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| The Big Kiss-Off of 1944, | Andrew Bergman | t was a Thursday morning and I had lots to do, like sip black coffee out of a blackboard container and stare out the window at the file clerks shuffling paper in the office across the street. | Buy | |
| Bellefleur | Joyce Carol Oates | t was many years ago in that dark, chaotic, unfathomable pool of time before Germaine's birth (nearly twelve months before her birth), on a night in late September stirred by innumerable frenzied winds, like spirits contending with one another - mow plaintively, now angrily, now with a subtle cellolike delicacy capable of making the flesh rise on one's arms and neck - a night so sulfurous, so restless, so swollen with inarticulate longing that Leah and Gideon Bellefleur in their enormous bed quarreled once again, brought to tears because their love was too ravenous to be contained by their mere mortal bodies; and their groping, careless, anguished words were like strips or raw silk rubbed violently together (for each was convince the other did not, could not, be equal to his love - Leah doubted that any man was capable of a love so profound it could be silent, like a forest pond; Gideon doubted that any woman was capable of comprehending the nature of a man's passion, which might tear through him, rendering him broken and exhausted, as vulnerable as a smalll child): it was on this tumultuous rain-lashed night that Mahalaleel came to Bellefleur Manor on the western shore of the great Lake Noir, where he was to stay for nearly five years. | Buy | |
| The Towers of Trebizond | Rose Macaulay | Take my camel, dear. | Buy | |
| Lest Darkness Fall | L Sprague de Camp | Tancredi took his hands off the wheel again and waved them. | Buy | |
| The Dark Heart of Time | Philip José Farmer | Tarzan did not hear the hunters coming toward him through the rain forest of the African afternoon. | Buy | |
| Tarzan at the Earth's Core | Edgar Rice Burroughs | Tarzan of the Apes paused to listen and to sniff the air. | Buy | |
| Star Wars: Episode 1, The Phantom Menace | Terry Brooks | Tatooine. The suns burned down out of a cloudless blue sky, washing the vast desert wastes of the planet in brilliant white light. The resultant glare rose off the flat, sandy surface in a wet shimmer of blistering heat to fill the gaps between the massive cliff faces and solitary outcroppings of the mountains that were the planet's sole distinguishing feature. Sharply etched, the monoliths stood like sentinels keeping watch in a watery haze. | Buy | |
| Hot Pursuit | Christina Skye | Taylor looked south to the distant sprawl of San Francisco. | Buy | |
| The Odyssey | Homer | Tell me, Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered far and wide after he had sacked Troy's sacred city, and saw the towns of many men and knew their mind. | Buy | |
| Use of Weapons | Ian M Banks | Tell me, what is happiness? | Buy | |
| The Blind Assassin | Margaret Atwood | Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left but charred smithereens. | Buy | |
| All Around the Town | Mary Higgins Clark | Ten minutes before it happened, four-year-old Laurie Kenyon was sitting crosslegged on the floor of the den rearranging the furniture in her dollhouse. She was tired of playing alone and wanted to go in the pool. | Buy | |
| A Small Town in Germany | John Le Carre | Ten minutes to midnight: a pious Friday evening in May and a fine river mist lying in the market square. | Buy | |
| A House for Mr. Biswas | V.S. Naipaul | Ten weeks before he died, Mr. Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St. James, Port of Spain, was sacked. | Buy | |
| The Domesday Report | Rock Bryner | Terry Bancroft arrived at her office above Fifth Avenue early on the Monday following New Year's Day, and even before removing her rain-soaked jacket, she signaled the start of 1998 by logging on to her computer. | Buy | |
| X. Jones Of Scotland Yard | Harry Stephen Keeler | Thanks a million for the check-up of the fingerprint in Nebraska. | Buy | |
| So Well Remembered | James Hilton | That day so well remembered--a day, indeed, impossible to forget--was the first of September, 1921; on the morning of which George Boswell--then only Councillor Boswell, then sandy-brown-haired with not a trace of gray--woke before dawn, looked at his watch, and promptly slept again till Annie brought in the morning paper, a cup of tea, and some letters that had just arrived. | Buy | |
| The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe | That homely proverb, used on so many occasions in England, viz. "That what is bred in the bone will not go out of the flesh," was never more verified than in the story of my Life | Buy | |
| The Death of the Heart | Elizabeth Bowen | That morning's ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam. | Buy | |
| Hornet's Nest | Patricia Cornwell | That morning, summer sulked and gathered darkly over Charlotte, and heat shimmered on pavement. Traffic teemed, people pushing forward to promise as they drove through new construction, and the past was bulldozed away. | Buy | |
| Zuleika Dobson | Sir Max Beerbohm | That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in tweed or flannels, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly up the line. | Buy | |
| The Chinese Bandit | Stephen Becker | That summer they hanged a fat man at the Western Gate as a warning and example to all. | Buy | |
| The Heat of the Day | Elizabeth Bowen | That Sunday, from six o'clock in the evening, it was a Viennese orchestra that played. The season was late for an outdoor concert; already leaves were drifting on to the grass stage--here and there one turned over, crepitating as though in the act of dying, and during the music some more fell. | Buy | |
| Dead Skip | Joe Gores | The 1969 Plymouth turned into Seventh Avenue from Fulton, away from Golden Gate Park | Buy | |
| Catriona | Robert Louis Stevenson | The 25th day of August, 1751, about two in the afternoon, I, David Balfour, came forth of the British Linen Company, a porter attending me with a bag of money, and some of the chief of these merchants bowing me from their doors. Two days before, and even as yestermorning, I was like a beggar-man by the wayside, clad in rags, brought down to my last shillings, my companion a condemned traitor, a price set on my own head for a crime with the news of which the country rang. To-day I was served heir to my position in life, a landed laird, a bank porter by me carrying my gold, recommendations in my pocket, and (in the words of the saying) ball directly at my foot. | Buy | |
| The Stars Shine Down | Sidney Sheldon | The 747 was lost in a sea of cumulus clouds that tossed the plane around like a giant silver feather. The pilot's worried voice came over the speaker. | Buy | |
| The Go-Between | Leslie Poles Hartley | The 8th of July was a Sunday, and on the following Monday I left West Hatch, the village where we lived near Salisbury, for Brandham Hall. My mother arranged that my Aunt Charlotte, a Londoner, should take me across London. Between bouts of stomach-turning trepidation I looked forward wildly to the visit. | Buy | |
| Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend | Robert James Waller | The Trivandrum Mail was on time. It came out of the jungle and pounded into Villupuram Junction at 3:18 on a sweltry afternoon in south India. When the whistle first sounded far and deep in the countryside, people began pressing toward the edge of the station platform. | Buy | |
| Snow Falling on Cedars | David Guterson | The accused man, Kabuo Miyamoto, sat proudly upright with a rigid grace, his palms placed softly on the defendents table - the posture of a man who has detached himself insofar as this is possible at his own trial. | Buy | |
| Cancel All Our Vows | John D MacDonald | The afternoon edition of the Minidoka Herald had a red-bordered box on page one titled WHEW! | Buy | |
| Murder In a Cold Climate | Scott Young | The air terminal at Inuvik has comfortable chairs and some nice Arctic art on the walls and usually a lot more space than passengers, so it is not exactly O'Hare, but it's not Tuktoyaktuk either. | Buy | |
| Jewels | Danielle Steel | The air was so still in the brilliant summer sun that you could hear the birds, and every sound for miles, as Sarah sat peacefully looking out her window. The grounds were brilliantly designed, perfectly manicured, the gardens laid out by Le Notre, as Versailles' had been, the trees towering canopies of green framing the park of the Chateau de la Meuze. The chateau itself was four hundred years old, and Sarah, Duchess of Whitfield, had lived there for fifty-two years now. | Buy | |
| Exodus | Leon Uris | The airplane plip-plopped down the runway to a halt before the big sign: WELCOME TO CYPRUS. | Buy | |
| The Spy Who Came in from the Cold | John Le Carré | The American handed handed Leamas another cup of coffee and said, "Why don't you go back and sleep? We can ring you if he shows up." | Buy | |
| The Spy Who Came in from the Cold | John Le Carre | The American handed Leamas another cup of coffee and said, "Why don't you go back and sleep? We can ring you if he shows up." | Buy | |
| The Reign of Law | James Lane Allen | The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold, freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral Britain. | Buy | |
| The Icarus Agenda | Robert Ludlum | The angry waters of the Oman Gulf were a prelude to the storm racing down through the Strait of Hormuz into the Arabian Sea. It was sundown, marked by the strident prayers nasally intoned by bearded muezzins in the minarets of the port city's mosques. The sky was darkening under the black thunderheads that swirled ominously across the lesser darkness of evening like roving behemoths. Blankets of heat lightning sporadically fired the eastern horizon over the Makran Mountains of Turbat, two hundred miles across the sea in Pakistan. | Buy | |
| Hitty Her First Hundred Years | Rachel Field | The antique shop is very still now. Theobold and I have it all to ourselves, for he cuckoo clock was sold the day before yesterday and Theobold has been so industrious of later there are no more mice to venture out from behind the woodwork. Theobold is the shop cat--the only thing in it that is not for sale, which has made him rather overbearing at times. | Buy | |
| The Firm of Girdlestone | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The approach to the offices of Girdlestone and Co. was not a very dignified one, nor would the uninitiated who traversed it form any conception of the commercial prosperity of the firm in question. | Buy | |
| The Wandering Jew | Eugene Sue (Marie Joseph Eugene Sue) | The Arctic Ocean encircles with a belt of eternal ice the desert confines of Siberia and North America--the uttermost limits of the Old and New worlds, separated by the narrow, channel, known as Behring's Straits. | Buy | |
| Dodsworth | Sinclair Lewis | The aristocracy of Zenith were dancing at the Keenpoose Canoe Club. | Buy | |
| Ramage's Challenge | Dudley Pope | The Atlantic entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar always reminded Ramage of a gigantic funnel lying on its side, its spout pointing towards the Mediterranean and forever replenishing the warm inland sea from the cold ocean. | Buy | |
| Mario the Magician | Thomas Mann | The atmosphere of Torre di Venere remains unpleasant in the memory. From the first moment the air of the place made us uneasy, we felt irritable, on edge; then at the end came the shocking business of Cipolla, that dreadful being who seemed to incorporate, in so fateful and so humanly impressive a way, all the peculiar evilness of the situation as a whole. | Buy | |
| The Matarese Circle | Robert Ludlum | The band of carolers huddled at the corner, stamping their feet and swinging their arms, their young voice penetrating the cold night air between the harsh sounds of automobile horns and police whistles and the metallic strains of Christmas music blaring out from storefront speakers. The snowfall was dense, snarling traffic, causing the hordes of last-minute shoppers to shield their eyes. | Buy | |
| Operation Breakthrough | Dan J Marlowe | The bank was on the ground floor of a four-story downtown Nassau office building. | Buy | |
| Jitterbug Perfume | Tom Robbins | The beet is the most intense of vegetables. | Buy | |
| Have His Carcase | Dorothy L. Sayers | The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth. | Buy | |
| Kate Vaiden | Reynolds Price | The best thing about my life up to her is, nobody believes it. | Buy | |
| Nausea | Jean-Paul Sartre | The best thing would be to write down events from day to day. Keep a diary to see clearly--let none of the nuances or small happenings escape even though they might seem to mean nothing. And above all, classify them. I must tell how I see this table, this street, the people, my packet of tobacco, since those are the things which have changed. I must determine the exact extent and nature of this change. | Buy | |
| Star | Danielle Steel | The birds were already calling to each other in the early morning stillness of the Alexander Valley as the sun rose slowly over the hills, stretching golden fingers into a sky that within moments almost purple. The leaves on the trees rustled gently in the barest breeze as Crystal stood silent in the damp grass, watching the brilliant sky explode in shimmering colors. For brief moments, the birds stopped singing, almost as though they, too, were in awe of the valleys beauty. | Buy | |
| Maid in Waiting | John Galsworthy | The Bishop of Portminister was sinking fast; they had sent for his four nephews, his two nieces and their one husband. | Buy | |
| Black Ajax | George MacDonald Fraser | The black man is dying, but neither he nor any of the other men in the barn suspects it. | Buy | |
| Scarlet Sister Mary | Julia Mood Peterkin | The black people who live in the Quarters at Blue Brook Plantation believe they are far the best black people living on the whole "Neck," as they call that long, narrow, rich strip of land lying between the sea on one side and the river with its swamps and deserted rice-fields on the other. | Buy | |
| Joseph and His Brethren | Harold Webber Freeman | The black soil of the hillside field glistened coldly in the meagre rays of the westering sun which were all that it caught of warmth and light during the day, surrounded as it was on three sides by dense pine copses. | Buy | |
| Papillon | Henri Charriere | The blow was such a stunner that it was thirteen years before I could get back on my feet again. | Buy | |
| A Fine Italian Hand | Eric Wright | The blue Volkswagen Jetta was parked against the wall behind the motel. | Buy | |
| All the Young Men | Marvin H Albert | The bodies of the two Marine scouts who had been trudging through the frozen Korean hills ahead of the advancing Second Platoon lay in the deep snow behind the brush-filled gully that lined the north rim of the valley. | Buy | |
| Humboldt's Gift | Saul Bellow | The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in Thirties was an immediate hit. | Buy | |
| Possession: A Romance | A S Byatt | The book was thick and black and covered with dust. | Buy | |
| Possession | Antonia Susan Byatt | The book was thick and black and covered with dust. | Buy | |
| The Black Echo | Michael Connelly | The boy couldn't see in the dark, but he didn't need to. | Buy | |
| Casabianca | Felicia Hemans | The boy stood on the burning deck/ Whence all but he had fled | Buy | |
| Casabianca | Mrs. Felicia D. Hemans | The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle's wreck, Shone round him o'er the dead. . . . . The flames roll'd on--he would not go Without his Father's word; That father, faint in death below, His voice no longer heard. | Buy | |
| Lord of the Flies | William Golding | The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon. | Buy | |
| T. Tembarom | Frances Hodgson Burnett | The boys at the Brooklyn public school which he attended did not know what the "T." stood for. He would never tell them. All he said in reply to questions was: "It don't stand for nothin'. You've gotter have a' 'nitial, ain't you?" His name was, in fact, an almost inevitable school-boy modification of one felt to be absurd and pretentious. His Christian name was Temple, which became "Temp." His surname was Barom, so he was at once "Temp Barom." In the natural tendency to avoid waste of time it was pronounced as one word, and the letter p being superfluous and cumbersome, it easily settled itself into "Tembarom," and there remained. | Buy | |
| The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | Muriel Spark | The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away. | Buy | |
| The Rainbow | David Herbert Lawrence | The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire. | Buy | |
| Mutiny on the Bounty | Charles Nordhoff and James Hall | The British are frequently criticized by other nations for their dislike of change, and indeed we love England for those aspects of nature and life which change the least. Here in the West Country, where I was born, men are slow of speech, tenacious of opinion, and averse--beyond their countrymen elsewhere--to innovation of any sort. | Buy | |
| Tom Brown's School Days | Thomas Hughes | The Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackeray and the pencil of Doyle, within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now matriculating at the Universities. | Buy | |
| Tom Brown's Schooldays | Thomas Hughes | The Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackeray and the pencil of Doyle, within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now matriculating at the Universities. | Buy | |
| Artifact | Gregory Benford | The buried the great King as twilight streaked the west crimson. | Buy | |
| The Talisman [1825], part of Tales of the Crusaders | Walter Dill Scott | The burning sun of the Syria had not yet attained its highest point in the horizon, when a knight of the Red Cross, who had left his distant northern home and joined the host of the Crusaders in Palestine, was pacing slowly along the sandy deserts which lie in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, or, as it is called the Lake Asphaltites, where the waves of the Jordan pour themselves into an inland sea, from which there is no discharge of waters. | Buy | |
| The Bourne Ultimatum | Robert Ludlum | The cacophony spun out of control as the crowds swelled through the amusement park in the countryside on the outskirts of Baltimore. The summer night was hot, and nearly everywhere faces and necks were drenched with sweat, except for those screaming as they plunged over the crests of a roller coaster, or shrieking as they plummeted down the narrow, twisting gullies of racing water in torpedo sleds. The garishly colored, manically blinking lights along the midway were joined by the grating sounds of emphatic music metallically erupting out of an excess of loudspeakers--calliopes presto, marches prestissimo. | Buy | |
| Night Extra | William P McGivern | The Call-Bulletin's first deadline was at nine o'clock in the morning and by eight fifty-five everyone in the long brightly lighted city room was working under the insistent pressure of time. | Buy | |
| All the Pretty Horses | Cormac McCarthy | The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. | Buy | |
| Black Rose | Christina Skye | The candles on the carved mahogany side table sputtered, their flickering dance reflected in a nearby set of crystal decanter and glasses. | Buy | |
| The Jade of Destiny | Jeffrey Farnol | The Captain gave his battered hat the true swashbuckling cock, cast his ragged cloak about him with superb, braggadocio flourish, clashed his rusty spurs and bowed. | Buy | |
| The Man With The Golden Arm | Nelson Algren | The captain never drank. Yet, toward nightfall in that smoke-colored season between Indian summer and December's first true snow, he would sometimes feel half drunken. He would hang his coat neatly over the back of his chair in the leaden station-house twilight, say he was beat from lack of sleep and lay his head across his arms upon the query-room desk. | Buy | |
| Governor Ramage R N | Dudley Pope | The captain's cabin on board the Lion was small, even for an old sixty-four gun ship now rated too weak to stand in the line of battle. | Buy | |
| Swann's Way | Marcel Proust | The Captive: At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I had seen above the big window-curtains what tone the first streaks of light assumed, I could already tell what the weather was like. The Fugitive: "Mademoiselle Albertine is gone!" | Buy | |
| The Highbinders | Oliver Bleeck | The carnation made me feel silly. | Buy | |
| In Secret | Robert William Chambers | The case in question concerned a letter in a yellow envelope, which was dumped along with other incoming mail upon one of the many long tables where hundreds of women and scores of men sat opening and reading thousands of letters for the Bureau of P.C.--whatever that may mean. | Buy | |
