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| Books in database: 3191 | ||||||||
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| The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett | Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. | Buy | |
| Moonheart | Charles de Lint | Sara Kendell once read somewhere that the tale of the world is like a tree. The tale, she understood, did not so much mean the niggling occurrences of daily life. Rather it encompassed the grand stories that caused some change in the world and were remembered in ensuing years as, if not histories, at least folktales and myths. | Buy | |
| The Awkward Age | Henry James Jr | Save when it happened to rain Vanderbank always walked home, but he usually took a hansom when the rain was moderate and adopted the preference of the philosopher when it was heavy. On this occasion he therefore recognized, as the servant opened the door, a congruity between the weather and the 'four-wheeler' that, in the empty street, under the glazed radiance, waited and trickled and blackly glittered. | Buy | |
| Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. | Buy | |
| The Hurricane | Charles Nordhoff and James Hall | Scattered over a thousand miles of ocean in the eastern tropical Pacific, below the Equator, lies a vast collection of coral islands extending in a general northwesterly, southeasterly direction across ten degrees of latitude. Seventy-eight atolls, surf-battered dykes of coral, enclosing lagoons, make up this barrier to the steady westward roll of the sea. | Buy | |
| Dear Brutus | Sir James Matthew Barrie | Scene: - LOB's house - the drawing room at Sinister Warren, LOB's house in a remote part of England. | Buy | |
| Naked Came The Stranger | Penelope Ashe | Screwed. It was, Gilian realized, an obscene word. But it was the word that came to mind. Screwed. It had been, after all, an obscene act. She tried not to think about it. | Buy | |
| Scuffy the Tugboat | Gertrude Crampton | Scuffy was sad. Scuffy was cross. Scuffy sniffed his blue smokestack. | Buy | |
| To Autumn | John Keats (1) | Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness! Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core. | Buy | |
| Blood Meridian | Cormac McCarthy | See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. | Buy | |
| The House of Mirth | Edith Newbold Wharton (nee Jones) | Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart. | Buy | |
| The Rector of Justin | Louis Auchincloss | September 10, 1939. I have always wanted to keep a journal, but whenever I am about to start one, I am dissuaded by the idea that it is too late. | Buy | |
| Go Ask Alice | Anonymous (Beatrice Matthews Sparks) | September 16 Yesterday I remember thinking I was the happiest person in the whole earth, in the whole galaxy, in all of God's creation. Could that only have been yesterday or was it endless light-years ago? | Buy | |
| The King's General | Daphne du Maurier | September 1653. The last of summer. The first chill winds of autumn. The sun no longer strikes my eastern window as I wake, but, turning laggard, does not top the till before eight o'clock. | Buy | |
| The King's General | Daphne du Maurier | September 1653. The last of summer. The first chill winds of autumn. | Buy | |
| Memory and Dream | Charles de Lint | September 1992 Katharine Mully had been dead for five years and two months, the morning Isabelle received the letter from her. | Buy | |
| Winter Wheat | Mildred Walker | September is like a quiet day after a whole week of wind. I mean real wind that blows dirt into your eyes and hair and between your teeth and roars in your ears after you/ve gone inside. | Buy | |
| A Sport and a Pastime | James Salter | September: It seems these luminous days will never end. | Buy | |
| A Tree Grows in Brooklyn | Betty Smith | Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. | Buy | |
| The Apostle | Sholem Asch | Seven weeks had gone by since that memorable day when on the hill of Golgotha Yeshua of Nazareth had been crucified by command of Pontius Pilate. The disciples and followers of the crucified one had left the city and gone into hiding among their own on the Mount of Olives. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Battle | Bernard Cornwell | Sharpe swore. | Buy | |
| Between the Rivers | Harry Turtledove | Sharur was walking back toward his family's shop and home on the Street of Smiths when a fever demon that had been basking on a broken mud brick soaking up heat sprang at him, its batlike wings glistening in the sun. | Buy | |
