leaned forward and spoke pleasantly into the telephone of
his individual headset. | Buy | |
| The Regulators | Richard Bachman | Poplar Street/3:45 P.M./July 15, 1996
Summer's here.
Not just summer, either, not this year, but the apotheosis of summer, the avatar of summer, high green perfect central Ohio summer dead-smash in the middle of July, white sun glaring out of that fabled faded Levi's sky, the sound of kids hollering back and forth through the Bear Street Woods at the top of the hill, the tink! of Little League bats from the ballfield on the other side of the woods, the sound of powermowers, the sound of muscle-cars out on Highway 19, the sound of Rollerblades on the cement sidewalks and smooth macadam of Poplar Street, the sound of radios--Cleveland Indians baseball (the rare day game) competing with Tina Turner belting out "Nutbush City Limits," the one that goes "Twenty-five is the speed limit, motorcycles not allowed in it"--and surrounding everything like an auditory edging of lace, the soothing, silky hiss of lawn sprinklers.
Summer in Wentworth, Ohio, oh boy, can you dig it. | Buy | |
| Arabian Nights | Antoine Galland | PRAISE BE TO ALLAH - THE BENEFICENT KING - THE CREATOR OF THE
UNIVERSE - LORD OF THE THREE WORLDS - WHO SET UP THE FIRMAMENT
WITHOUT PILLARS IN ITS STEAD - AND WHO STRETCHED OUT THE EARTH
EVEN AS A BED - AND GRACE, AND PRAYER - BLESSING BE UPON OUR LORD
MOHAMMED - LORD OF APOSTOLIC MEN - AND UPON HIS FAMILY AND
COMPANION TRAIN - PRAYER AND BLESSINGS ENDURING AND GRACE WHICH
UNTO THE DAY OF DOOM SHALL REMAIN - AMEN! - O THOU OF THE THREE
WORLDS SOVEREIGN! | Buy | |
| Like Water for Chocolate | Laura Esquivel | PREPARATION:
Take care to chop the onion fine. To keep from crying when you
chop it (which is so annoying!), I suggest you place a little bit
on your head. The trouble with crying over an onion is that once
the chopping gets you started and the tears begin to well up, the
next thing you know you just can't stop. I don't know whether
that's ever happened to you, but I have to confess it's happened
to me, many times. Mama used to say it was because I was
especially sensitive to onions, like my great-aunt, Tita. | Buy | |
| Courtship Rite | Donald Kingsbury | Prime Predictor Tae Ran-Kaiel was long dead but he lived in the bellies of his aggressive progeny. | Buy | |
| The Comedy of Errors | William Shakespeare | Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall,
And by the doom of death end woes and all. | Buy | |