| The Devil's Alternative | Frederick Forsyth | The castaway would have been dead before sundown but for the sharp eyes of an Italian seaman called Mario. | Buy | |
| Rienzi | Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton | The celebrated name which forms the title to this work will sufficiently apprise the reader that it is in the earlier half of the fourteenth century that my story opens. | Buy | |
| Darkness at Noon | Arthur Koestler | The cell door slammed behind Rubishov. | Buy | |
| Six Chapters of a Man's Life | Victoria Cross | The charts were all spread out upon the table; the midnight gas burned steadily above my head; my pencil traced a dotted line down the paper under my hand. | Buy | |
| Caribbean | James A. Michener | The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east. | Buy | |
| The Betrothed | Walter Dill Scott | The Chronicles, from which this narrative is extracted, assure us, that during the long period when the Welsh princes maintained their independence, the year 1187 was peculiarly marked as favorable to peace betwixt them and their warlike neighbors, the Lord Marchers, who inhabited those formidable castles on the frontiers of the ancient British, on the ruins of which the traveller gazes with wonder. | Buy | |
| Pagan Babies | Elmore Leonard | The church had become a tomb where forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains had been lying on the concrete floor the past five years, though not lying where they had been shot with Kalashnikovs or hacked to death with machetes. The benches had been removed and the bodies reassembled: men, women and small children laid in rows of skulls and spines, femurs, fragments of cloth stuck to mummified remains, many of the adults missing feet, all missing bones had been carried off by scavenging dogs. | Buy | |
| Three Tales | Gustave Flaubert | The citadel of Machaerus rose east of the Dead Sea on a basalt Peak shaped like a cone, girdled by four deep valleys; two about its sides, one in front, and the fourth behind. | Buy | |
| The King Must Die | Mary Renault | The Citadel of Troizen, where the Palace stands, was built by giants before anyone remembers. | Buy | |
| The Mugger | Ed McBain | The city could be nothing but a woman, and that's good because your business is women. | Buy | |
| A Poor Wise Man | Mary Roberts Rinehart | The city turned its dreariest aspect toward the railway station; blackened walls, irregular and ill-paved streets, gloomy warehouses, and over all a gray, smoke-laden atmosphere which gave it mystery and often beauty. | Buy | |
| The Loring Mystery | Jeffrey Farnol | The clock of St. Clement Danes was chiming the hour of eleven as Mr. Gillespie, folding up the brief which had engaged his attention all the evening, yawned, drained the last of his toddy and rose to betake himself to bed; indeed he had just taken up his chamber candle and was in the act of extinguishing the candelabrum upon the table when he paused and stood staring beneath puckered brows as a sudden knocking sounded upon the outer door. | Buy | |
| His Children's Children | Arthur Cheney Train | The clock on Trinity Church pointed to half-past four. Rufus Kayne glanced up from the letter at which he was scowling, observed the lateness of the hour and pressed a pearl button upon the desk beside him. He had not noticed the swift fading of the November afternoon, for he worked in an artificial glare. The light which beats upon the president of a trust company rivals that which in past days was said to beat upon a throne. | Buy | |
| Keep the Aspidistra Flying | George Orwell | The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back of Mr. McKechnie's bookshop, Gordon--Gordon Comstock, last member of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already--lounged across the table, pushing a fourpenny packet of Player's Weights open and shut with his thumb. | Buy | |
| Stars on the Sea | F van Wyck Mason | The clouds darkening Boston Harbor looked so low and ghostlike Sergeant Timothy Bennett guessed snow would soon begin falling. In fact, the jumbled dark roofs and church spires of distant Cambridge were already graying out of sight. | Buy | |
| Sweet Women Lie | Loren D Estleman | The Club Canaveral's rainbow front died short of the alley that ran alongside the building. | Buy | |
| My Friend Prospero | Henry Harland | The coachman drew up his horses before the castle gateway, where their hoofs beat a sort of fanfare on the stone pavement; and the footman, letting himself smartly down, pulled, with a peremptory gesture that was just not quite a swagger, the bronze hand at the end of the dangling bell-cord. | Buy | |
| The Red Badge of Courage | Stephen Crane | The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills. | Buy | |
| The Red Badge of Courage | Stephen Crane | The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. | Buy | |
| The Parsifal Mosaic | Robert Ludlum | The cold rays of the moon streaked down from the night sky and bounced off the rolling surf, which burst into suspended sprays of white where isolated waves crashed into the rocks of the shoreline. The stretch of beach between the towering boulders of the Costa Brava was the execution ground. It had to be. May God damn this goddamned world--it had to be! | Buy | |
| Persuader | Lee Child | The cop climbed out of his car exactly four minutes before he got shot. | Buy | |
| QB VII | Leon Uris | The corporal cadet stepped out of the guard hut and squinted out over the field. A shadowy figure ran through the knee-high grass toward him. The guard lifted a pair of binoculars. The man, half stumbling, carried a single battered suitcase. He waved and gasped a greeting in Polish. | Buy | |
| Home Truths | David Lodge | The cottage stands all on its own at the end of a rutted cart-track that leads off from the main road to the village, about a mile away. | Buy | |
| Requiem for a Nun | William Faulkner | The courthouse is less old than the town, which began somewhere under the turn of the century as a Checkasaw Agency trading-post and so continued for almost thirty years before it discovered, not that it lacked a depository for its records and certainly not that it needed one, but that only by creating or anyway decreeing one, could it cope with a situation which otherwise was going to cost somebody money. | Buy | |
| Nightwork | Joseph Hansen | The creekbed was paved with sloping slabs of concrete and walled by standing slabs of concrete to a height of ten feet. | Buy | |
| The Glory That Was | L Sprague de Camp | The Dagmar II sank into the trough of the waves, hiding all but her naked poles. | Buy | |
| Storm Below | Hugh Garner | The dawn of March 9th, 1943 rose above the spinning earth. | Buy | |
| Of Human Bondage | William Somerset Maugham | The day broke gray and dull | Buy | |
| Of Human Bondage | W Somerset Maugham | The day broke gray and dull. | Buy | |
| Of Human Bondage | William Somerset Maugham | The day broke gray and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child's bed. | Buy | |
| Steppenwolf | Hermann Hesse | The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life. | Buy | |
| The Heart of Rachael | Kathleen Norris | The day had opened so brightly, in such a welcome wave of April sunshine, that by mid-afternoon there were two hundred players scattered over the links of the Long Island Country Club at Belvedere Bay; the men in thick plaid stockings and loose striped sweaters, the women's scarlet coats and white skirts making splashes of vivid color against the fresh green of grass and the thick powdering of dandelions. | Buy | |
| Sleeping with Schubert | Bonnie Marson | The day I became a genius I locked the keys in the car with the motor running. | Buy | |
| Topaz | Leon Uris | The day was balmy. That certain magic of Copenhagen and the Tivoli Gardens had Michael Nordstrom all but tranquilized. | Buy | |
| The Salamander | Owen McMahon Johnson | The day was Thursday; the month, October, rushing to its close; and the battered alarm-clock on the red mantel stood at precisely one o'clock. | Buy | |
| Steamboat Gothic | Frances Parkinson Keyes | The day was warm for March, and the stranger, who had been walking for nearly half an hour along the river road, took a fine embroidered handkerchief from the tail pocket of his burgundy-colored frock coat and mopped his face with it. Then he flicked the handkerchief lightly over his tight-fitting mouse-gray trousers and his shining congress boots. He had no mind to reach his destination dripping with sweat or powdered with dust. | Buy | |
| The Rich Part of Life | Jim Kokoris | The day we won the lottery I was wearing wax lips that my father had bought for the Nose Picker and me at a truck stop. | Buy | |
| The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come | John William Fox | The days of that April had been days of mist and rain. Sometimes, for hours, there would come a miracle of blue sky, white cloud, and yellow light, but always between dark and dark the rain would fall and the mist creep up the mountains and steam from the tops--only to roll together from either range, drip back into the valleys, and lift, straightway, as mist again. | Buy | |
| Interface | Joe Gores | The dead Mexican lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. | Buy | |
| The Man from Brodney's | George Barr McCutcheon | The death of Taswell Skaggs was stimulating, to say the least, inapplicable though the expression may seem. | Buy | |
| The Chamber | John Grisham | The decision to bomb the office of the radical Jew lawyer was reached with relative ease. | Buy | |
| The Geography of the Imagination | Guy Davenport | The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination. | Buy | |
| When Rich Men Die | Harold Adams | The digital clock showed 2:41 A.M. as I rolled to lift the receiver before the second ring and said, "Yeah?" | Buy | |
| The Fantastic Island | Kenneth Robeson | The disappearance of William Harper Littlejohn attracted no public attention whatever. | Buy | |
| Four Blind Mice | James B. Patterson | The District Attorney for Cumberland County, North Carolina, Marc Sherman, pushed the old wooden captain's chair away from the prosecution table, and it made a harsh, scrapping eeek in the nearly silent courtroom. | Buy | |
| Not as a Stranger | Morton Thompson | The doctor came out of the house and he closed the door gently behind him. He looked up and there was a little boy. | Buy | |
| Escape | Ethel Vance | The doctor took out the stitches, swabbed the scar with a disinfectant, and then made an examination of his patient. | Buy | |
| Zeno's Conscience | Italo Svevo (pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz) | The doctor with whom I discussed the question told me to begin my work with a historical analysis of my smoking habit. | Buy | |
| The Witching Hour | Anne Rice | The Doctor woke up afraid. He had been dreaming of the old house in New Orleans again. He had seen the woman in the rocker. He'd seen the man with the brown eyes. | Buy | |
| Theatre | William Somerset Maugham | The door opened and Michael Gosselyn looked up. Julia came in. | Buy | |
| Maria Chapdelaine | Louis Hemon | The door opened, and the men of the congregation began to come out of the church at Peribonka. | Buy | |
| Cyrano de Bergerac | Edmund Rostand | The Doorkeeper: Stop! You haven't paid your fifteen sols! | Buy | |
| Troilus and Criseyde | Geoffrey Chaucer | The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen, That was the king Priamus sone of Troye, In lovinge, how his aventures fellen Fro wo to wele, and after out of Ioye, My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye. Thesiphone, thou help me for tendyte Thise woful vers, that wepen as I wryte! | Buy | |
| Arrowsmith | Sinclair Lewis | The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen. | Buy | |
| 2001: A Space Odyssey | Arthur C Clarke | The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. Here on the Equator, in the continent which would one day be known as Africa, the battle for existence had reached a new climax of ferocity, and the victor was not yet in sight. | Buy | |
| The Mouse That Roared | Leonard Wibberley | The Duchy of Grand Fenwick lies in a precipitous fold of the northern Alps and embraces in its tumbling landscape portions of three valleys, a river, one complete mountain with an elevation of two thousand feet and a castle. | Buy | |
| The Assistant | Bernard Malamud | The early November street was dark though night had ended, but the wind, to the grocer's surprise, already clawed. It flung his apron into his face as he bent for the two milk cases at the curb. Morris Bober dragged the heavy boxes to the door, panting. A large brown bag of hard rolls stood in the doorway along with the sour-faced, gray-haired Poilisheh huddled there, who wanted one. | Buy | |
| Murder Melody | Kenneth Robeson | The earth shook. | Buy | |
| The Woman of Andros | Thornton Niven Wilder | The earth sighed as it turned in its course; the shadow of night crept gradually along the Mediterranean, and Asia was left in darkness. | Buy | |
| Lanark | Alasdair James Gray | The Elite Cafe was entered by a staircase from the foyer of a cinema. | Buy | |
| The Blithedale Romance | Nathaniel Hawthorne | The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor-apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly-man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street. | Buy | |
| Fairy Tale | Alice Thomas Ellis | The eyes of the watchers were cold and flat and incurious and the watchers were still. | Buy | |
| The Runaway Jury | John Grisham | The face of Nicholas Easter was slightly hidden by a display rack filled with slim cordless phones, and he was looking not directly at the hidden camera but somewhere off to the left, perhaps at a customer, or perhaps at a counter where a group of kids hovered over the latest electronic games from Asia. | Buy | |
| The Clansman | Thomas Dixon Jr | The fair girl who was playing a banjo and singing to the wounded
soldiers suddenly stopped, and, turning to the surgeon,
whispered: "What's that?" "It sounds like a mob--" | Buy | |
| Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen | The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. | Buy | Read |
| House of Sand and Fog | Andre Dubus III | The fat one, the Radish Torez, he calls me Camel, because I am Persian and because I can bear this August sun longer than the Chinese and the Panamanians and even the little Vietnamese, Tran. He works very quickly without rest, but when Torez stops the orange highway truck in front of the crew, Tran hurries for his paper cup of water with the rest of them. This heat is no good for work. | Buy | |
| The Garden of Allah | Robert Smythe Hichens | The fatigue caused by a rough sea journey, and, perhaps, the consciousness that she would have to be dressed before dawn to catch the train for Beni-Mora, prevented Domini Enfilden from sleeping. There was deep silence in the Hotel de la Mer at Robertville. The French officers who took their pension there had long since ascended the hill of Addouna to the barracks. The cafes had closed their doors to the drinkers and domino players. The lounging Arab boys had deserted the sandy Place de la Marine. | Buy | |
| Executive Orders | Tom Clancy | The FBI's emergency command center on the fifth floor of the Hoover building is an odd-shaped room, roughly triangular and surprisingly small with room for only fifteen of so people to bump shoulders. Number sixteen to arrive, tieless and wearing casual cloths, was Deputy Assistant Director Daniel E. Murray. | Buy | |
| Strangers and Brothers | Charles Percy Snow | The fire in our habitual public-house spurted and fell. | Buy | |
| The Best Laid Plans | Sidney Sheldon | The first entry in Leslie Stewart's diary read: Dear Diary: This morning I met the man I am going to marry. | Buy | |
| The League of Gentlemen | John Boland | The first of the registered packages was received by Peter Race. | Buy | |
| Black Beauty | Anna Sewell | The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. | Buy | |
| The Pickwick Papers | Charles Dickens | The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted. | Buy | |
| The Perfect Gift | Christina Skye | The first snowflakes of Winter danced over Scotland's green hills. | Buy | |
| The House on the Strand | Daphne du Maurier | The first thing I noticed was the clarity of the air, and then the sharp green colour of the land. | Buy | |
| The Long Goodbye | Raymond Chandler | The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. | Buy | |
| Goodbye, Columbus | Philip Roth | The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses. | Buy | |
| Murder in the Raw | Bruno Fischer | The first time I saw her she was in trouble. | Buy | |
| The Lady Kills | Bruno Fischer | The first time I saw the publisher's daughter she wore slippers and a couple of scant strips of black cloth and a cigarette. | Buy | |
| Black and Blue | Anna Quindlen | The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old. | Buy | |
| The Sweet Forever | George Pelecanos | The first time Richard Tutt made it with a suspect's girlfriend, he realized that there was nothing, nothing at all, that a man in his position couldn't do | Buy | |
| California Gold | John Jakes | The first treasure California began to surrender after the Gold Rush as the oldest: her land. | Buy | |
| Tuck Everlasting | Natalie | The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. | Buy | |
| Tuck Everlasting | Natalie Babbitt | The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. | Buy | |
| Gyfford of Weare | Jeffrey Farnol | The flash of a face glimpsed beyond opening door, a puff of breath, and the candle, suddenly extinguished, choked him with its reek. | Buy | |
| The Club Dumas | Arturo Pérez-Reverte | The flash projected the outline of the hanged man onto the wall. | Buy | |
| Work of Art | Sinclair Lewis | The flat roof of the American House, the most spacious and important hotel in Black Thread Center, Connecticut, was lined with sheet of red-painted tin, each embossed with "Phoenix, the Tin of Kings." | Buy | |
| Darwin's Radio | Greg Bear | The flat sky spread over the black and gray mountains like a stage backdrop, the color of a dog's pale crazy eye. | Buy | |
| The High and the Mighty | Ernest Kellogg Gann | The forecaster caressed his bald head and then swept his bony fingers across the course from Honolulu to San Francisco. | Buy | |
| Two Years Before the Mast | Richard Henry Dana Jr | The fourteenth of August was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim, on her voyage from Boston, round Cape Horn, to the Western coast of North America. As she was to get under way early in the afternoon, I made my appearance on board at twelve o'clock, in full sea-rig, with my chest, containing an outfit for a two or three years' voyage, which I had undertaken from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books, with a plenty of hard work, plain food, and open air, a weakness of the eyes, which had obliged me to give up my studies, and which no medical aid seemed likely to remedy. | Buy | |
| The First Circle | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | The fretwork hands stood at five past four. | Buy | |
| The Fireship | C Northcote Parkinson | The frigate Medusa was on her passage home from the Mediterranean and lay becalmed almost in sight of Falmouth. | Buy | |
| The Story of an African Farm | Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner | The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain. | Buy | |
| The Master of Ballantrae | Robert Louis Stevenson | The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for and the public curiosity is sure to welcome. | Buy | |
| The Master of Ballantrae | Robert Louis Stevenson | The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for, and public curiosity is sure to welcome | Buy | |
| The Gay Desperado | Berkeley Gray | The fun started when the Frampton Fury hit an air pocket of such impressive size that Norman Conquest experienced all the sensations of a man who walks over the edge of a cliff. | Buy | |
| Skipping Christmas | John Grisham | The gate was packed with weary travelers, most of them standing and huddled along the walls because the meager allotment of plastic chairs had long since been taken. Every plane that came and went held at least eighty passengers, yet the gate had seats for only a few dozen. | Buy | |
| You Only Live Twice | Ian Fleming | The geisha called "Trembling Leaf," on her knees beside James Bond, leant forward from the waist and kissed him chastely on the right cheek. | Buy | |
| Devil to Pay | C Northcote Parkinson | The George Inn, Portsmouth, was the scene of feverish activity. | Buy | |
| The Davidian Report | Dorothy B Hughes | The girl had boarded the plane at Kansas City. | Buy | |
| Murder on the Run | Medora Sale | The girl walked slowly down the street, her feet in heavy hiking boots dragging slightly with every step or two. | Buy | |
| High Adventure | Donald E Westlake | The girl was a real pest. | Buy | |