| The Coast of Folly | Coningsby William Dawson | She awoke reluctantly, drawing the sheets closer in an effort to avoid the dazzling shaft of sunlight. Having lain motionless for a while she yawned, took a sly peep into the familiar room and sank her head once more into the inviting hollow of the lacy pillow. | Buy | |
| Destiny Run | James Axler | She came awake slowly. | Buy | |
| Angel Pavement | John Boynton Priestley | She came gliding along London's broadest street, and then halted, swaying gently. | Buy | |
| The Mettle of the Pasture | James Lane Allen | She did not wish any supper and she sank forgetfully back into the stately oak chair. | Buy | |
| A Good Woman | Louis Bromfield | She found the letter when she returned to the slate-colored house from the regular monthly meeting of the Augusta Simpson Branch of the Woman's Christian temperance Union. | Buy | |
| The Ruby | Christina Skye | She gasped, realizing she'd have to stop | Buy | |
| Exile | George Warwick Deeping | She had been christened Barbara Irene. But, since the family name was Brown, she had taken to herself in the nursery the more intimate and characteristic name of Bib, and as Bib she had continued to be known until the irreverent affection of a rough and tumble girls' school had named her Billy. | Buy | |
| The Last Time They Met | Anita Shreve | She had come from the plane and was even now forgetting the ride from the airport. As she stepped from the car, she emerged to an audience of a doorman in uniform and another man in a dark coat moving through the revolving door of the hotel. The man in the dark coat hesitated, taking a moment to open an umbrella that immediately, in one fluid motion, blew itself inside out. He looked abashed and then purposefully amused--for now she was his audience--as he tossed the useless appendage into a bin and moved on. | Buy | |
| All Roads Lead to Calvary | Jerome K Jerome | She had not meant to stay for the service. | Buy | |
| The Hours | Michael Cunningham | She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another was has begun. | Buy | |
| The Spoilers | Desmond Bagley | She lay on the bed in an abandoned attitude, oblivious of the big men crowding the room and making it appear even smaller than it was. | Buy | |
| Love Is Eternal | Irving Stone | She leaned across her dressing table and gazed into the gilt-framed mirror on the wall. | Buy | |
| Kane And Abel | Jeffrey Archer | She only stopped streaming when she died. It was then that he started to scream. | Buy | |
| The Trail of the Lonesome Pine | John William Fox | She sat at the base of the big tree--her little sunbonnet pushed back, her arms locked about her knees, her bare feet gathered under her crimson gown and her deep eyes fixed on the smoke in the valley below. Her breath was still coming fast between her parted lips. There were tiny drops along the roots of her shining hair, for the climb had been steep, and now the shadow of disappointment darkened her eyes. | Buy | |
| The Lonely Lady | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | She sat at the top of the stairs and cried. | Buy | |
| Those Who Love | Irving Stone | She sat in the center of the bed she shared with her old sister Mary, slim legs tucked beneath her, enjoying the early October sunlight as her hand moved across the letter paper. | Buy | |
| Rose Madder | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | She sits in the corner, trying to draw air out of a room which seemed to have plenty just a few minutes ago and now seems to have none. | Buy | |
| The Shell Seekers | Rosamunde Pilcher | She sometimes thought that for her, Nancy Chamberlain, the most straightforward or innocent occupation was doomed to become, inevitably, fraught with tedious complication. | Buy | |
| The English Patient | Michael Ondaatje | She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. | Buy | |
| Find This Woman | Richard S Prather | She still had all her clothes on and was standing in the blue light from a baby spot when I came in, but I knew it wasn't going to last because the way she was moving I could tell it was that kind of dance. | Buy | |
| Strange Fruit | Lillian Smith | She stood at the gate, waiting; behind her the swamp, in front of her Colored Town, beyond it, all Maxwell. Tall and slim and white in the dusk, the girl stood there, hands on the picket gate. | Buy | |
| Due North | Mitchell Smith | She stood on the fox until it died. | Buy | |
| Immortal Wife | Irving Stone | She swept into the reception room of Miss English's Academy, her hazel eyes bright with anger, the rustle of her taffeta gown raised from a crisp whisper to a cry by the vigor of her movements. | Buy | |
| A Purple Place for Dying | John D MacDonald | She took the corner too fast, and it was definitely not much of a road. | Buy | |
| If Tomorrow Comes | Sidney Sheldon | She undressed slowly, dreamily, and when she was naked, she selected a bright red negligee to wear so that the blood would not show. Doris Whitney looked around the bedroom for the last time to make certain that the pleasant room, grown dear over the past thirty years, was neat and tidy. She opened the drawer of the bedside table and carefully removed the gun. | Buy | |
| The Wings of the Dove | Henry James Jr | She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. | Buy | |
| The Fortunes of Captain Blood | Rafael Sabatini | She was a beautiful ship, in the frigate class, fashioned, not merely in her lines but in her details, with an extreme of that loving care that Spanish builders not infrequently bestowed. | Buy | |
| Pale Horse, Pale Rider | Katherine Anne Porter | She was a spirited-looking young woman, with dark curly hair cropped and parted on the side, a short oval face with straight eyebrows, and a large curved mouth. A round white collar rose from the neck of her tightly buttoned black basque, and round white cuffs set off lazy hands with dimples in them, lying at ease in the folds of her flounced skirt which gathered around to a bustle. | Buy | |
| Final Notice | Joe Gores | She was a willowy girl wearing a skirt that was too short. | Buy | |
| The Valley of Horses | Jean M Auel | She was dead. What did it matter if icy needles of freezing rain flayed her skin raw. The young woman squinted into the wind, pulling her wolverine hood closer. Violent gusts whipped her bearskin wrap against her legs. | Buy | |
| The Greek Treasure | Irving Stone | She was helping the other girls of the village decorate the icon
of St. Meletios, putting daisies, end-of-August chrysanthemums
and skyllakia around the shrine in the middle of the small
church for the coming holiday. Her younger sister Marigo rushed
in breathless, and cried: "Sophia! The American has arrived, Your suitor, Mr. Schliemann!" | Buy | |
| The Tomorrow File | Lawrence Sanders | She was naked. | Buy | |
| The Home-Maker | Dorothy Canfield Fisher | She was scrubbing furiously at a line of grease spots which led from the stove towards the door to the dining-room. That was where Henry had held the platter tilted as he carried the steak in yesterday. And yet if she had warned him once about that, she had a thousand times! | Buy | |
| Bride Of The Mist | Christina Skye | She was shaking. | Buy | |
| Black Alibi | Cornell Woolrich | She was sitting there at her glass, at the fashionable going-out hour, trying to decide between a cluster of crystal grapes and a live gardenia as a shoulder decoration, when someone knocked at the suite door, outside across the adjoining reception room. | Buy | |
| Portnoy's Complaint | Philip Roth | She was so deeply imbedded in my conciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. | Buy | |
| Kill the Clown | Richard S Prather | She was the only client who ever hired Sheldon Scott, Investigations--that's me--before a word was spoken. | Buy | |
| Delilah | Marcus Goodrich | She was very slim and light. | Buy | |
| Palace Walk | Naguib Mahfouz | She woke at midnight. She always woke up then without having to rely on an alarm clock. A wish that had taken root in her awoke her with great accuracy. For a few moments she was not sure she was awake. Images from her dreams and perceptions mixed together in her mind. She was troubled by anxiety before opening her eyes, afraid sleep had deceived here. Shaking her head gently, she gazed at the total darkness of the room. There was no clue by which to judge the time. | Buy | |
| Memories of Midnight | Sidney Sheldon | She woke up screaming every night and it was always the same dream. She was in the middle of a lake in a fierce storm and a man and a woman were forcing her head under the icy waters, drowning her. She awakened each time panicky, gasping for breath, soaked with perspiration. | Buy | |
| Scenes of Clerical Life | George Eliot | Shepperton Church was a very different looking building five-and-twenty years ago. To be sure, its substantial stone tower looks at you through its intelligent eye, the clock, with the friendly expression of former days; but in everything else what changes! | Buy | |
| The Sign of the Four | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction. | Buy | |