| Roper's Row | George Warwick Deeping | The girl was tempted by the open door. It was unusual for Hazzard to leave his door open. His habit was to shut it quietly and carefully, for like many other door in Roper's Row it had seen better days, and was suffering from decrepitude, strained hinges and a stammering lock. Hazzard knew the habits of that door. Unless you were firm with it and made sure that the catch had caught, the door would swing slowly back into the room, uttering a little creaking moan. It was a faithless, treasonable door. It was ready to betray you and your secrets, and Hazzard had many reasons for wishing to keep the door closed. | Buy | |
| A Good Man Is Hard to Find | Flannery O'Connor | The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she liver with, her only boy. | Buy | |
| The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse | Louise Erdrich | The grass was white with frost on the shadowed sides of the reservation hills and ditches, but the morning air was almost warm, sweetened by a southern wind. Father Damien's best hours were late at night and just after rising, when all he'd had to break his fast was a cup of hot water. He was old, very old, but alert until he had to eat. | Buy | |
| The White Company | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The great bell of Beaulieu was ringing. Far away through the forest might be heard its musical clangor and swell. | Buy | |
| Jaws | Peter Benchley | The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail. | Buy | |
| The Legacy of Reginald Perrin | David Nobbs | The great November gale killed a plumber in Slough, a lady on her way to demonstrate the boning of a shoulder of lamb to the Bromyard Women's Institute, an aromatherapist from Wakefield, and Reginald Iolanthe Perrin. | Buy | |
| And So--Victoria | William Vaughan Wilkins | The great window-bay over the porch became a very private place after the waiter had drawn the curtains before its recess. The small boy, crouched on the seat that ran around three sides of it, was not sorry to be shut out, with the fading daylight, from the cognizance of the two gentlemen sitting at wine over the fire in the room beyond. | Buy | |
| The Big Land | Frank Gruber | The guns were stilled, the carnage had ended. | Buy | |
| Grand Hotel | Vicki Baum | The Hall Porter was a little white about the gills as he came out of No. 7 box. He went for his cap which he had left on the radiator. | Buy | |
| It Can't Happen Here | Sinclair Lewis | The handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies' Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club. | Buy | |
| The Green Berets | Robin Moore | The headquarters of Special Forces Detachment B-520 in one of Vietnam's most active war zones looks exactly like a fort out of the old West. Although the B detachments are strictly support and administrative units for the Special Forces A teams fighting the Communist Viet Cong guerrillas in the jungles and rice paddies, this headquarters had been attacked twice in the last year by VC and both times had sustained casualties. | Buy | |
| Ramage and the Drumbeat | Dudley Pope | The heat and humidity of a Mediterranean summer made the watermark in the paper stand out like a fading scar, and traces of mildew left a tarnished gilt outline round the edges. | Buy | |
| Family Album | Danielle Steel | The heat of the jungle was so oppressive that just standing in one place was almost like swimming through thick, dense air. It was a presence you could feel and smell and touch, and yet the men pressed forward wanting to see her . . . to get closer . . . to see more. . . . Their shoulders were tightly compressed, as they sat there, side by side, cross-legged on the ground. In the front, way up front, they had folding chairs, but they had run out of chairs hours before. The men had been sitting since sundown, baking, sweating, waiting. | Buy | |
| The Battle of the Villa Fiorita | Rumer Godden | The hedges of scented whitethorn on either side of the villa gates had the longest fiercest thorns they had ever seen. | Buy | |
| The Best Christmas Pageant Ever | Barbara Robinson | The Hermans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker's old broken-down toolhouse. | Buy | |
| A Painted House | John Grisham | The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a "good crop." | Buy | |
| The Head of the House of Coombe | Frances Hodgson Burnett | The history of the circumstances about to be related began many years ago--or so it seems in these days. It began, at least, years before the world being rocked to and fro revealed in the pause between each of its heavings some startling suggestion of a new arrangement of its kaleidoscopic particles, and then immediately a re-arrangement, and another and another until all belief in a permanency of design seemed lost, and the inhabitants of the earth waited, helplessly gazing at changing stars and colours in a degree of mental chaos. | Buy | |
| The Ugly American | William Julius Lederer and Eugene Leonard Burdick | The Honorable Louis Sears, American Ambassador to Sarkhan, was angry. Even though the airconditioner kept his office cool, he felt hot and irritable. He smoothed out the editorial page of the Sarkhan Eastern Star, the most widely distributed paper in Haidho, and studied the cartoon carefully. | Buy | |
| The Secret of Santa Vittoria | Robert Crichton | The hour this story begins is known. The minute is known; the exact moment is recorded. Even the state of the weather is known. To some this might not appear to be remarkable, but when it is considered that there are entire generations in the history of Santa Vittoria about which nothing at all is known, the statement becomes remarkable. | Buy | |
| Love and War | John Jakes | The house burned an hour before midnight on the last day of April. The wild, distant ringing of the fire bells woke George Hazard. He stumbled through the dark hallway, then upstairs to the mansion tower, and stepped outside into the narrow balcony. | Buy | |
| The Concrete Blonde | Michael Connelly | The house in Silverlake was dark, its windows as empty as a dead man's eyes. | Buy | |
| P is for Peril | Sue Grafton | The house on Old Reservoir Road appeared to be in the final phrases of construction. I spotted the site as I rounded the curve, recognizing the unfinished structure from Fiona Purcell's description. To my right, I could see a portion of the reservoir for which the road was named. Brunswick Lake fills the bottom of a geographical bowl, a spring-fed body that supplied the town with drinking water for many years. | Buy | |
| Elizabeth Appleton | John O'Hara | The house was at the corner of Harvard Road and Bucknell Street, set back on two sides from the unpaved sidewalks, and with a garage at the rear. | Buy | |
| Islands in the Stream | Ernest Hemingway | The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream. | Buy | |
| The High Window | Raymond Chandler | The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Knoll section of Pasadena, a big solid cook-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra-cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim. | Buy | |
| Rage of Angels | Sidney Sheldon | The hunters were closing in for the kill. | Buy | |
| The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight | Jimmy Breslin | The idea for the six-day bike race came out of a meeting held in November, in Brooklyn, in the offices of Anthony Pastrumo, Sr. | Buy | |
| The Unbearable Lightness of Being | Milan Kundera | The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify? | Buy | |
| Coming Up for Air | George Orwell | The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth. | Buy | |
| More Than Human | Theodore Hamilton Sturgeon | The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead. | Buy | |
| More Than Human | Theodore Sturgeon | The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. | Buy | |
| Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ | Lewis | The Jebel es Zubleh is a mountain fifty miles and more in length, and so narrow that its tracery on the map gives it a likeness to a caterpillar crawling from the south to the north. Standing on its red-and-white cliffs, and looking off under the path of the rising sun, one sees only the Desert of Arabia, where the east winds, so hateful to vinegrowers of Jericho, have kept their playgrounds since the beginning. Its feet are well covered by sands tossed from the Euphrates, there to lie, for the mountain is a wall to the pasture-lands of Moab and Ammon on the west-lands which else had been of the desert a part. | Buy | |
| The Mansion | William Faulkner | The jury said "Guilty" and the Judge said "Life" but he didn't hear them. | Buy | |
| The Cricket on the Hearth | Charles Dickens | The kettle began it! | Buy | |
| The French Key | Frank Gruber | The key wouldn't go into the lock, because someone had already inserted a key and broken it off. | Buy | |
| Sunset | Douglas Reeman | The khaki staff car rolled to a halt, and after some hesitation the Royal Marine driver offered, "No boat there yet, sir". | Buy | |
| The Puppet Crown | Harold MacGrath | The king sat in his private garden in the shade of a potted orange tree, the leaves of which were splashed with brilliant yellow. It was high noon of one of those last warm sighs of passing summer which now and then lovingly steal in between the chill breaths of September. The velvet hush of the mid-day hour had fallen. | Buy | |
| Sir Patrick Spens | Old Ballad | The king sits in Dunfermline town Drinking the blude-red wine. | Buy | |
| The Thinking Reed | Rebecca West | The knocking on the door did not wake Isabelle because she had started up from sleep early that morning. | Buy | |
| The Wild Palms | William Faulkner | The knocking sounded again, at once discreet and peremptory, while the doctor was descending the stairs, the flashlight's beam lancing on before him down the brown-stained stairwell and into the brown-stained tongue-and-groove box of the lower hall. It was a beach cottage, even though of two stories, and lighted by oil lamps--or an oil lamp, which his wife had carried up stairs with them after supper. | Buy | |
| Wild Palms | William Faulkner | The knocking sounded again, at once discreet and peremptory, while the doctor was descending the stairs, the flashlight's beam lancing on before him down the brown-stained stair-well and into the brown-stained tongue-and-groove of the lower hall. | Buy | |
| Eight Black Horses | Ed McBain | The lady was extraordinarily naked. | Buy | |
| The Salzburg Connection | Helen MacInnes | The lake was cold, black, evil, no more than five hundred yards in length, scarcely two hundred in breadth, a crooked stretch of glassy calm shadowed by the mountainsides that slipped steeply into its dark waters and went plunging down. There were no roads, no marked paths around it; only a few tracks, narrow ribbons, wound crazily along its high sides, sometimes climbing up and around the rough crags, sometimes dropping to the sparse clumps of fir at its water line. The eastern tip of the lake was closed off by a ridge of precipices. The one approach was by its western end. | Buy | |
| The Golden Butterfly | Sir Walter Besant and J. Rice | The largest and most solid of all the substantial houses in Carnarvon Square, Bloomsbury, is Number Fifteen, which, by reason of its corner position (Mulgrave Street intersecting it at right angles at this point), has been enabled to stretch itself out at the back. It is a house which a man who wanted to convey the idea of a solid income without ostentation or attempt at fashion would find the very thing to assist his purpose. | Buy | |
| The Golden Butterfly | Sir Walter Besant and J Rice | The largest and most solid of all the substantial houses in Carnarvon Square, Bloomsbury, is Number Fifteen, which, by reason of its corner position (Mulgrave Street intersecting it at right angles at this point), has been enabled to stretch itself out at the back. It is a house which a man who wanted to convey the idea of a solid income without ostentation or attempt at fashion would find the very thing to assist his purpose. | Buy | |
| The Key to Rebecca | Ken Follett | The last camel collapsed at noon. It was the five-year-old white bull he had bought in Gialo, the youngest and strongest of the three beasts, and the least ill-tempered: he liked the animal as much as a man could like a camel, which is to say that he hated it only a little. | Buy | |
| Out Of The Silent Planet | C S Lewis | The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortable on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut-tree into the middle of the road. | Buy | |
| Rubyfruit Jungle | Frederic Brown | The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door . . . | Buy | |
| The Constant Image | Marcia Davenport | The last moment before the house went dark was pure enchantment. All had been splendour and brilliance, laughter and gossip, amidst the loveliest colours of festivity, white and gold and scarlet. | Buy | |
| Memories of Another Day | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | The last time I saw my father, he was lying quietly on his back in his coffin, his eyes closed, an unaccustomed blandness on his strong features, his thick white hair and heavy eyebrows neatly brushed. | Buy | |
| Easy Meat | John Harvey | The last words Norma Snape said to her youngest that Thursday: "You let me get my hands on you, you little tripeshanks, and I'll wring your miserable neck!" | Buy | |
| The Lost World | Michael Crichton | The late twentieth century has witnessed a remarkable growth in scientific interest in the subject of extinction. | Buy | |
| Ramage at Trafalgar | Dudley Pope | The lawyer took out the parchment from his worn leather case, carefully smoothed it out flat on the table and perched a pair of spectacles on his bulbous nose. | Buy | |
| I Can't Stop Running | Edward S Aarons | The light bothered him. | Buy | |
| The Tin Soldier | Temple Bailey | The lights shining through the rain on the smooth street made of it a golden river. | Buy | |
| The Human Comedy | William Saroyan | The little boy named Ulysses Macauley one day stood over the new gopher hole in the backyard of his house on Santa Clara Avenue in Ithaca, California. | Buy | |
| Ramage's Mutiny | Dudley Pope | The little dockyard at English Harbour was already bustling, although the sun was only just lifting over the rounded hills to the east. | Buy | |
| Journey | Danielle Steel | The long black limousine pulled up slowly, and came to a stop, in a long line of cars just like it. It was a balmy evening in early June, and two Marines stepped forward in practiced unison, as Madeleine Hunter emerged gracefully from the car in front of the east entrance to the White House. | Buy | |
| The Sisters-in-Law | Gertrude Atherton | The long street rising and falling and rising again until its farthest crest high in the east seemed to brush the fading stars, was deserted even by the private watchmen that guarded the homes of the apprehensive in the Western Addition. | Buy | |
| Weir of Hermiston | Robert Louis Stevenson | The Lord Justice-Clerk was a stranger in that part of the country; but his lady wife was known there from a child, as her race had been before her. | Buy | |
| The Shapes Of Sleep | J B Priestly | The Madison-Mayfair Agency was in a new building, just off Curzon Street, that Sterndale had never seen before. | Buy | |
| The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen | The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. | Buy | |
| The Gunslinger | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. | Buy | |
| The Fourth Protocol | Frederick Forsyth | The man in gray decided to take the Glen Suite of diamonds at midnight. Provided they were still in the apartment safe and the occupants away. This he needed to know. So he watched and he waited. At half past seven he was rewarded. | Buy | |
| Assignment--Peking | Edward S Aarons | The man in the mask struggled in the darkness of his nonidentity. | Buy | |
| Sunshine Enemies | KC Constantine | The man with the clerical collar tottered bowlegged under the weight of his cargo into Balzic's office. | Buy | |
| The Street Lawyer | John Grisham | The man with the rubber boots stepped into the elevator behind me, but I didn't see him at first. I smelled him though--the pungent odor of smoke and cheap wine and life on the street without soap. | Buy | |
| Pleading Guilty | Scott Turow | The Management Oversight Committee of our firm, known among the partnership simply as "the Committee," meets each Monday at 3:00 p.m. over coffee and chocolate brioche, these three hotshots, the heads of the firm's litigations, transactional, and regulatory departments, decide what's what at Gage & Griswell for another week. | Buy | |
| A Deepness In the Sky | Vernor Vinge | The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light-years and eight centuries. | Buy | |
| The Sun Is My Undoing | Marguerite Steen | The manner of Hercules Flood's death made a scandal which eclipsed every other scandal that, during the long, candlelit evenings of Bristol winter, disturbed drawing-rooms and kept business lively in taverns. | Buy | |
| Memoirs of a Nun | Denis Diderot | The Marquis de Croismare's reply, if he does reply, will serve as the opening lines of this tale. Before writing to him I wanted to know what he was like. He is a man of the world, he has had a distinguished military career, is elderly, a widower with a daughter and two sons whom he loves and who return his affection. He is well born, enlightened, intelligent and witty, is fond of the arts and above all has an original mind. | Buy | |
| The Dark Half | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | The May 23rd issue of People magazine was pretty typical. | Buy | |
| The Darkening Sea | Alexander Kent | The meandering track that ran around the wide curve of Falmouth Bay was just wide enough to allow passage to horse and rider, and only slightly less dangerous than the footpath which was somewhere beneath it. | Buy | |
| And Quiet Flows the Don | Mikhail Sholokhov | The Melekhov farm was right at the end of the Tatarsk village. The gate of the cattle-yard opened northward towards the Don. | Buy | |
| A Dance to the Music of Time | Anthony Powell | The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes. | Buy | |
| King--Of the Khyber Rifles | Talbot Mundy (pseudonym of William Lancaster Gribbon) | The men who govern India--more power to them and her!--are few. | Buy | |
| The Murders in the Rue Morgue | Edgar Allan Poe | The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis | Buy | |
| Messer Marco Polo | Donn Byrne | The message came to me, at the second check of the hunt, that a countryman and a clansman needed me. The ground was heavy, the day raw, and it was a drag, too fast for fun and too tame for sport. So I blessed the countryman and the clansman, and turned my back on the field. | Buy | |
| Pride's Castle | Frank Yerby | The middle years--the eighteen-seventies, 'eighties, 'nineties--were a time of moral bankruptcy when men stole millions by a stroke of the pen or by the simple expedient of printing tons of worthless paper. | Buy | |
| Mary's Neck | Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) | The middle-aged stranger whom I met by chance upon the lower rocks at Mary's Neck, that salt-washed promontory of the New England coast, was at first taciturn but became voluble when a little conversation developed the fact that we were both from the Midland country. | Buy | |
| Anatomy of a Murder | Robert Traver (pseudonym of John Voelker) | The mine whistles were tooting midnight as I drove down Main Street hill. | Buy | |
| The Wind in the Willows | Kenneth Grahame | The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. | Buy | |
| Peder Victorious | Ole Edvart Rolvaag | The moment the sun lifted his red face above the horizon, Peder was up; and in summer, just after the face had dropped out of sight, Peder was in bed again. . . . Strange old sun . . . He often wondered what could make that face so red morning and evening. Perhaps weariness with shining so hard all the time. Since he himself often felt drowsy and full when evening came, Peder could very well understand this. . . . | Buy | |
| Come The Night | Christina Skye | The moon was full. | Buy | |
| Have Gat--Will Travel | Richard S Prather | The morgue in Los Angeles is downstairs in the Hall of Justice. | Buy | |
| A Fine Balance | Rohinton Mistry | The morning express bloated with passengers slowed to a crawl, then lurched forward suddenly, as though to resume full speed. The train's brief deception jolted its riders. The bulge of humans hanging out of the doorway distended perilously, like a soap bubble to its limit. | Buy | |
| The Intriguers | Donald Hamilton | The morning I got shot at, down there in Mexico, I'd been out fishing the high-powered little boat Mac had lent me, along with a trailer to carry it and a station wagon to pull it. | Buy | |
| Molly Make-Believe | Ellen Hallowell Abbott | The morning was as dark and cold as city snow could make it--a dingy whirl at the window; a smoky gust through the fire-place; a shadow black as a bear's cave under the table. Nothing in all the cavernous room, loomed really warm or familiar except a glass of stale water, and a vapid, half-eaten grape-fruit. | Buy | Read |