| Dead Man | Joe Gores | Sherman Rare Books was a narrow elegant storefront across Post Street from the side entrance to the St. Francis Hotel. | Buy | |
| The Dim Lantern | Temple Bailey | Sherwood Park is twelve miles from Washington. Starting as a somewhat pretentious suburb on the main line of the railroad, it was blessed with easy accessibility until encroaching trolleys swept the tide of settlement away from it, and left it high and dry--its train service, unable to compete with modern motor vehicles, increasingly inefficient. | Buy | |
| The Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston | Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. | Buy | |
| Star Wars: Attack of the Clones | R.A. Salvatore (Robert Anthony Salvatore) | Shmi Skywalker Lars stood on the edge of the sand berm marking the perimeter of the moisture farm, one leg up higher, to the very top of the ridge, knee bent. | Buy | |
| Mr. Sammler's Planet | Saul Bellow | Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers. | Buy | |
| Burr | Gore Vidal | Shortly before midnight, July 1, 1833, Colonel Aaron Burr, aged seventy-seven, married Eliza Jumel, born Bowen fifty-eight years ago (more likely sixty-five but remember: she is prone to litigation!). | Buy | |
| The Cunning Man | Robertson Davies | Should I have taken the false teeth? | Buy | |
| The Song of Hiawatha | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | Should you ask me, whence these stories? Whence these legends and traditions, With the odors of the forest With the dew and damp of meadows, With the curling smoke of wigwams, With the rushing of great rivers, With their frequent repetitions, And their wild reverberations As of thunder in the mountains? | Buy | |
| Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood | Rebecca Wells | Sidda is a girl again in the hot heart of Louisiana, the bayou world of Catholic saints and voodoo queens. | Buy | |
| The Man in the Iron Mask | Alexandre Dumas pere | Since Aramis's singular transformation into a confessor of the order, Baisemeaux was no longer the same man. Up to that period, the place which Aramis had held in the worthy governor's estimation was that of a prelate whom he respected and a friend to whom he owed a debt of gratitude; but now he felt himself an inferior, and that Aramis was his master. | Buy | |
| Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall | Charles Major | Since I play no mean part in the events of this chronicle, a few words concerning my own history previous to the opening of the story I am about to tell you will surely not be amiss, and they may help you to a better understanding of my narrative. | Buy | |
| The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon | William Makepeace Thackeray | Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it. | Buy | |
| Sparkenbroke | Charles Morgan | Since the death of Lord Sparkenbroke, tourists from Chelmouth who would formerly have been content to wander through the corridors of his great house, gazing at its treasures and listening to the mechanical chatter of the guides, have added the church and the churchyard to their pilgrimage, for in the churchyard stands the Sparkenbroke Mound, an open, grassy sepulchre of a type familiar in Wales but rare so far east as Dorset, and through its iron-barred gate Lord Sparkenbroke's coffin may be seen among those of his ancestors. | Buy | |
| The Iliad | Homer | Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls Of heroes into Hades' dark And left their bodies to rot as feasts For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done. | Buy | |
| The Merry Wives of Windsor | William Shakespeare | Sir Hugh, persuade me not--I will make a Starchamber matter of it. If he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, Esquire. | Buy | |
| The Sea-Hawk | Rafael Sabatini | Sir Oliver Tressilian sat at his ease in the lofty dining-room of the handsome house of Penarrow, which he owned to the enterprise of his father of lamented and lamentable memory and to the skill and invention of an Italian engineer named Bagnolo who had come to England half a century ago as one of the assistants of the famous Torrigiani. | Buy | |
| Persuasion | Jane Austen | Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. | Buy | |
| Light in August | William Faulkner | Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, "I have come from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece." | Buy | |
| Typee | Herman Melville | Six months at sea! | Buy | |