| Reaper Man | Terry Pratchett | The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse | Buy | |
| The Call of Cthulhu | H P Lovecraft | The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. | Buy | |
| Phineas Gage | John Fleischman | The most unlucky/lucky moment in the life of Phineas Gage is only a minute or two away. | Buy | |
| Murderer's Row | Donald Hamilton | The motel was on the left side of the highway leading from Washington, D.C., to the eastern shore of Maryland by way of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. | Buy | |
| In This House of Brede | Rumer Godden | The motto was "Pax," but the word was set in a circle of thorns. | Buy | |
| The Professor | Willa Sibert Cather | The moving was over and done. | Buy | |
| The Judgment House | Sir Gilbert Parker | The music throbbed in a voice of singular and delicate power; the air was resonant with melody, love and pain. The meanest Italian in the gallery far up beneath the ceiling, the most exalted of the land in the boxes and the stalls, leaned indulgently forward, to be swept by this sweet storm of song. | Buy | |
| Basil of Baker Street | Eve Titus | The Mystery of the Missing Twins could never have been solved by an ordinary detective. | Buy | |
| The Ambushers | Donald Hamilton | The natives call it the River of Goats, the Rio de las Cabras. | Buy | |
| The Fringes of the Fleet | Rudyard Kipling | The Navy is very old and very wise. | Buy | |
| Illegal Alien | Robert J Sawyer | The Navy lieutenant poked his close-cropped head into the aircraft carrier's wardroom. | Buy | |
| The Pirate | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | The needlepoint spray of the shower on his scalp drowned out the sound of the four big jet engines. Steam began to fog the walls of the narrow shower stall. Quickly, he rubbed the rich soap into a perfumed lather over his body, then rinsed and cut the water from hot to ice cold. Instantly, fatigue left him and he was wide awake. He turned off the water and stepped from the shower stall. | Buy | |
| Glorious Apollo | E Barrington | The Nemesis of the Byron ill-luck had pursued him from birth, and yet on that day one would have thought it might have spared him. But everything had gone wrong. | Buy | |
| Esther | Henry Brook Adams | The new church of St. John's, on Fifth Avenue, was thronged the morning of the last Sunday of October, in the year 1880. Sitting in the gallery, beneath the unfinished frescoes, and looking down the nave, one caught an effect of autumn gardens, a suggestion of chrysanthemums and geraniums, or of October woods, dashed with scarlet oaks and yellow maples. | Buy | |
| The Deluge | Henryk Sienkiewicz | The new year came in the midst of a cold, dry Winter that covered all of Zmudya with a deep white quilt. The trees bent and crackled under the weight of snow that blinded the eyes of passersby in daylight. At night, by moonlight, the fields and pastures sparkled with pinpoint lights as if the moon had tossed a multitude of spangles on the frozen soil. | Buy | |
| Forgive Us Our Trespasses | Lloyd Cassell Douglas | The new-laid harvest straw beneath the faded red carpet rustled crisply under Martha's shapeless felt slippers as she padded across the living-room to the cluttered mantle. | Buy | |
| Evil Come, Evil Go | Whit Masterson | The newspapers called it the Crime of the Century. | Buy | |
| Pale Gray for Guilt | John D MacDonald | The next to last time I saw Tush Bannon alive was the very same day I had that new little boat running the way I wanted it to run, after about six weeks of futzing around with it. | Buy | |
| Nick's Trip | George Pelecanos | The night Billy Goodrich walked in I was tending bar at a place called the Spot, a bunker of painted cinder block and forty-watt bulbs at the northwest corner of Eighth and G in Southeast. | Buy | |
| Where the Wild Things Are | Maurice Bernard Sendak | The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief on one kind and another his mother called him "WILD THING!" and Max said "I'LL EAT YOU UP!" so he was sent to bed without eating anything. | Buy | |
| Chasing The Sea | Tom Bissell | The night was hot or cold, depending on where one stood. | Buy | |
| Way Station | Clifford Simak | The noise was ended now. The smoke drifted like thin gray wisps of fog above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by cannon fire. | Buy | |
| Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | The North Carolina Mutual life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o'clock. | Buy | |
| The Prize | Irving Wallace | The northern night had come early to Stockholm this day, and that meant that autumn was almost gone and the dark winter was near at hand. | Buy | |
| How Much for Just the Planet? | John M Ford | The Officer's Mess of the starship USS Enterprise was a small, rather cozy room, with comfortable chairs, moderately bright lighting, and a food-service wall with four delivery slots, no waiting. | Buy | |
| Master of Life and Death | Robert Silverberg | The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. | Buy | |
| Europa: The Days of Ignorance | Robert Stephen Briffault | The old fellow who was cadging drinks from me the other night at the Cafe Royal told me he had known Julian Bern's people in the old days at Rome. | Buy | |
| Grendel | John Gardner | The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant. | Buy | |
| Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm | Kate Douglas Wiggin | The old stage coach was rumbling along the dusty road that runs from Maplewood to Riverboro. The day was as warm as midsummer, though it was only the middle of May, and Mr. Jeremiah Cobb was favoring the horses as much as possible, yet never losing sight of the fact that he carried the mail. The hills were many, and the reins lay loosely in his hands as he lolled back in his seat and extended one foot and leg luxuriously over the dashboard. His brimmed hat of worn felt was well pulled over his eyes, and revolved a quid of tobacco in his left cheek. | Buy | |
| Thieves' Nights | Harry Stephen Keeler | The one dirty window of the barren little room on the corner of Halsted and Maxwell streets, Chicago, looked out on a scene that, to Ward Sharlow, its only occupant, resembled nothing so much as that noisy maelstrom in London known as Petticoat Lane. | Buy | |
| Martin Eden | Jack London | The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, followed by a young fellow who awkwardly removed his cap. He wore rough clothes that smacked of the sea, and he was manifestly out of place in the spacious hall in which he found himself. He did not know what to do with his cap, and was stuffing it into his coat pocket when the other took it from him. The act was done quietly and naturally, and the awkward young fellow appreciated it. "He understands," was his thought. "He'll see me through all right." | Buy | |
| Martin Eden | Jack London | The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, followed by a young fellow who awkwardly removed his cap | Buy | |
| No Greater Love | Danielle Steel | The only sound in the dining room was the ticking of the large, ornate clock on the mantelpiece, and the occasional muffled rustling of a heavy linen napkin. There were eleven people in the enormous dining room, and it was so cold that Edwina could barely move her fingers. | Buy | |
| No Questions Asked | Oliver Bleeck | The only thing in the mail that day of any interest was the eviction notice. | Buy | |
| The Family | Nina Fedorova | The only thing the Family managed to retain from the prolific line of their noble ancestors was a long and shapely aristocratic nose. | Buy | |
| The Professor | Charlotte Brontë | The other day, in looking over my papers, I found in my desk the following copy of a letter, sent by me a year since to an old school acquaintance. | Buy | |
| The Eye of the World | Robert Jordan | The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory, groaned as if it would deny what had happened. | Buy | |
| The Blue Flower | Henry Jackson van Dyke | The parents were abed and sleeping. The clock on the wall ticked loudly and lazily, as if it had time to spare. Outside the rattling windows there was a restless, whispering wind. The room grew light, and dark, and wondrous light again, as the moon played hide-and-seek through the clouds. The boy, wide-awake and quiet in his bed, was thinking of the Stranger and his stories. | Buy | |
| Seven Days in May | Fletcher Knebel and Charles Waldo Bailey II | The parking lot stretched away to the north, cheerless and vacant. Its monotonous acres of concrete were unbroken except where the occasional shadow of a maple tree speared thinly across the pavement. In the nearby lagoon that opened out into the Potomac, small craft lay in rows at their moorings as though glued to a mirror. No ripple disturbed the surface of the water where it reflected the early-morning sun that was now rising over the silent domes and roofs of Washington across the river. | Buy | |
| The Go-Between | Leslie Poles Hartley | The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. | Buy | |
| The Faerie Queene | Edmund Spenser | The Patron of true Holinesse, Foule Errour doth defeate: Hypocrisie him to entrappe, Doth to his home entreate. | Buy | |
| The Rosary | Florence L Barclay | The peaceful stillness of an English summer after-noon brooded over the park and gardens at Overdene. A hush of moving sunlight and lengthening shadows lay upon the lawn, and a promise of refreshing coolness made the shade of the great cedar tree a place to be desired. | Buy | |
| The Little Sister | Raymond Chandler | The pebbled glass door is lettered in flaked black paint: "Phillip Marlowe . . . Investigations." It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is locked, but next to it is another door with the same legend which is not locked. Come on in--there's nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle fly. But not if you're from Manhattan, Kansas. | Buy | |
| Farewell Companions | James Plunkett (a/k/a James Plunkett Kelly) | The photograph album on the table beside the window lay on a brown velvet cloth and was the inseparable companion of the geranium. | Buy | |
| The Doctor's Wife | Brian Moore | The plane from Belfast arrived on time, but when the passengers disembarked there was a long wait for baggage. | Buy | |
| The Tribe That Lost Its Head | Nicholas Monsarrat | The plane, a shabby old Dakota, bumped twice in the noon-day heat, then settled down on its steady course. | Buy | |
| The Private Life of Helen of Troy | John Erskine | The point of this story is that Paris gave the prize to Aphrodite, not because she bribed him, but because she was beautiful. After all, it was a contest in beauty, though Athena and Hera started a discussion about wisdom and power. It was they who tried to bribe him. They had their merits and they had arguments, but Aphrodite was the thing itself. | Buy | |
| Noble House | James Clavell | The police officer was leaning against one corner of the information counter watching the tall Eurasian without watching him. | Buy | |
| The Shoes of the Fisherman | Morris L. West | The Pope was dead. | Buy | |
| Wheels | Arthur Hailey | The president of General Motors was in a foul humor. | Buy | |
| The Billion Dollar Sure Thing | Paul E. Erdman | The president of the United States did not suffer from such disadvantages of birth. He claimed both Irish and Jewish blood, a contention which, though never proven, was of itself sufficient to carry New York State regularly for his party. Sceptics pointed out that the man was neither rich nor drunk very often. | Buy | |
| About Time | Jack Grandison Finney | The presidents of the New York Central and the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroads will swear on a stack of timetables that there are only two. | Buy | |
| Lethal Injection | Jim Nisbet | The priest had a cold in his nose and an uncertainty as to his sexual identity; he'd never performed this service before; and there was an optional line in the prayers he had to get right. | Buy | |
| Mitla Pass | Leon Uris | The Prime Minister's cottage, a remnant of the former German colony, sat unobtrusively in the midst of the outsized defense complex on the northern end of Tel Aviv. Midnight had come and gone. The stream of callers faded to a trickle, then halted. | Buy | |
| Watership Down | Richard Adams | The primroses were over. | Buy | |
| The Golden Bowl | Henry James Jr | The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Rifles | Bernard Cornwell | The prize was a strongbox. | Buy | |
| The Prodigal Judge | Vaughan Kester | The Quintards had not prospered on the barren lands of the pine woods whither they had emigrated to escape the malaria of the low coast, but this no longer mattered, for the last of his name and race, old General Quintard, was dead in the great house his father had built almost a century before and the thin acres of the Barony, where he had made his last stand against age and poverty, were to claim him, now that he had given up the struggle in their midst. | Buy | |
| The Indiscreet Letter | Ellen Hallowell Abbott | The Railroad Journey was very long and slow. The Traveling Salesman was rather short and quick. And the Young Electrician who lolled across the car aisle was neither one length nor another, but most inordinately flexible, like a suit of chain armor | Buy | Read |
| Get Carter | Ted Lewis | The rain rained. | Buy | |
| Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon | Charles James Lever | The rain was dashing in torrents against the window-panes, and the wind sweeping in heavy and fitful gusts along the dreary and deserted streets, as a party of three persons sat over their wine, in that stately old pile which once formed the resort of the Irish Members, in College Green, Dublin, and went by the name of Daly's Clubhouse. | Buy | |
| The Fifth Horseman | Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre | The rain, the bitter rain of winter, flayed the window with its silken lash, sending jagged rivulets coursing down its plate-glass surface. The man peered out, across the empty canyons, into the black recesses of the night. He shuddered. | Buy | |
| Kaleidoscope | Danielle Steel | The rains were torrential northeast of Naples on the twenty-fourth of December,1943, and Sam Walker huddled in his foxhole with his rain gear pulled tightly around him. He was twenty-one years old and he had never been in Europe before the war. It was a hell of a way to see the world, and he had seen more than he'd ever wanted. | Buy | |
| Master Humphrey's Clock | Charles Dickens | The reader must not expect to know where I live. | Buy | |
| The Dead Pull Hitter | Alison Gordon | The reading light over my seat didn't work. | Buy | |
| Cleopatra | H Rider Haggard | The recesses of the desolate Libyan mountains that lie behind the temple and city of Abydus, the supposed burying place of the Holy Osiris, a tomb was recently discovered, among the contents of which were the papyrus rolls whereon this history is written. | Buy | |
| The Hunt for Red October | Tom Clancy | The Red October Captain First Rank Marko Ramius of the Soviet Navy was dressed for the Artic conditions normal to the Northern Fleet submarine base at Polyarnyy. Five layers of wool and oilskin enclosed him. A dirty harbor tug pushed his submarine's bow around to the north, facing down the channel. | Buy | |
| And Now Good-Bye | James Hilton | The Reford rail smash was a bad business." | Buy | |
| Life, The Universe And Everything | Douglas Adams | The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was. | Buy | |
| The Warden | Anthony Trollope | The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of _____; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected. | Buy | |
| The Warden | Anthony Trollope | The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of ----; let us call it Barchester. | Buy | |
| The Silver Chalice | Thomas B Costain | The richest man in Antioch, by common report, was Ignatius, the dealer in olive oil. | Buy | |
| The Next Best Thing | John Ralston Saul | The river ferry was a clumsy, wooden affair, low in the water. | Buy | |
| The River | Rumer Godden | The river was in Bengal, India, but for the purpose of this book, these thoughts, it might as easily have been a river in America, in Europe, in England, France, New Zealand or Timbuctoo, though they do not of course have rivers in Timbuctoo. | Buy | |
| Wings | Danielle Steel | The road to O'Malley's Airport was a long, dusty thin trail that seemed to drift first left, then right, and loop lazily around the cornfields. The airport was a small dry patch of land near Good Hope in McDonough County, a hundred and ninety miles southwest of Chicago. | Buy | |
| This Gun Is Still | Frank Gruber | The road was a miserable one. | Buy | |
| Unto This Hour | Tom Wicker | The road was blue with them. | Buy | |
| Loves Music, Loves to Dance | Mary Higgins Clark | The room was dark. He sat in the chair, his arms hugging his legs. It was happening again. Charley wouldn't stay locked in the secret place. Charley insisted on thinking about Erin. Only two more, Charley whispered. Then I'll stop. | Buy | |
| Saturday Night and Sunday Morning | Alan Sillitoe | The rowdy gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables saw Arthur walk unsteadily to the head of the stairs, and though they must all have known that he was dead drunk, and seen the danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him and lead him back to his seat. With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the top-most stair to the bottom. | Buy | |
| Cross of St George | Alexander Kent | The Royal Dockyard at Portsmouth, usually a place of noise and constant movement, was as quiet as the grave. | Buy | |
| The Moneyman | Thomas B Costain | The Royal Standard of France waved above the towers of the Louvre. It was an unusual sight, for the King bore Paris no love and seldom came there. | Buy | |
| East of Eden | John Ernst Steinbeck | The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay. | Buy | |
| White Oleander | Janet Fitch | The Santa Anas blew hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon. | Buy | |
| The Etruscan Bull | Frank Gruber | The savings and loan bank occupied the first two floors of the new high-rise building and the upper floors were leased to desirable tenants--those able to pay the rent, which was high even for Beverly Hills. | Buy | |
| Pudd'nhead Wilson | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson's Landing, on
the Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day's journey, per
steamboat, below St. Louis. In 1830 it was a snug little collection of modest one- and two-story frame dwellings whose whitewashed exteriors were almost concealed from sight by climbing tangles of rose-vines, honeysuckles and morning-glories. | Buy | |
| Under the Andes | Rex Stout | The scene was not exactly new to me | Buy | |
| Casino Royale | Ian Fleming | The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. | Buy | |
| Scenes from Provincial Life | William Cooper | The school at which I was science-master was desirably situated, right in the centre of the town. | Buy | |
| Jude the Obscure | Thomas Hardy | The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. | Buy | |
| The Alibi | Sandra Brown | The scream rent the air-conditioned silence of the hotel corridor. | Buy | |
| Shibumi | Trevanian | The screen flashed 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 ... then the projector was switched off, and the lights came up in recessed sconces along the walls of the private viewing room. | Buy | |
| The Alexandria Quartet | Lawrence George Durrell | The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. | Buy | |
| The Field of Vision | Wright Morris | The seat in the shady side of the bullring made McKee cold. | Buy | |
| Ramshackle Roost | Jane Flory | The second week of June 1922 was too early for a heat wave, but early or not, it certainly was scorching. | Buy | |
| The Man with the Golden Gun | Ian Fleming | The Secret Service holds much that is kept secret even from very senior officers in the organization. Only M. and his Chief of Staff know absolutely everything there is to know. The latter is responsible for keeping the Top Secret record known as The War Book so that, in the event of the death of both of them, the whole story, apart from what is available to individual Sections and Stations, would be available to their successors. | Buy | |
| The Firm | John Grisham | The senior partner studied the resume for the hundredth time and again found nothing he disliked about Mitchell Y. McDeere, at least not on paper. He had the brains, the ambition, the good looks. And he was hungry; with his background, he had to be. He was married, and that was mandatory. | Buy | |
| Rather A Vicious Gentleman | Frank McAuliffe | The sergeant said, "Just a minute, sir." | Buy | |