| Flaubert's Parrot | Dan Kavanagh | Six North Africans were playing boules beneath Flaubert's statue. Clean cracks sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand dispatched a silver globe. It landed, hopped heavily, and curved in a slow scatter of hard dust. The thrower remained a stylish, temporary statue: knees not quite unbent, and the right hand ecstatically spread. | Buy | |
| Silverwing | Ken Oppel | Skimming over the banks of the stream, Shade heard the beetle warming up its wings. | Buy | |
| Edge of Panic | Henry Kane | Sky tinted the windows, morning pale. | Buy | |
| Remember | Barbara Taylor Bradford | Sleep eluded her. She lay in the darkness, trying to empty her head of every thought, troubling or otherwise, but this seemed to be an impossibility. Bone tired though she had been earlier, when she had stripped off her clothes and fallen into bed, she was now wide-awake. All of her senses were alerted; she strained to catch any untoward sounds from outside. At this moment, though, very little noise penetrated the walls of the plush hotel suite. It was curious, ominous, the silence outside. | Buy | |
| Ann Vickers | Sinclair Lewis | Slow yellow river flowing, willows that gesture in tepid August airs, and four children playing at greatness, as, doubtless, great men themselves must play. | Buy | |
| HMS Ulysses | Alistair MacLean | Slowly, deliberately, Starr crushed out the butt of his cigarette. | Buy | |
| The Looking Glass War | John Le Carre | Snow covered the airfield. | Buy | |
| Gabriel Conroy | Bret Harte | Snow. Everywhere. As far as the eye could reach--fifty miles, looking southward from the highest peak. | Buy | |
| The Guns of August | Barbara W. Tuchman | So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. | Buy | |
| The Lone Star Ranger | Zane Grey | So it was in him, then--an inherited fighting instinct, a driving intensity to kill. | Buy | |
| King Henry the Fourth, Part I | William Shakespeare | So shaken as we are, so wan with care, Find we a time for frighted peace to pant And breathe short-winded accents of new broils To be commenced in stronds afar remote. | Buy | |
| Biggles Defends the Desert | Captain W E Johns | So slowly as to be almost imperceptible the stars began to fade. | Buy | |
| Message from Malaga | Helen MacInnes | So this, thought Ferrier, was El Fenicio, an open courtyard behind a wineshop, a rectangle of hard-packed earth on which rows of small wooden tables and chairs had been set out to face a bare platform of a stage. | Buy | |
| The Third Deadly Sin | Lawrence Sanders | Some days lasted forever; some were never born. She awoke in a fury of expectation, gone as soon as felt; the world closed about. Once again life became a succession of swan pecks. | Buy | |
| The Virginian--A Horseman of the Plains | Owen Wister | Some notable sight was drawing the passengers, both men and women, to the window; and therefore I rose and crossed the car to see what it was. I saw near the track an enclosure, and round it some laughing men, and inside it some whirling dust, and amid the dust some horses, plunging, huddling, and dodging. They were cow ponies in a corral, and one of them would not be caught, no matter who threw the rope. We had plenty of time to watch this sport, for our train had stopped that the engine might take water at the tank before it pulled us up beside the station platform of Medicine Bow. We were also six hours late, and starving for entertainment. The pony in the corral was wise, and rapid of limb. | Buy | |
| Seven Pillars of Wisdom | Thomas Edward Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") | Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare. | Buy | |
| Bad Girl | Vina Delmar | Some one had brought a ukulele. Some one who hit the strings with a gay discordancy, a gleeful insolence that seemed to say, "Sure, it's out of tune. Who cares?" | Buy | |
| 2000 Kisses | Christina Skye | Some things were almost as good as sex. | Buy | |
| Byrne | Anthony Burgess | Somebody had to do it. Blasted Byrne Pulled out a bunch of dollars from his pocket, Escudos, francs and dirhams. `Let them learn If they've a speck of talent not to mock it But plant it and expect a slow return. I whizzed mine skywards like a bloody rocket. Tell what they call a cautionary tale. Here's on the nail. Expect more in the mail. | Buy | |
| Doomsday | George Warwick Deeping | Someone had asked Mary Viner as a child why she so disliked going to school, and had received the pregnant reply: "'Cos one does the same thing every day"; and at the age of three-and-twenty Mary was still resenting repetition. | Buy | |
| The Trial | Franz Kafka | Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. | Buy | |