| The Rescue | Joseph Conrad | The shallow sea that foams and murmurs on the shores of the thousand islands, big and little, which make up the Malay Archipelago has been for centuries the scene of adventurous undertakings. | Buy | |
| Bitter Sage | Frank Gruber | The sheriff unlocked the cell door and pulled it open. | Buy | |
| Free | Todd Komarnicki | The shots were loud and dull, like a stripper I used to know. | Buy | |
| Neuromancer | William Gibson | The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. | Buy | |
| The Briar King | J. Gregory Keyes (Greg Keyes) | The sky cracked and lightning fell through its crooked seams. With it came a black sleet tasting of smoke, copper, and brimstone. With it came a howling like a gale from hell. | Buy | |
| Mixed Blessings | Danielle Steel | The sky was a brilliant blue, and the day was hot and still as Diana Goode stepped out of the limousine with her father. The angles of her face were softer than usual beneath a haze of creamy ivory veil, and the heavy satin dress whooshed softly as the driver helper her out and settled it around her. She beamed at her father, standing outside the church, and then she closed her eyes, trying to remember absolutely every detail of the moment. She had never been this happy in her life. Everything was perfect. | Buy | |
| Call It Sleep | Henry Roth | The small white steamer, Peter Stuyvesant, that delivered the immigrants from the stench and throb of the steerage to the stench and throb of New York tenements, rolled slightly on the water beside the stone quay in the lee of the weathered barracks and the new brick buildings of Ellis island. | Buy | |
| Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris | Paul William Gallico | The small, slender woman with apple-red cheeks, graying hair, and shrewd, almost naughty eyes sat with her face pressed against the cabin window of the BEA Viscount morning flight from London to Paris. | Buy | |
| The Black Ice | Michael Connelly | The smoke carried up from the Cahuenga Pass and flattened beneath a layer of cool crossing air. | Buy | |
| Eyeless in Gaza | Aldous Huxley | The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories. | Buy | |
| The Masters | C P Snow | The snow had only just stopped, and in the court below my rooms all sounds were dulled. | Buy | |
| The Secret History | Donna Tartt | The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. | Buy | |
| Blue Camellia | Frances Parkinson Keyes | The snow, which had fallen quietly at first, was now pelting against the windowpanes, driven by a wicked wind; the storm was rapidly assuming proportions of a blizzard. | Buy | |
| Daddy | Danielle Steel | The snowflakes fell in big white clusters, clinging together like a drawing from a fairy tale, just like in the books Sarah used to read to the children. She sat at the typewriter, looking out the window, watching snow cover the lawn, hanging from the trees like lace, and she completely forgot the story she'd been chasing around in her head since early that morning. | Buy | |
| Iron Heel | Jack London | The soft summer wind stirs the redwoods, and Wild-Water ripples sweet cadences over its mossy stones. There are butterflies in the sunshine, and from everywhere arises the drowsy hum of bees. It is so quiet and peaceful, and I sit here, and ponder, and am restless. It is the quiet that makes me restless. It seems unreal. All the world is quiet, but it is the quiet before the storm. I strain my ears, and all my senses, for some betrayal of that impending storm. Oh, that it may not be premature! That it may not be premature! | Buy | |
| Heartland | Wilson Harris | The solid morning mist began to disintegrate and dark shoulders of rock appeared in the water giving the illusion of swimmers, reaching from bank to bank, dispersing from themselves wreaths of snakes with imperceptible strokes. | Buy | |
| Heartbeat | Danielle Steel | The sound of an ancient typewriter sang out staccato in the silence of the room, as a cloud of blue smoke hung over the corner where Bill Thigpen was working. Glasses shoved up high on his head, coffee in styrofoam cups hovering dangerously near the edge of the desk, ashtrays brimming, his face intense, blue eyes squinting at what he was writing. Faster, faster, a glance over his shoulder at the clock ticking relentlessly behind him. | Buy | |
| Mirror Image | Danielle Steel | The sound of the birds outside was muffled by the heavy brocade curtains of Henderson Manor, as Olivia Henderson pushed aside a lock of long dark hair, and continued her careful inventory of her father's china. It was a warm summer day and, as usual, her sister had gone off somewhere. | Buy | |
| Malice | Danielle Steel | The sounds of the organ music drifted up to the Wedgwood blue sky. Birds sang in the trees, and in the distance, a child called out to a friend on a lazy summer morning. | Buy | |
| Peachtree Road | Anne Rivers Siddons | The South killed Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable on the day she was born. It just took her until now to die. It was a textbook murder, classical in concept, faultless is execution; a work of art, really, as such things go. And no wonder. It's what we do best, kill our women. Or maim them. Or make monsters of them, which may be the worst of all. | Buy | |
| E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial Storybook | William Kotzwinkle | The spaceship floated gently, anchored by a beam of lavender light to the earth below. Round in shape and glowing warmly, it looked like a gigantic old Christmas tree ornament fallen from the sky. The ship landed on Earth purposefully, the intelligence commanding it beyond navigational error. Yet an error was about to be made . . . | Buy | |
| The Fighting Chance | Robert William Chambers | The speed of the train slackened; a broad tidal river flashed into sight below the trestle, spreading away on either hand through yellowing level meadows. And now, above the roaring undertone of the cars, from far ahead floated back the treble bell-notes of the locomotive; there came a gritting vibration of the brakes; slowly, more slowly the cars glided to a creaking standstill beside a sun-scorched platform gay with the bright flutter of sunshades and summer gowns. | Buy | |
| Final Cut | Eric Wright | The St. Lawrence Market in Toronto consists of two buildings separated by Front Street. | Buy | |
| The Headless Horseman | Capt. Mayne Reid (Thomas Mayne Reid) | The stag of Texas, reclining in midnight lair, is startled from his slumbers by the hoofstroke of a horse. | Buy | |
| The Amazing Interlude | Mary Roberts Rinehart | The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for most of us but one setting. | Buy | |
| White Noise | Don DeLillo | The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. | Buy | |
| In Gallant Company | Alexander Kent | The stiff offshore wind, which had backed slightly to the north-west during the day, swept across New York's naval anchorage, bringing no release from the chilling cold and the threat of more snow. | Buy | |
| The Courts of the Morning | John Buchan | The story begins, so far as I am concerned, in the August of 19--, when I had for the second time a lease of the forest of Machray. | Buy | |
| The Turn of the Screw | Henry James | The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happen to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. | Buy | |
| In Our Time | Ernest Hemingway | The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming. | Buy | |
| The Invisible Man | H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells) | The stranger came early in February one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. | Buy | |
| The Invisible Man | H G Wells | The stranger came early in February one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand | Buy | |
| K | Mary Roberts Rinehart | The Street stretched away north and south in two lines of ancient houses that seemed to meet in the distance. | Buy | |
| Old Wine and New | George Warwick Deeping | The street was as black as a tunnel. | Buy | |
| The Reptile Room | Lemony Snicket | The stretch of road that leads out of the city, past Hazy Harbor and into the town of Tedia, is perhaps the most unpleasant in the world. | Buy | |
| The Picture Of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde | The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. | Buy | |
| The Pathfinder | James Fenimore Cooper | The sublimity connected with vastness, is familiar to every eye. | Buy | |
| The Man Who Was Thursday | Gilbert Keith Chesterton | The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged a cloud of sunset. | Buy | |
| The Man Who Was Thursday | G K Chesterton | The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. | Buy | |
| Flower Fables | Louisa May Alcott | The summer moon shone brightly down upon the sleeping earth, while far away from mortal eyes danced the Fairy folk. | Buy | |
| The Hotel New Hampshire | John Irving | The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born - we weren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Fanny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg. | Buy | |
| The Hotel New Hampshire | John Irving | The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born--we weren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny; the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg. | Buy | |
| The Cat in the Hat | Dr. Seuss (pseudonym of Theodore Seuss Geisel) | The sun did not shine. It was too wet too play. So we sat in the house All that cold, cold, wet day. | Buy | |
| Secrets | Danielle Steel | The sun reverberated off the buildings with the brilliance of a handful of diamonds cast against an iceberg, the shimmering white was blinding, as Sabina lay naked on a deck chair in the heat of the Los Angeles sun. She lay sparkling and oiled, warmed to a honey brown by the relentless sun. | Buy | |
| The Light Fantastic | Terry Pratchett | The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure that it was worth all the effort. | Buy | |
| Pilgrim's Inn | Elizabeth Goudge | The sun shining through the uncurtained east window woke Sally to a new day. | Buy | |
| The Carpetbaggers | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | The sun was beginning to fall from the sky into the white Nevada desert as Reno came up beneath me. I banked the Waco slowly and headed due east. I could hear the wind pinging the biplane's struts and I grinned to myself. The old man would really hit the roof when he saw this plane. But he wouldn't have anything to complain about. It didn't cost him anything. I won it in a crap game. | Buy | |
| Mary Marie | Eleanor Hodgman Porter | The sun was slowly setting in the west, casting golden beams of light into the somber old room. | Buy | |
| Trainspotting | Irving Welsh | The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. | Buy | |
| American Pastoral | Philip Roth | The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city's old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the anomalous face. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Sword | Bernard Cornwell | The tall man on horseback was a killer. | Buy | |
| Sounder | William H Armstrong | The tall man stood at the edge of the porch. The roof sagged from the two rough posts which held it, almost closing the gap between his head and the rafters. The dim light from the cabin window cast long equal shadows from man and posts. A boy stood nearby shivering in the cold October wind. He ran his fingers back and forth over the broad crown of the head of a coon dog named Sounder. | Buy | |
| Juggernaut | Desmond Bagley | The telephone call came when I was down by the big circular pool chatting up the two frauleins I had cut out of the herd. | Buy | |
| Valley of the Dolls | Jacqueline Susann | The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived. New York was steaming--an angry concrete animal caught unawares in an unseasonable hot spell. But she didn't mind the heat or the littered midway called Times Square. She thought New York was the most exciting city in the world. | Buy | |
| It | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years--if it ever did end--began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain. | Buy | |
| No Time for Sergeants | Mac Hyman | The thing was, we had gone fishing that day and Pa had wore himself out with it the way he usually did when he went fishing. | Buy | |
| The Choirboys | Joseph Wambaugh | The Third Marines were bleeding and dying for three nameless hills north of Khe Sanh in 1967. | Buy | |
| The Cask of Amontillado | Edgar Allan Poe | The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. | Buy | |
| California Gold | John Jakes | The three hanged men turned in the wind as the timbers of the gibbet creaked and the blizzard covered the shabby coats of the dead with shrouds of white. The boy was frightened of the three, with their closed eyes, fishy white skin, purple throats. He knew them all: O'Murphy, Caslin, and Uncle Dave, Pa's brother. They frightened him nearly as much as this sudden storm. | Buy | |
| The Path of the King | John Buchan | The three of us in that winter camp in the Selkirks were talking the slow aimless talk of wearied men. | Buy | |
| The Lifted Veil | George Eliot | The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many months. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence. | Buy | |
| The Time Machine | H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells) | The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. | Buy | |
| The Time Machine | H G Wells | The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us | Buy | |
| Special Delivery | Danielle Steel | The tires of the red Ferrari squealed, as it came around the corner and dove neatly into the space where Jack Watson always parked it. It was in the parking lot of his Beverly Hills store, Julie's. | Buy | |
| Lewis Rand | Mary Johnston | The tobacco-roller and his son pitched their camp beneath a gum tree upon the edge of the wood. | Buy | |
| Babbit | Sinclair Lewis | The tower of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches but frankly and beautifully office-buildings. | Buy | |
| Lake Wobegon Days | Garrison Keillor | The town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, lies on the shore against Adams Hill, looking east across the blue-green water to the dark woods. From the south, the highway aims for the lake, bends hard left by the magnificent concrete Grecian grain silos, and eases over a leg of the hill past the SLOW CHILDREN sign, bringing the traveler in on Main Street toward the town's one traffic light, which is almost always green. A few surviving elms shade the street. | Buy | |
| The Young Lions | Irwin Shaw | The town shone in the snowy twilight like a Christmas window, with the electric railway's lights tiny and festive at the foot of the white slope, among the muffled winter hills of the Tyrol. | Buy | |
| The Wedding | Danielle Steel | The traffic moved along the Santa Monica Freeway at a snail's pace, as Allegra Steinberg lay her head back against the seat of the midnight blue Mercedes 300. At this rate, it was going to take forever. | Buy | |
| The Silver Horde | Rex Beach | The trail to Kalvik leads down from the northward mountains over the tundra which flanks the tide flats, then creeps out upon the salt ice of the river and across to the village. It boasts no travel in summer, but by winter an occasional toil-worn traveller may be seen issuing forth from the Great Country beyond, bound for the open water; while once in thirty days the mail-team whirls out of the forest to the south, pauses one night to leave word of the world, and then is swallowed up in the silent hills. Kalvik, to be sure, is not much of a place, being hidden away from the main-travelled routes to the interior and wholly unknown except to those interested in the fisheries. | Buy | |
| The Net | Rex Beach | The train from Palermo was late. Already long, shadowy fingers were reaching down the valleys across which the railroad track meandered. Far to the left, out of an opalescent sea, rose the fairy-like Lipari Islands, and in the farthest distance Stromboli lifted its smoking cone above the horizon. On the landward side of the train, as it reeled and squealed along its tortuous course, were gray and gold Sicilian villages perched high against the hills or drowsing among fields of artichoke and sumac and prickly pear. | Buy | |
| The Good-Natured Lady | J E Buckrose | The train in which Catherine journeyed was one in which it would be a delight for the worn-out dollar-snatcher of any nationality to travel. | Buy | |
| The Thurber Carnival | James Thurber | The train was twenty minutes late, we found out when we bought our tickets, so we sat down on a bench in the little waiting room of the Cornwall Bridge station. It was too hot outside in the sun. This midsummer Saturday had got off to a sulky start, and now, at three in the afternoon, it sat, sticky and restive, in our laps. | Buy | |
| Israel Potter | Herman Melville | The traveller who at the present day is content to travel in the good old Asiatic style, neither rushed along by a locomotive, nor dragged by a stage-coach; who is willing to enjoy hospitalities at far-scattered farmhouses, instead of paying his bill at an inn; who is not to be frightened by any amount of loneliness, or to be deterred by the roughest roads or the highest hills; such a traveller in the eastern part of Berkshire, Mass., will find ample food for poetic reflection in the singular scenery of a country, which, owing to the ruggedness of the soil and its lying out of the track of all public conveyances, remains almost as unknown to the general tourist the interior of Bohemia. | Buy | |
| The Bourne Identity | Robert Ludlum | The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out an impenetrable swamp. The waves rose to goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind. Everywhere there were the sounds of inanimate pain, wood straining against wood, ropes twisting, stretched to the breaking point. The animal was dying. | Buy | |
| The Lady in the Lake | Raymond Chandler | The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side. | Buy | |
| Tapestry of Spies | Stephen Hunter | The trial of the assassin Benny Lal in the old courthouse at Moulmein, lower Burma, in February of 1931, caused a bit of a stir in its own day, but its memory has not lingered. | Buy | |
| The Radetzky March | Joseph Roth | The Trottas were a young dynasty. Their progenitor had been knighted after the Battle of Solferino. He was a Slovene. Sipolje--the German name for his native village--became his title of nobility. Fate had elected him for a special deed. But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him. | Buy | |
| The Great Impersonation | Edward Phillips Oppenheim | The trouble from which great events were to come began when Everard Dominey, who had been fighting his way through the scrub for the last three quarters of an hour towards those thin, spiral wisps of smoke, urged his pony to a last despairing effort and came crashing through the great oleander shrub to pitch forward on his head in the little clearing. It developed the next morning, when he found himself for the first time for many months on the truckle bed, between linen sheets, with a cool, bamboo-twisted roof between him and the relentless sun. He raised himself a little in the bed. | Buy | |
| The Great Impersonation | E Phillips Oppenheim | The trouble from which great events were to come began when Everard Dominey, who had been fighting his way through the scrub for the last three quarters of an hour towards those thing, spiral wisps of smoke, urged his pony to a last despairing effort and came crashing through the great oleander shrub to pitch forward on his head in the little clearing. | Buy | |
| Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy | John Le Carre | The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn't dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood's at all. | Buy | |
| Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy | John Le Carré | The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn't dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood's at all. | Buy | |
| The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep | Lawrence Block | The Turks have dreary jails. | Buy | |
| The Dead Zone | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | The two things Sarah remembered about that night later were his run of luck at the Wheel of Fortune and the mask. But as time passed, years of it, it was the mask she thought about--when she could bring herself to think about that horrible night at all. | Buy | |
| The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing | The two women were alone in the London flat. | Buy | |
| Parade's End | Ford Madox Ford | The two young men--they were of the English public official class--sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage. The leather straps to the windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne. The compartment smelt faintly, hygienically of admirable varnish; the train ran as smoothly--Tietjens remember thinking--as British gilt-edged securities. It travelled fast; yet had it swayed or jolted over the rail joints, except at the curve before Tonbridge or over the points at Ashford where these eccentricities are expected and allowed for, Macmaster, Tietjens felt certain, would have written to the company. Perhaps he would even have written to the Times. | Buy | |
| Frederic and Elfrida | Jane Austen | The Uncle of Elfrida was the Father of Frederic; in other words, they were first cousins by the Father's side. | Buy | |
| The Shape of Things to Come | H G Wells | The unexpected death of Dr. Philip Raven at Geneva in November 1930 was a very grave loss to the League of Nations Secretariat. | Buy | |
| A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | The ungentle laws and customs touched upon in this tale are historical, and the episodes which are used to illustrate them are also historical. | Buy | |
| The Fifth Horseman | Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre | The unseasonably cold December day drew to a close. Mounds of still-fresh snow, the heritage of the unexpected storm which had swept up the eastern seaboard seventy two hours before, lined the streets of the nation's capital. That snow, and the freezing weather which had followed it, had kept most of the city's 726,000 inhabitants indoors this Sunday afternoon, December 13. | Buy | |
| The Plague | Albert Camus | The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194- at Oran. Everyone agreed that considering their extraordinary character, they were out of place there. For its ordinariness is what strikes one first about the town of Oran, which is merely a large French port on the Algerian coast, headquarters of the prefect of a French department. | Buy | |
| The Pawns Count | Edward Phillips Oppenheim | The usual little crowd was waiting in the lobby of a fashionable London restaurant a few minutes before the popular lunch hour. Pamela Van Teyl, a very beautiful American girl, dressed in the extreme of fashion, which she seemed somehow to justify, directed the attention of her companions to the notice affixed to the wall facing them. | Buy | |
| Audrey | Mary Johnston | The valley lay like a ribbon thrown into the midst of the encompassing hills. The grass which grew there was soft and fine and abundant; the trees which sprang from its dark, rich mould were tall and great of girth. A bright stream flashed through it, and the sunshine fell warm upon the grass and changed the tassels of the maize into golden plumes. | Buy | |
| The Weavers | Sir Gilbert Parker | The village lay in a valley which had been the bed of a great river in the far-off days when Ireland, Wales and Brittany were joined together, and the Thames flowed into the Seine. | Buy | |
| In Cold Blood | Truman Capote | The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there". | Buy | |
| The Devil's Garden | William Babington Maxwell | The village postmaster stood staring at an official envelope that had just been shaken out a mailbag upon the sorting table. It was addressed to himself; and for a few moments his heart beat quicker, with sharp, clean percussions, as if it were trying to imitate the sounds made by two clerks as they plied their stampers on the blocks. Perhaps this envelope contained his fate. | Buy | |
| Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire | J K Rowling | The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it "the Riddle House," even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there. It stood on a hill overlooking the village, some its windows boarded, tiles missing from its roof, and ivy spreading unchecked over its face. Once a fine-looking manor, and easily the largest and grandest building for miles around, the Riddle House was now damp, derelict, and unoccupied. | Buy | |
| Diana: Her True Story | Andrew Morton | The voice on the other end of the telephone line was abrupt and filled with contained excitement. "Go to scrambler" it said. This was not the operations room of a naval warship or a secret room in the White House but my modest office above a restaurant in north London. The scrambler device was duly attached to the standard telephone and the first details emerged of Prince Charles's dismissal of his private secretary, Major-General Sir Christopher Airey. | Buy | |
| Playback | Raymond Chandler | The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn't hear too well what it said--partly because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down. | Buy | |
| Lightning | Danielle Steel | The voices droned around the conference room as Alexandra Parker stretched long legs beneath the huge mahogany table. She jotted a note on a yellow legal pad, and glanced across the table briefly at one of her partners. | Buy | |
| Childhood's End | Arthur C Clarke | The Volcano that had reared Taratua up from the Pacific depths had been sleeping now for half a million years. Yet in a little while, thought Reinhold, the island would be bathed in fires fiercer than any that had attended its birth. | Buy | |
| The Martyred | Richard E. Kim | The war came early one morning in June of 1950, and by the time the North Koreans occupied out capital city, Seoul, we had already left our university, where we were instructors in the History of Human Civilization. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Gold | Bernard Cornwell | The war was lost; not finished, but lost. | Buy | |
| A House in Naples | Peter Rabe | The warm palm of land cupped the water to make a bay, and that's where Naples was. | Buy | |
| The Tower of Babel | Morris L. West | The watcher on the hilltop settled himself against the snarled bole of an olive tree, tested his radio, opened his map case on his knees, focused his field glasses and began a slow meticulous survey from the southern tip of the Lake of Tiberias to the spur of Sha'ar Hagolan, where the Yarmuk River turned southwestward to join the Jordan. | Buy | |
| The Scarlet Plague | Jack London | The way led along upon what had once been the embankment of a railroad. | Buy | |
| . . . And Ladies of the Club | Helen Hooven Santmyer | The Waynesboro Female College in the eighteen fifties and sixties was a fitting subject, along with the Court House, the churches, the "gentlemen's mansions," for a steel engraving of the sort then fashionable,-- | Buy | |
| Captains Courageous | Rudyard Kipling | The weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the fishing-fleet. | Buy | |
| The Terminators | Donald Hamilton | The weather in Bergen was just about what you'd expect at that time of year. | Buy | |
| Five Days in Paris | Danielle Steel | The weather in Paris was unusually warm as Peter Haskell's plane landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The plane taxied neatly to the gate, and a few minutes later, briefcase in hand, Peter was striding through the airport. | Buy | |
| The Road from Coorain | Jill Ker Conway | The western plains of New South Wales are grasslands. Their vast expanse flows for many hundreds of miles beyond the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee rivers until the desert takes over and sweeps inland to the dead heart of the continent. In a good season, if the eyes are turned to the earth on those plains, they see a tapestry of delicate life--not the luxuriant design of a book of hours by any means, but a tapestry nonetheless, designed by a spare modern artist. What grows there hugs the earth firmly with its extended system of roots above which plant life is delicate but determined. After rain there is an explosion of growth. | Buy | |
| The Eye of the World | Robert Jordan | The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of the Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning. | Buy | |
| The White Linen Nurse | Ellen Hallowell Abbott | The White Linen Nurse was so tired that her noble expression ached. | Buy | Read |
| A Woman Called Fancy | Frank Yerby | The Williamsons' farm lay on a hillside so that when it rained the water ran down and away from it. In fifty years it had worn out and starved out the three families who had tried to work it. The Williamsons were the fourth. | Buy | |
| Mission of Gravity | Hal Clement | The wind came across the bay like something living. It tore the surface so thoroughly to shreds that it was hard to tell where the liquid ended and atmosphere began; it tried to raise waves that would have swamped the Bree like a chip, and blew them into impalpable spray before they had risen a foot. | Buy | |
| When the Sacred Ginmill Closes | Lawrence Block | The windows at Morrissey's were painted black. | Buy | |
| The Man from Glengarry | Ralph Connor | The winter had broken early and the Scotch River was running ice-free and full from bank to bank. | Buy | |
| The Queen's Necklace | Alexandre Dumas pere | The winter of 1784, that monster which devoured a sixth of France, we could not see, although he growled at the doors, while at the house of Monsieur de Richelieu, shut in as we were in that warm and comfortable dining-room. | Buy | |
| The Plains of Passage | Jean M Auel | The woman caught a glimpse of movement through the dusty haze ahead and wondered if it was the wolf she had seen loping in front of them earlier. | Buy | |
| Arch of Triumph | Erich Maria Remarque | The woman veered toward Ravic. She walked quickly, but with a peculiar stagger. Ravic first noticed her when she was almost beside him. He saw a pale face, high cheekbones and wide-set eyes. The face was rigid and masklike; it looked hollowed out, and her eyes in the light from the street lamps had an expression of such glassy emptiness that they caught his attention. | Buy | |
| Angels Flight | Michael Connelly | The word sounded alien in his mouth, as if spoken by someone else. | Buy | |
| The 120-Hour Clock | Francis M Nevins | The word went out from North Jersey and crossed the Hudson on phone lines that were checked for bugs three times a day, and filtered down through various layers of impolite society in the boroughs of the City of New York. | Buy | |
| To Have and to Hold | Mary Johnston | The work of the day being over, I say down upon my doorstep, pipe in hand, to rest awhile in the cool of the evening. | Buy | |
| The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. Trisha McFarland discovered this when she was nine years old. | Buy | |
| A Bend in the River | V.S. Naipaul | The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. | Buy | |
| Somebody's Luggage | Charles Dickens | The writer of these humble lines being a Waiter, and having come of a family of Waiters, and owning at the present time five brothers who are all Waiters, and likewise an only sister who is a Waitress, would wish to offer a few words respecting his calling; first having the pleasure of hereby in a friendly manner offering the Dedication of the same unto Joseph, much respected Head Waiter at the Shamjam Coffeehouse, London, E.C., than which an individual more eminently deserving of the name of man, or a more amenable honour to be his own head and heart, whether consideredin the light of a Waiter or regarded as a human being, do not exist. | Buy | |
| Winesburg, Ohio | Sherwood Anderson | The writer, an old man with a white moustache, had some difficulty getting into bed. | Buy | |
| With Fire and Sword | Henryk Sienkiewicz | The year 1647 abounded with omens. Strange signs and portents of disasters appeared on earth and in the skies. | Buy | |
| Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea | Jules Verne | The year 1866 was marked by a strange event, an unexplained and inexplicable occurrence that doubtless no one has yet forgotten. | Buy | |
| A Year in Provence | Peter Mayle | The year began with lunch | Buy | |
| Harrison Bergeron | Kurt Vonnegut Jr | The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal. | Buy | |
| The Bishop's Mantle | Agnes Sligh Turnbull | The young man in the taxi leaned forward. | Buy | |
| U.S.A. | John Roderigo Dos Passos | The young man walks fast by himself through the crowd that thins into the night streets; feet are tired from hours of walking; eyes greedy for warm curve of faces, answering flicker of eyes, the set of a head, the lift of a shoulder, the way hands spread and clench; blood tingles with wants; mind is a beehive of hopes buzzing and stinging; muscles ache for the knowledge of jobs, for the roadmender's pick and shovel work, the fisherman's knack with a hook when he hauls on the slithery net from the rail of the lurching trawler, the swing of a bridgeman's arm as he slings down the whitehot rivet, the engineer's slow grip wise on the throttle, the dirtfarmer's use of his whole body when, whoaing the mules, he yanks the plow from the furrow. The young man walks by himself searching through the crowd with greedy eyes, greedy ears taut to hear, by himself, alone. | Buy | |
| Rebel | Bernard Cornwell | The young man was trapped at the top end of Shockoe Slip where a crowd had gathered in Cary Street. | Buy | |
| The Silver Spoon | John Galsworthy | The young man who, at the end of September, 1924, dismounted from a taxicab in South Square, Westminster, was so unobtrusively American that his driver had some hesitation in asking for double his fare. The young man had no hesitation in refusing it. | Buy | |
| An Indecent Obsession | Colleen McCullough | The young soldier stood looking doubtfully up at the unlabelled entrance to ward X, his kit bag lowered to the ground while he assessed the possibility that this was indeed his ultimate destination. | Buy | |
| Funeral Games | Mary Renault | The ziggurat of Bel-Marduk has been half-ruinous for a century and a half, ever since Xerxes had humbled the gods of rebellious Babylon. | Buy | |
| Sugar Street | Naguib Mahfouz | Their heads were huddled around the brazier, and their hands were spread over its fire: Amina's thin and gaunt, Aisha's stiff, and Umm Hanafi's like the shell of a turtle. | Buy | |
| Christopher and Columbus | Countess Elizabeth von Arnim | Their names were really Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas; but they decided, as they sat huddled together in a corner of the second-class deck of the American liner St. Luke, and watched the dirty water of the Mersey slipping past and the Liverpool landing-stage disappearing into the mist, and felt that it was comfortless and cold, and knew they hadn't got a father or a mother, and remembered that they were aliens, and realised that in from of them lay a great deal of grey, uneasy, dreadfully wet sea, endless stretches of it, days and days of it, with waves on top of it to make them sick and submarines beneath it to kill them if they could, and knew that that hadn't the remotest idea, not the very remotest, what was before them when and if they did get across to the other side, and knew that they were refugees, castaways, derelicts, two wretched little Germans who were neither really Germans nor really English because they so unfortunately, so complicatedly were both,--they decided, looking very calm and determined and sitting very close together beneath the rug their English aunt had given them to put round their miserable alien legs, that what they really were, were Christopher and Columbus, because they were setting out to discover a New World. | Buy | |
| The Red Tent | Anita Diamant | Their stories began with the day that my father appeared. Rachel came running into camp, knees flying, bellowing like a calf separated from its mother. But before anyone could scold her for acting like a wild boy, she launched into a breathless yarn about a stranger at the well, her words spilling out like water into sand. | Buy | |
| Mistress Wilding | Rafael Sabatini | Then drink it thus, cried the rash young fool, and splashed the contents of his cup full into the face of Mr. Wilding even as that gentleman, on his feet, was proposing to drink to the eyes of the young fool's sister. | Buy | |
| White Light | Rudy Rucker | Then it rained for a month. | Buy | |
| The Alienist | Caleb Carr | Theodore is in the ground. | Buy | |
| Notes From a Small Island | Bill Bryson | There are certain idiosyncratic notions that you quitely come to accept when you live for a long time in Britain. | Buy | |
| Sunday under Three Heads | Charles Dickens | There are few things from which I derive greater pleasure, than walking through some of the principal streets of London on a fine Sunday, in summer, and watching the cheerful faces of the lively groups with which they are thronged. | Buy | |
| Eugenie Grandet | Honore de Balzac | There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step. | Buy | |
| Eugenie Grandet | Honore de Balzac | There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step. | Buy | |
| The Witch Finder | Loren D Estleman | There are mornings, just after dawn on unseasonably hot June days when every breath you draw is filtered through forty pounds of wet laundry, that you welcome the clear cold icicle of the telephone ringing. | Buy | |
| The Chimes | Charles Dickens | There are not many people - and it is desireable that a story-teller and a story-reader should establish a mutual understanding as soon as possible, I beg it to be noticed that I cinfine this observation neither to young people nor to little people, but extend it to all conditions of people: little and big, young and old: yet growing up, or already growing down again - there are not, I say many people who would care to sleep in a church. | Buy | |
| Between the Conceits from Grey Area and Other Stories | Will Self | There are only eight people in London and fortunately I am one of them. | Buy | |
| She | H Rider Haggard | There are some events of which each circumstance and surrounding detail seem to be graven on the memory in such a fashion that we cannot forget them. | Buy | |
| Mary Barton | Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell | There are some fields near Manchester, well known to the inhabitants as "Green Heys Fields," through which runs a public footpath to a little village about two miles distant. | Buy | |
| The Watch That Ends the Night | Hugh MacLennan | There are some stories into which the reader should be led gently, and I think this may be one of them. | Buy | |
| Pierre | Herman Melville | There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. | Buy | |
| The Bridges of Madison County | Robert James Waller | There are songs that come from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. | Buy | |
| The Hours | Michael Cunningham | There are still the flowers to buy. Clarisa feigns exasperation
(though she loves doing errands like this), leaves Sally cleaning
the bathroom, and runs out, promising to be back in half an hour. It is New York City. It is the end of the twentieth century. | Buy | |
| Jenny Villiers | J B Priestly | There are two ways into the famous Green Room of the Theatre Royal, Barton Spa. | Buy | |
| The Cassini Division | Ken MacLeod | There are, still, photographs of the woman who gate-crashed the party on the observation deck of the Casa Azores, one evening in the early summer of 2303. | Buy | |
| Tomorrow Will Be Better | Betty Smith | There couldn't be a colder--lonelier place in the whole world, thought Margy Shannon, than a deserted Brooklyn Street on a Saturday night. | Buy | |
| Without Armor | James Hilton | There died on the 12th inst. at Roone's Hotel, Carrigole, Co. Cork, where he had been staying for some time, Mr. Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill, in his forty-ninth year. | Buy | |
| The Good Companions | J B Priestly | There far below, is the knobbly backbone of England, the Pennine Range. | Buy | |
| The Sky and the Forest | C S Forester | There had been much rain during the night, and the morning air was still saturated with moisture, heavy and oppressive, and yet with a suspicion of chill about it, enough to make flies sluggish and men and women slow in their movements. | Buy | |
| The Man Who Was Not With It | Herbert Gold | There he is on the midway, Grack the Frenchie, talking for his counterstore or his zoo while the loudspeaker clamored under his come-on with a hee hee hee and a ho ho ho. | Buy | |
| Woodstock | Walter Dill Scott | There is a handsome parish church in the town of Woodstock,--I am told so, at least, for I never saw it, having scarce time, when at the place, to view the magnificence of Blenheim, its painted halls and tapestried bowers, and then return in due season to dine in hall with my learned friend, the provost of ----; being one of those occasions on which a man wrongs himself extremely, if he lets his curiosity interfere with his punctuality. | Buy | |
| When a Man's a Man | Harold Bell Wright | There is a land where a man, to live, must be a man. | Buy | |
| Cry the Beloved Country | Alan Paton | There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass covered and rolling and they are lovely beyond any singing of it | Buy | |
| The Turmoil | Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) | There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke. | Buy | |
| The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe | Douglas Adams | There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. | Buy | |