| The Eagle Has Landed | Jack Higgins | Someone was digging a grave in one corner of the cemetery as I went in through the lychgate. I remember that quite clearly because it seemed to set the scene for nearly everything that followed. | Buy | |
| The Miserable Mill | Lemony Snicket | Sometime in your life--in fact, very soon--you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book's first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains. | Buy | |
| Nectar in a Sieve | Kamala Markandaya (pseudonym of Kamala Taylor) | Sometimes at night I think that my husband is with me again, coming gently through the mists, and we are tranquil together. | Buy | |
| Preserve and Protect | Allen Stuart Drury | Sometimes he read. | Buy | |
| Much Bigger Than Martin | Steven Kellog | Sometimes it's fun being Martin's little brother. But I hate it when he says, "Let's form a line. The biggest is first. The smallest is last." | Buy | |
| Where Is Janice Gantry? | John D MacDonald | Sometimes the hot night wind brings bad dreams. | Buy | |
| Andersonville | MacKinlay Kantor | Sometimes there was a compulsion which drew Ira Claffey from his plantation and sent him to walk the forest. | Buy | |
| The Mandelbaum Gate | Muriel Spark | Sometimes, instead of a letter to thank his hostess, Freddy Hamilton would compose a set of formal verses--roudeaux redoubles, villanelles, rondels, or Sicilian octaves--to express his thanks neatly. It was part of his modest nature to do this. He always felt he had perhaps been boring during his stay, and it was one's duty in life to be agreeable. | Buy | |
| Charming Billy | Alice McDermott | Somewhere in The Bronx, only twenty minutes or so from the cemetery, Maeve found a small bar-and-grill in a wooded alcove set well off the street that was willing to serve the funeral party of forty-seven medium-rare roast beef and boiled potatoes and green beans amandine, with fruit salad to begin and vanilla ice cream to go with the coffee. | Buy | |
| This House of Sky | Ivan Doig | Soon before daybreak on my sixth birthday, my mother's breathing wheezed more raggedly than ever, then quieted. And then stopped. | Buy | |
| Rendezvous with Rama | Arthur C Clarke | Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometers--a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe. | Buy | |
| The Byzantine Omelet | Hector Hugh (H.H.) Munro (Saki) | Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage. | Buy | |
| Green Dolphin Street | Elizabeth Goudge | Sophie le Patourel was reading aloud to her two daughters from the Book of Ruth, as they lay upon their backboards digesting their dinners and improving their deportment. This spending of the after-dinner hour upon their backboards instead of in the parlor was as a matter of fact a punishment for insubordination during the morning; but their Papa being home, Sophie was softening the punishment by reading aloud. | Buy | |
| Sorrell and Son | George Warwick Deeping | Sorrell was trying to fasten the straps of the little brown portmanteau, but since the portmanteau was old and also very full, he had to deal with it tenderly. | Buy | |
| Action At Aquila | Hervey Allen | Southward, two mighty ranges of the Appalachians shouldered their way into the blue distance like tremendous caravans marching across eternity. | Buy | |
| Ramage and the Saracens | Dudley Pope | Southwick counted the pieces of salt beef as the cook's mate lifted them out of the cask, banging each piece before he removed it to shake off the encrusted salt. | Buy | |
| Ramage's Trial | Dudley Pope | Southwick walked slowly across the quarterdeck to where Ramage stood trying to find some shade from a small awning which, having done so much service in the Tropics, now comprised more patches than original cloth and in places was so threadbare from the sun and wind that it provided only a little more shade than a piece of muslin. | Buy | |
| Tigers and Traitors | Jules Verne | Speaking of the great American Andes, the mineralogist Hauy uses a grand expression when he calls them "The incommensurable parts of Creation." | Buy | |
| Kings Row | Henry Bellamann | Spring came late in the year 1890, so it came more violently, and the fullness of its burgeoning heightened the seasonal disturbance that made unquiet in the blood. | Buy | |
| And Tell of Time | Laura Lettie Krey (used pseudonym Mary Everett) | Spring came late, the year the war closed. | Buy | |