| The Tenth Man | Graham Henry Greene | There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double. | Buy | |
| Second Foundation | Isaac Asimov | There is much more that the Encyclopedia has to say on the subject of the Mule and his Empire but almost all of it is not germane to the issue at immediate hand, and most of it is considerably too dry for our purposes in any case. | Buy | |
| Elsie Venner | Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr | There is nothing in New England corresponding at all to the feudal aristocracies of the Old World. | Buy | |
| The Closing of the American Mind | Allan David Bloom | There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. | Buy | |
| When Bad Things Happen to Good People | Harold S. Kushner | There is only one question which really matters: why do bad things happen to good people? | Buy | |
| The King's Own | Captain Frederick Marryat | There is perhaps no event in the annals of our history which excited more alarm at the time of its occurrence, or has since been the subject of more general interest, than the Mutiny at the Nore, in the year 1797. Forty thousand men, to whom the nation looked for defence from its surrounding enemies, and in steadfast reliance upon whose bravery it lay down every night in tranquillity, - men who had dared everything for their king and country, and in whose breasts patriotism, although suppressed for the time, could never be extinguished, - irritated by ungrateful neglect on the one hand, and by seditious advisers on the other, turned the guns which they had so often manned in defence of the English flag against their own countrymen and their own home, and, with all the acrimony of feeling ever attending family quarrels, seemed determined to sacrifice the nation and themselves, rather than listen to the dictates of reason and of conscience. | Buy | |
| Sketches of Young Couples | Charles Dickens | There is to be a wedding this morning at the corner house in the terrace. | Buy | |
| Victory | Joseph Conrad | There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as "black diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property. | Buy | |
| Candide | Voltaire | There lived in Westphalia, at the country seat of Baron Thunder-ten- tronckh, a young lad blessed by nature with the most agreeable manner. You could read his character in his face. He combined sound judgement with unaffected simplicity; and, I suppose, was why he was called _____. the old family servants suspected that he was the son of the Baron's sister by a worthy gentleman of that neighbourhood, whom the young lady would never agree to marry because he could only claim seventy-one quarterings, the rest of the family tree having suffered from the ravages of time. | Buy | |
| Nicholas Nickleby | Charles Dickens | There once lived, in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby: a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason. | Buy | |
| The Phantom Tollbooth | Norton Juster | There was a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always. | Buy | |
| Ramage's Diamond | Dudley Pope | There was a faint smell of oil, turpentine and beeswax in the shop, and while an assistant scurried off to fetch the owner Ramage glanced at the sporting guns in the racks round the walls and then at the pairs of pistols nestling in their mahogany cases which almost covered one end of the counter. | Buy | |
| The Ill Wind Contract | Philip Atlee | There was a hint of snow in the air as I drove back into the Ozark Mountains, headed for my remote eyrie. | Buy | |
| Delta of Venus: Erotica | Anais Nin | There was a Hungarian adventurer who had astonishing beauty, infallible charm, grace, the powers of a trained actor, culture, knowledge of many tongues, aristocratic manners. Beneath all of this was a genius for intrigue, for slipping out of difficulties, for moving in and out of countries. | Buy | |
| The Hollow Hills | Mary Stewart | There was a lark singing somewhere high above. Light fell dazzling against my closed eyelids, and with it the song, like a distant dance of water. I opened my eyes. | Buy | |
| The Common Law | Robert William Chambers | There was a long, brisk, decisive ring at the door. He continued working. After an interval the bell rang again, briefly, as though the light touch on the electric button had lost its assurance. | Buy | |
| The Bottle Imp | Robert Louis Stevenson | There was a man in the island of Hawaii, whom I shall call Keawe; for the truth is, he still lives, and his name must be kept secret; but the place of his birth was not far from Honaunau, where the bones of Keawe the Great lie hidden in a cave. | Buy | |
| The Worm Ouroboros | Eric Rucker Eddison | There was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old low house in Wasdale, set in a gray old garden where yew-trees flourished that had seen Vikings in Copeland in their seedling time. | Buy | |
| The Island Nights Entertainments | Robert Louis Stevenson | There was a man of the Island of Hawaii, whom I shall call Keawe; for the truth is, he still lives, and his name must be kept secret; but the place of his birth was not far from Honaunau, where the bones of Keawe the Great lie hidden in a cave | Buy | |
| Their Yesterdays | Harold Bell Wright | There was a man. And it happened--as such things often so happen--that this man we went back into his days that were gone. Again and again and again he went back. Even as every man, even as you and I, so this man went back into his Yesterdays. | Buy | |
| Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah | Richard Bach | There was a Master come unto the earth, born in the holy land of Indiana, raised in the mystical hills east of Fort Wayne. | Buy | |
| Dolores | Jacqueline Susann | There was a mean chill in the air as Air Force One began its slow approach toward Washington. Although the plane was warm, the occupants could almost sense the dankness below. Dolores shivered and folded her arms about herself and stared at the lights below . . . the thousands of tiny cars that moved like an army of lemmings through the city. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Honour | Bernard Cornwell | There was a secret that would win the war for France. | Buy | |
| The Odessa File | Frederick Forsyth | There was a thin robin's-egg-blue dawn coming up over Tel Aviv when the intelligence analyst finished typing his report. | Buy | |
| Oh, Money! Money! | Eleanor Hodgman Porter | There was a thoughtful frown on the face of the man who was the possessor of twenty million dollars. | Buy | |
| Debt of Honor | Tom Clancy | There was a university somewhere in the Midwest, Jack had once heard on the radio, which had an instrument package designed to go inside a tornado. | Buy | |
| The Dispossessed | Ursula Le Guin | There was a wall. | Buy | |
| The Late Mrs. Null | Frank R Stockton | There was a wide entrance-gate to the old family mansion of Midbranch, but it was never opened to admit the family or visitors; although occasionally a load of wood, drawn by two horses and two mules, came between its tall chestnut posts, and was taken by a roundabout way among the trees to a spot at the back of the house, where the chips of several generations of sturdy wood-choppers had formed a ligneous soil deeper than the arable surface of any portion of the nine hundred and fifty acres which formed the farm of Midbranch. | Buy | |
| The Luck of Roaring Camp | Bret Harte | There was commotion in Roaring Camp. It could not have been a fight, for in 1850 that was not novel enough to have called together the entire settlement. | Buy | |
| The Horse Whisperer | Nicholas Evans | There was death at its beginning as there would be death again at its end. Though whether is was some fleeting shadow of this that passed acroess the girl's dreams and woke her on that least likely of mornings she would never know. All she knew, when she opened her eyes, was that the world was somehow altered. | Buy | |
| The Silmarillion | J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien) | There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. | Buy | |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. | Buy | |
| The Golden Hawk | Frank Yerby | There was no wind in all that sweep of sky. | Buy | |
| The Voyage of the Dawn Treader | C S Lewis | There was once a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. | Buy | |
| Dog Soldiers | Robert Stone | There was only one bench in the shade and Converse went for it, although it was already occupied. | Buy | |
| The Country of the Pointed Firs | Sarah Orne Jewett | There was something about the coast of Dunnet which made it seem more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine. | Buy | |
| The Fallen Sparrow | Dorothy B Hughes | There was the heat. | Buy | |
| Fear of Flying | Erica Jong | There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. | Buy | |
| To Say Nothing of the Dog | Connie Willis | There were five of us - Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger. | Buy | |
| Three Men in a Boat | Jerome K Jerome | There were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency | Buy | |
| The Betrayers | Donald Hamilton | There were no pretty girls with leis to meet me at the Honolulu International Airport, but a greeter-type lady handed me a glass of pineapple juice when I got inside the terminal. | Buy | |
| The Dogs of War | Frederick Forsyth | There were no stars that night on the bush airstrip, nor any moon; just the West African darkness wrapping round the scattered groups like warm, wet velvet. The cloud cover was lying hardly off the tops of the iroko trees, and the waiting men prayed it would stay a while longer to shield them from the bombers. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Devil | Bernard Cornwell | There were sixteen men and only twelve mules. | Buy | |
| One Increasing Purpose | Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson | There were three brothers Paris: Andrew, Charles, Simon. | Buy | |
| All Through the Night | Mary Higgins Clark | There were twenty-two days to go before Christmas, but Lenny was doing his Christmas shopping early this year. | Buy | |
| More Adventures of the Great Brain | John D Fitzgerald | There were two good reasons for the people in Adenville to celebrate Christmas in 1896 besides the birth of Jesus Christ. | Buy | |
| The Little Country | Charles de Lint | There were two things Janey Little loved best in the world: music and books, and not necessarily in that order. | Buy | |
| The Doctor | Ralph Connor | There were two ways by which one could get to the Old Stone Mill. One, from the sideroad by a lane which, edged with grassy, flower-decked banks, wound between snake fences, along which straggled irregular clumps of hazel and blue beech, dogwood and thorn bushes, and beyond which stretched on one side fields of grain just heading out this bright June morning, and on the other side a long strip of hay fields of mixed timothy and red clover, generous of colour and perfume, which ran along the snake fence till it came to a potato patch which, in turn, led to an orchard where the lane began to drop down to the Mill valley. | Buy | |
| Starplex | Robert J Sawyer | There would be hell to pay. | Buy | |
| Different Seasons | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | There's a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America. I guess--I'm the guy who can get it for you. | Buy | |
| He Sees You When You're Sleeping | Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark | There's nothing worse than listening to the sounds of preparations for a great party, knowing that you're not invited. It's even worse when the party is located in heaven, Sterling Brooks thought to himself. | Buy | |
| The Parisian Affair | Nick Carter | There's something about a graveyard, even one in a city as bright and bustling as Paris, that makes all your senses just a little more alert. | Buy | |
| Charlie and the Chocolate Factory | Roald Dahl | These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr. Bucket. | Buy | |
| Battle Cry | Leon Uris | They call me Mac. The name's unimportant. You can best identify me by the six chevrons, three up and three down, and by that row of hashmarks. Thirty years in the United States Marine Corps. | Buy | |
| City of Ice | John Farrow | They called themselves Wolverines. | Buy | |
| The Ipcress File | Len Deighton | They came through on the hot line at about half past two in the afternoon. | Buy | |
| The Trojan Hearse | Richard S Prather | They dug up Johnny Troy that day. | Buy | |
| The Partner | John Grisham | They found him in Ponta Pora, a pleasant little town in Brazil, on the border of Paraguay, in a land still known as the Frontier. | Buy | |
| The Burden of Proof | Scott Turow | They had been married for thirty-one years, and the following spring, full of resolved and a measure of hope, he would marry again. But that day, on a late afternoon near the end of March, Mr. Alejandro Stern had returned home and, with his attached case and garment bag still in hand, called out somewhat absently from the front entry for Clara, his wife. He was fifty-six years old, stout and bald, and never particularly goodlooking, and he found himself in a mood of intense preoccupation. | Buy | |
| August 1914 | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | They left the village in the clear dawn light. As the sun rose the mountains were dazzling white with dark blue hollows, every indentation could be seen, and they looked so close that a stranger might have thought them a two hours' drive away. | Buy | |
| Red Storm Rising | Tom Clancy | They moved swiftly, silently, with purpose, under a crystalline, star-filled night in western Siberia. They were Muslims, though one could scarcely have known it from their speech, which was Russian, though inflected with the singsong Azerbaijani accent that wrongly struck the senior members of the engineering staff as entertaining. The three of them had just completed a complex task in the truck and train yards, the opening of hundreds of loading valves. Ibrahim Tolkaze was their leader, though he was not in front. | Buy | |
| Valhalla Rising | Clive Eric Cussler | They moved through the morning mist like ghosts, silent and eerie in phantom ships. Tall, serpentine prows arched gracefully on bow and stern, crowned with intricately carved dragons, teeth bared menacingly in a growl as if their eyes were piercing the vapor in search of victims. Meant to incite fear into the crew's enemies, the dragons were also believed to be protection against the evil spirits that lived in the sea. | Buy | |
| The Passions of the Mind | Irving Stone | They moved up the trail vigorously, their slim young figures in rhythmic cadence. | Buy | |
| Figures of Earth | James Branch Cabell | They of Poictesme narrate that in the old days, when miracles were as common as fruit pies, young Manuel was a swineherd, living modestly in attendance upon the miller's pigs. | Buy | |
| The Unconquered | Ben Ames Williams | They rode at a footpace, side by side, threading a way among the scuppernongs, and Travis Currain studied the neglected vines, deciding what must be done to bring them back to full productivity. | Buy | |
| Wildtrack | Bernard Cornwell | They said I'd never walk again. | Buy | |
| Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys | They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. | Buy | |
| Paradise | Toni Morrison | They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun. | Buy | |
| Dubin's Lives | Bernard Malamud | They sometimes met on country roads when there were flowers or snow. | Buy | |
| Across the River and into the Trees | Ernest Hemingway | They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead. In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter's two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys. | Buy | |
| Except the Dying | Maureen Jennings | They started with the boots, which looked new. | Buy | |
| Cities of the Plain | Cormac McCarthy | They stood in the doorway and stomped the rain from their boots and swung their hats and wiped the water from their faces. Out in the street the rain slashed through the standing water driving the gaudy red and green colors of the neon signs to wander and seethe and rain danced on the steel tops of the cars parked along the curb. | Buy | |
| The Siege of Villa Lipp | Eric Ambler | They stopped the car by the gateway in the wall on the lower coast road. | Buy | |
| The Postman Always Rings Twice | James M. Cain | They threw me off the hay truck about noon. | Buy | |
| My Cousin Rachel | Daphne du Maurier | They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. | Buy | |
| Where Angels Fear to Tread | E M Forster | They were all at Charing Cross to see Lilia off--Philip, Harriet, Irma, Mrs. Herriton herself. | Buy | |
| Ramage's Devil | Dudley Pope | They were both lying, propped up by an elbow, on the bristling carpet of short, coarse grass which was fighting for its life on top of the cliff, the roots clinging desperately to the thin layer of earth and finding cracks in the rock beneath. | Buy | |
| Saratoga Trunk | Edna Ferber | They were interviewing Clint Maroon. | Buy | |
| The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself | KC Constantine | They were on the Addleman farm, one of the dozen or so farms leased by the Rocksburg Police Rod and Gun Club for the small-game season. | Buy | |
| The Accidental Tourist | Anne Tyler | They were supposed to stay at the beach a week, but neither of them had the heart for it and they decided to come back early. | Buy | |
| The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse | Vicente Blasco Ibanez | They were to have met in the garden of the Chapelle Expiatoire at five o'clock in the afternoon, but Julio Desnoyers with the impatience of a lover who hopes to advance the moment of meeting by presenting himself before the appointed time, arrived an half hour earlier. The change of the seasons was at this time greatly confused in his mind, and evidently demanded some readjustment. | Buy | |
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | Ken Kesey | They're out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them. | Buy | |
| Prey | Michael Crichton | Things never turn out the way you think they will. | Buy | |
| A Lost Lady | Willa Sibert Cather | Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere. | Buy | |
| Little Dorrit | Charles Dickens | Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day. | Buy | |
| With The Turks In Palestine | Alexander Aaronsohn | Thirty-five years ago, the impulse which has since been organized as the Zionist Movement led my parents to leave their homes in Roumania and emigrate to Palestine, where they joined a number of other Jewish pioneers in founding Zicron-Jacob--a little village lying just south of Mount Carmel, in that fertile coastal region close to the ancient Plains of Armageddon. | Buy | Read |
| Holiday Romance | Charles Dickens | This beginning-part is not made out of anybody's head, you know. | Buy | |
| Northwest Passage | Kenneth Lewis Roberts | This book has not been written to prove a case. | Buy | |
| The Innocents Abroad | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of solemn scientific expedition, it would have about it that gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind, and withal so attractive. Yet notwithstanding it is only a record of a pic-nic, it has a purpose, which is to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. | Buy | |
| Youth | Joseph Conrad | This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak--the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of breadwinning. | Buy | |
| Men Against the Sea | Charles Nordhoff and James Hall | This day my good friend William Elphinstone was laid to rest, in the Lutheran churchyard on the east bank of the river, not five cable-lengths from the hospital. Mr. Sparling, Surgeon-General of Batavia, helped me into the boat, and two of his Malay servants were waiting on the bank, with a litter to convey me to the grave. | Buy | |
| The Green Mile | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too, of course. | Buy | |
| Tarzan Alive | Philip José Farmer | This is a biography of a living person. | Buy | |
| The Five People You Meet In Heaven | Mitch Albom | This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. | Buy | |
| Breakfast of Champions | Kurt Vonnegut Jr | This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. | Buy | |
| Breakfast of Champions | Kurt Vonnegut | This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. | Buy | |
| Magnolia Street | Louis Golding | This is a tale of a small street in the Longton district of Doomington, in the North Country. Its name is Magnolia Street, and the streets that run parallel with it, right and left across the central thoroughfare of Blenheim Road, are called after the mimosa, the acacia, the laburnum, the oleander, and several other blossoming shrubs that never blossomed in this neighbourhood since the Romans were hereabouts. | Buy | |
| Tell No Man | Adela Rogers St. Johns | This is a true story. As you will see, it is incumbent upon me to tell it as a novel. | Buy | |
| Main Street | Sinclair Lewis | This is America -- a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves. The town is, in our tale, called "Gopher Prairie, Minnesota." But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. | Buy | |
| Curious George | H A Rey | This is George. He lived in Africa. | Buy | |
| The Princess Bride | William Goldman | This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it. | Buy | |
| Evangeline | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the
hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest. | Buy | |
| The Good Soldier | Ford Maddox Ford | This is the saddest story I have ever heard. | Buy | |
| The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford | This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy--or, with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. | Buy | |
| Christine | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | This is the story of a lover's triangle, I suppose you'd say--Arnie Cunningham, Leigh Cabot, and, of course, Christine. But I want you to understand that Christine was there first. She was Arnie's first love, and while I wouldn't presume to say for sure (Not from whatever heights of wisdom I've attained in my twenty-two years, anyway), I think she was his only true love. So I call what happened a tragedy. | Buy | |
| The Circular Staircase | Mary Roberts Rinehart | This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agences happy and prosperous. | Buy | |
| The Woman in White | Wilkie | This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve. | Buy | |
| Woman in White | Wilkie Collins | This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve. | Buy | |
| The Cruel Sea | Nicholas Monsarrat | This is the story--the long and true story--of one ocean, two ships, and about a hundred and fifty men. | Buy | |
| Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by The Sieur Louis de Conte | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth. | Buy | |
| Shoot | Douglas Fairbairn | This is what happened. | Buy | |
| Skeleton Crew | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | This is what happened. On the night the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke--the night of July 19--the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen. | Buy | |
| Giant | Edna Ferber | This March day the vast and brassy sky, always spangled with the silver glint of airplanes, roared and glittered with celestial traffic. | Buy | |
| Cutlass Empire | F van Wyck Mason | This mid-May evening was as fresh and fine as any Harry Morgan could recall. Like the plumes of so many warriors, clumps of soft greenery nodded jauntily above such dull red, brown and black roofs as were visible above a line of gray ramparts protecting the heart of Bristol Town. Above the stout twin towers defending Frome Gate a handful of rooks still were circling and cawing and, at this hour, only the loftiest of those turrets designed to protect the city remained gilded by a sun swinging ever lower over the scarlet-tinted Avon River. | Buy | |
| The Moviegoer | Walker Percy | This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch. I know what this means. | Buy | |
| Talk Before Sleep | Elizabeth Berg | This morning, before I came to Ruth's house, I made yet another casserole for my husband and my daughter. | Buy | |
| Another Day | Jeffrey Farnol | This narrative should begin with the death-sob of Red Rory as the murderous bullet smote him from life; it should continue with the sick awaking of young Keith, Dallas, Chisholm in a certain evil haunt of Hell's Kitchen, New York City, to find himself staring into a hated face, seen as it were through a swirling mist, a ghastly face - grey, dead, blood-smeared, and beneath his own lax fingers a revolver, while with throbbing brain and mind a very chaos of horror he strove desperately to think back ... dispel this dreadful mist that benumbed his every faculty ... to remember.... | Buy | |
| The Edge of Sadness | Edwin O'Connor | This story at no point becomes my own. | Buy | |
| The Stars My Destination | Alfred Bester | This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying ... but nobody thought so. | Buy | |
| Scarlett | Alexandra Ripley | This will be over soon, and then I can go home to Tara. | Buy | |
| The Two Georges | Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove | Thomas Bushnell bent over the little desk in his stateroom, drafting yet another report. | Buy | |
| The Deemster | Sir Hall Caine | Thorkell Mylrea had waited long for a dead man's shoes, but he was wearing them at length. | Buy | |
| The Forsyte Saga | John Galsworthy | Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight--an upper middle-class family in full plumage. But whosoever of these favoured persons has possessed the gift of psychological analysis (a talent without monetary value and properly ignored by the Forsytes), has witnessed a spectacle, not only delightful in itself, but illustrative of an obscure human problem. In plainer words, he has gleaned from a gathering of this family--no branch of which had a liking for the other, between no three members of whom existed anything worthy of the name of sympathy--evidence of that mysterious concrete tenacity which renders a family so formidable a unit of society, so clear a reproduction of society in miniature. He has been admitted to a vision of the dim roads of social progress, has understood something of patriarchal life, of the swarmings of savage hordes, of the rise and fall of nations. | Buy | |
| The Man of Property | John Galsworthy | Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsythes have seen that charming and instructive sight - an upper middle class family in full plumage. | Buy | |
| The Old Wives' Tale | Arnold Bennett | Those two girls, Constance and Sophia Baines, paid no need to the manifold interest of their situation, of which, indeed, they had never been conscious. | Buy | |
| Ode on a Grecian Urn | John Keats (1) | Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time. | Buy | |
| Franny and Zooey | J.D. Salinger | Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone hoped it would stay for the big weekend--the weekend of the Yale game. | Buy | |
| The Last Tycoon | F. Scott Fitzgerald | Though I haven't ever been on the screen I was brought up in pictures. Rudolph Valentino came to my fifth birthday party--or so I was told. I put this down to indicate that even before the age of reason I was in a position to watch the wheels go round. | Buy | |
| The Inner Shrine | Anonymous | Though she had counted the strokes of every hour since midnight, Mrs. Eveleth had no thought of going to bed. | Buy | |
| The Inner Shrine | Anonymous (Basil King) | Though she had counted the strokes of every hour since midnight, Mrs. Eveleth had no thought of going to bed. | Buy | |
| Michael | E F Benson | Though there was nothing visibly graceful about Michael Comber, he apparently had the art of giving gracefully. | Buy | Read |
| Murder Among Children | Tucker Coe | Three happy children came walking down the street from my right. | Buy | |
| Cold Sassy Tree | Olive Ann Burns | Three weeks after Granny Blakeslee died, Grandpa came to our house for his early snort of whiskey, as usual, and said to me, "Will Tweedy? Go find your mama, then run up to your Aunt Loma's and tell her I said git on down here. I got something to say. And I ain't a-go'n say it but once't." | Buy | |
| Nights in Rodanthe | Nicholas Sparks | Three years earlier, on a warm November morning in 1999, Adrienne Willis had returned to the Inn and at first glance had thought it unchanged, as if the small inn were impervious to sun and sand and salted mist. | Buy | |
| Plum Island | Nelson DeMille | Through my binoculars, I could see this nice forty-something-foot cabin cruiser anchored a few hundred yards offshore. | Buy | |
| The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass. | Buy | |
| The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. | Buy | |
| Guard of Honor | James Gould Cozzens | Through the late afternoon they flew southeast, going home to Ocanara at about two hundred miles an hour. | Buy | |
| Sudden Prey | James Sandford (pseudonym of John Camp) | Through the speakers above his head, little children sang in sweet voices, O holy night, the stars are brightly shining, it is the night of the dear Savior's birth . . . | Buy | |
| The Hollow Tree | Janet Lunn | Throughout all her long life, Phoebe Olcott never forgot a single moment of the last happy afternoon she spent at home by the Connecticut River. | Buy | |
| Fugitive Pieces | Anne Michaels | Time is a blind guide. | Buy | |
| Cat's Eye | Margaret Atwood | Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. | Buy | |
| What Christmas is as We Grow Older | Charles Dickens | Time was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections and hopes! grouped everything and every one around the Christmas fire; and made the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete. | Buy | |
| Marked for Murder | Brett Halliday | Timothy Rourke's tall lean body was bent forward from the waist when he loped into the city room of the Courier. | Buy | |
| Under Milk Wood | Dylan Thomas | To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black. | Buy | |
| Under Western Eyes | Joseph Conrad | To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor--Kirylo Sidorovitch--Razumov. | Buy | |
| A Crowded Heart | Nicholas Papandreou | To describe Greece I would share with you a tomato on the sandy beaches of Skopellos, open a sea urchin with my penknife and serve you the scarlet eggs inside while the salt stretches the skin on our backs. | Buy | |
| All the King's Men | Robert Penn Warren | To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, the day we went up. | Buy | |
| The Removers | Donald Hamilton | To get to Reno, Nevada, from the southeast, in summer, if you don't have an air-conditioned car, you first sleep all day in Las Vegas. | Buy | |
| Ordinary People | Judith Guest | To have a reason to get up in the morning, it is necessary to possess a guiding principle. | Buy | |
| The Body | William Sansom | To hold the syringe gently, firmly but delicately--not to squirt, but to prod the sleeper into wakefulness with the nozzle, taking care to start no abrupt flight of fear. Only to stir a movement, to initiate a presence from such a deep dead sleep. | Buy | |
| Frankenstein | Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley | To Mrs. Saville, England St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17-- You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking. | Buy | |
| A Scandal in Bohemia | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. | Buy | |
| Pericles Prince of Tyre | William Shakespeare | To sing a song that old was sung, From ashes ancient Gower is come, Assuming man's infirmities To glad your ear and please your eyes. | Buy | |
| Life in the West | Brian W Aldiss | To stretch his legs between consultations, Maclean escorted his last patient to Baker Street station. | Buy | |
| If Winter Comes | Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson | To take Mark Sabre at the age of thirty-four, and in the year 1912, and at the place Penny Green is to necessitate looking back a little towards the time of his marriage in 1904, but happens to find him in good light for observation. | Buy | |
| Deadeye Dick | Kurt Vonnegut Jr | To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. | Buy | |
| Oil for the Lamps of China | Alice Tisdale Hobart | To the north where the red plains of Manchuria draw near to Siberia the light of the September dawn lay along the horizon. | Buy | |
| The Confessions of Nat Turner | William Styron | TO THE PUBLIC - The late insurrection in Southampton has greatly excited the public mind and led to a thousand idle, exaggerated and mischievous reports. | Buy | |
| The Grapes of Wrath | John Ernst Steinbeck | To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. | Buy | |
| The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. | Buy | |
| The Atonement of Leam Dundas | E. Lynn Linton | To those who admire the kind of thing that it was, North Aston was one of the loveliest places to be found in England. | Buy | |
| Sermons and Soda-Water | John O'Hara | To those who knew the bride and the groom, the marriage of Bobbie Hammersmith and Pete McCrea was the surprise of the year. | Buy | |
| Slapstick: or, Lonesome No More! | Kurt Vonnegut Jr | To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon. | Buy | |
| Slapstick | Kurt Vonnegut | To whom it may concern: It is springtime. | Buy | |
| Enemy of God | Bernard Cornwell | Today I have been thinking about the dead. | Buy | |
| The Wind Done Gone | Alice Randall | Today is the anniversary of my birth. I have twenty-eight years. This diary and the pen I am writing with are the best gifts I got--except maybe my cake. R. gave me the diary, the pen, and the white frosted tiers. He also gave me emerald earbobs. I think maybe my emeralds are just green glass; I hope maybe they be genuine peridots. | Buy | |
| The 151b. Matchmaker | Jill Limber | Today might qualify as theworst day of Jolie Carleton's life. | Buy | |
| Benton's Row | Frank Yerby | Tom Benton, the man, himself, came into Louisiana in 1842, riding out of Texas, out of the sunset, out, in fact, of the myths and legends already enshrouding his past; becoming, by that simple act of appearing at the end of the San Antonio Trace, for the space of years, a man living, breathing, thinking like other men, differing from them only in the minor peculiarities by which each man differs from his fellows. | Buy | |
| The Talented Mr. Ripley | Patricia Highsmith | Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom walked faster. There was no doubt the man was after him. Tom had noticed him five minutes ago, eyeing him carefully from a table, as if he weren't quite sure, but almost. He had looked for sure enough for Tom to down his drink in a hurry, pay and get out. | Buy | |
| The Christmas Train | David Baldacci | Tom Langdon was a journalist, a globetrotting one, because it was in his blood to roam widely. | Buy | |
| Disclosure | Michael Crichton | Tom Sanders never intended to be late for work on Monday, June 15. At 7:30 in the morning, he stepped into the shower at his home on Bainbridge Island. He knew he had to shave, dress, and leave the house in ten minutes if he was to make the 7:50 ferry and arrive at work by 8:30, in time to go over the remaining points with Stephanie Kaplin before they went into the meeting with the lawyers from Conley-White. He already had a full day of work, and the fax he had just received from Malaysia made it worse. | Buy | |
| Here on Earth | Alice Hoffman | Tonight, the hay in the fields is already brittle with frost, especially to the west of Fox Hill, where the pastures shine like stars. In October, darkness begins to settle by four-thirty and although the leaves have turned scarlet and gold, in the dark everything is a shadow of itself, gray with a purple edge. At this time of year, these woods are best avoided, or so the local boys say. | Buy | |
| The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years | Jamyang Norbu | Too many of Dr John Watson's unpublished manuscripts (usually discovered in 'a travel-worn and batterred tin dispatch box' somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox & Company, at Charing Cross) have come to light in recent years, for a long-suffering reading public not to greet the discovery of yet another Sherlock Holmes story with suspicion, if not outright incredulity. | Buy | |
| Time and Time Again | James Hilton | Toward midnight Charles Anderson finished some notes on a talk he had had had with a newspaper editor at lunch--nothing very important, but he though he ought to keep Bingay decently informed. | Buy | |
| The Idiot | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Towards the end of November, during a warm spell, at around nine o'clock in the morning, a train of the Petersburg-Warsaw line was approaching Petersburg at full steam. It was so damp and foggy that dawn could barely break; ten paces to right or left of the line it was hard to make out anything at all through the carriage windows. Among the passengers there were some who were returning from abroad; but the third-class compartments were more crowded, and they were petty business folk from not far away. Everyone was tired, as usual, everyone's eyes had grown heavy overnight, everyone was chilled, everyone's face was pale yellow, matching the color of the fog. | Buy | |
| Otho, the Archer | Alexandre Dumas pere | Towards the end of the year 1340, on a cold but still beautiful
Autumn night, a horseman was riding along the narrow road that
follows the left bank of the Rhine. You might have thought,
considering the lateness of the hour and the rapid pace at which
he urged his horse, tired as it was with the long day's journey
already done, that he was going to stop for a few hours in the
little town of Oberwinter, which he had just reached. But
nothing of the kind; without slackening his pace and like a man
who is familiar with them, he plunged into the midst of narrow
tortuous streets that might shorten his way by a few minutes, and
soon reappeared on the other side of the town, going out by the
opposite Gate to that by which he had come in. [Fr., Vers la fin de l'annee 1340, par une nuit froide, mais encore belle de l'automne, un cavalier suivant le chemin etroit qui cotoie la rive gauche du Rhin.] | Buy | |
| The Vicomte de Bragelonne | Alexandre Dumas | Towards the middle of the month of May, in the year 1660, at nine o'clock in the morning, when the sun, already high in the heavens, was fast absorbing the dew from the ramparts of the castle of Blois, a little cavalcade, composed of three men and two pages, re-entered the city by the bridge, without producing any other effect upon the strollers of the river bank beyond a first movement of the hand to the head, as a salute, and a second movement of the tongue to express, in the purest French then spoken in France: "There is Monsieur returning from hunting." | Buy | |
| The Mammoth Hunters | Jean M Auel | Trembling with fear, Ayla clung to the tall man beside her as she watched the strangers approach. Jondlar put his arm around her protectively, but she still shook. | Buy | |
| The Tell-Tale Heart | Edgar Allan Poe | TRUE!--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses--not destroyed--not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily--how calmly I can tell you the whole story. | Buy | |
| Where Echoes Live | Marcia Muller | Tufa Lake lies in the high desert of northeastern California, only miles from the Nevada border. | Buy | |
| Othello the Moor of Venice | William Shakespeare | Tush, never tell me! I take it much unkindly That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this. | Buy | |
| The Heart of the Hills | John William Fox | Twin spirals of blue smoke rose on either side of the spur, crept tendril-like up two dark ravines, and clearing the feathery green crests of the trees, drifted lazily on upward until, high above, they melted shyly together and into the haze that veiled the drowsy face of the mountain. | Buy | |
| Cry Hard, Cry Fast | John D MacDonald | Two hours before the accident occurred, Devlin Jamison drove over the crest of a hill on the pitted two-lane asphalt and saw, far below him, the multiple lanes of the east-west highway, the yellow octagon of the stop sign. | Buy | |
| Romeo and Juliet | William Shakespeare | Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. | Buy | |
| The Masquerader | Anonymous | Two incidents, widely different in character yet bound together by results, marked the night of January the twenty-third. | Buy | |
| The Masquerader | Anonymous (Katherine Cecil Thurston) | Two incidents, widely different in character yet bound together by results, marked the night of January the twenty-third. | Buy | |
| Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry | Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus. | Buy | |
| Smiley's People | John Le Carre | Two seemingly unconnected events heralded the summons of Mr. George Miley from his dubious retirement. | Buy | |
| Chances | Arthur Hamilton Gibbs | Two small, sturdy boys stood alone on the empty deck of the Channel steamer. | Buy | |
| Cryptonomicon | Neal Stephenson | Two tires fly. | Buy | |
| Claudius The God | Robert Graves | Two years have gone by since I finished writing the long story of how I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, the cripple, the stammerer, the fool of the family, whom none of his ambitious and bloody-minded relatives considered worth the trouble of executing, poisoning, forcing to suicide, banishing to a desert island or starving to death--which was how they one by one got rid of each other--how I survived them all, even my insane nephew Gaius Caligula, and was one day unexpectedly acclaimed Emperor by the corporals and sergeants of the Palace Guard. | Buy |