| The Major | Ralph Connor | Spring had come. Despite the many wet and gusty days which April had thrust in rude challenge upon reluctant May, in the glory of the triumphant sun which flooded the concave blue of heaven and the myriad shaded green of earth, the whole world knew to-day, the whole world proclaimed that spring had come. The yearly miracle had been performed. | Buy | |
| Diane of the Green Van | Leona Dalrymple | Spring was stealing lightly over the Connecticut hills, a shy, tender thing of delicate green winging its way with witch-rod over the wooded ridges and the sylvan paths of Diane Westfall's farm. | Buy | |
| Treasure Island | Robert Louis Stevenson | Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17--, and go back to the time when my father kept the "Admiral Benbow" inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof. | Buy | |
| Treasure Island | Robert Louis Stevenson | Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17... and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof | Buy | |
| The Eve of St. Agnes | John Keats (1) | St. Agnes's Eve--Ah, bitter chill is was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold. | Buy | |
| The Wapshot Chronicle | John Cheever | St. Botolphs was an old place, an old river town. | Buy | |
| Rabbit at Rest | John Updike | Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. | Buy | |
| The Man | Irving Wallace | Standing there in the cold office, at this ungodly hour, no longer night, not yet day, she felt apprehensive and nervous. She wondered why, but instantly her memory had traced the source of worry, and she knew its answer was right. | Buy | |
| Windmills of the Gods | Sidney Sheldon | Stanton Rogers was destined to be President of the United States. He was a charismatic politician, highly visible to an approving public, and backed by powerful friends. Unfortunately for Rogers, his libido got in the way of his career. | Buy | |
| Ulysses | James Joyce | Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed | Buy | |
| Jazz | Toni Morrison | Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, "I love you." | Buy | |
| The Ambassadors | Henry James Jr | Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconnected. | Buy | |
| The Seven Poor Travellers | Charles Dickens | Strictly speaking, there were only six Poor Travellers;but, being a Traveller myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as I hope to be, I brought the number up to seven. | Buy | |
| Population: 485 | Michael Perry | Summer here comes on like a zaftig hippie chick, jazzed on chlorophyll and flinging fistfuls of butterflies to the sun. | Buy | |
| Cradle and All | James B. Patterson | Sundown had bloodied the horizon over the uneven rooftops of South Boston. Birds were perched on every roof and seemed to be watching the girl walking slowly below. | Buy | |
| The Scorpio Illusion | Robert Ludlum | Sundown. The distressed sloop, its mainmast shattered by lightning, its sails ripped by the winds of the open sea, drifted into the small, quiet beach of a private island in the Lesser Antilles. During the past three days, before the dead calm descended, this section of the Caribbean had suffered not only a hurricane with the force of the infamous Hugo, but sixteen hours later a tropical storm whose bolts of lightning and earthshaking thunder had set fire to a thousand palms and caused a hundred thousand residents of the island chain to look to their gods for deliverance. | Buy | |
| Gentle Julia | Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) | Superciliousness is not safe after all, because a person who forms the habit of wearing it may some day find his lower lip grown permanently projected beyond the upper, so that he can't get it back, and must go through life looking like the King of Spain. | Buy | |
| Downriver | Loren D Estleman | Superior rolled under a Wedgwood sky, stacking sunlight in long platinum rows and tangling in the broken rocks on the beach. | Buy | |
| Memoirs of a Geisha | Arthur S. Golden | Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, "That afternoon when I met so-and-so . . . was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon." I expect you might put down your teacup and say, "Well, now, which was it? Was it the best or the worst? Because it can't possibly have been both!" | Buy | |
| Einstein's Dreams | Alan Lightman | Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly. | Buy | |
| An Error of Judgement | Pamela Hansford Johnson | Suspecting myself of a cardiac disease, I went one morning to Harley Street to see Setter who had been recommended to me by my doctor. | Buy | |
| A Hoosier Chronicle | Meredith Nicholson | Sylvia was reading in her grandfather's library when the bell tinkled. | Buy |