November 2009
30 posts
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Listen
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doctorow continued
“They ate at Devil’s Night, a restaurant in one of the reclaimed mansions in Brush Park, a neighborhood of wood-frame buildings that teenagers had all but burned to the ground over several decades’ worth of Halloweens.”
Making perfect sense, in the context of a book about theme parks — Detroit merely rates a theme restaurant, even in the shiny new future. Like...
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doctorow continued
“She smiled despite herself. She was drawing a half-million readers a day by doing near to nothing besides repeating the mind-blowing conversations around her. It had taken her a month to consider putting ads on the site — lots of feelers from blog ‘micro-labels’ who wanted to get her under management and into their banner networks, and she broke down when one of them...
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cory doctorow, makers
“‘Sure, willpower. Willpower nothing. The thing is, when three quarters of America are obese, when half are dangerously obese, like me, years off our lives from all the fat — that tells you that this isn’t a willpower problem. We didn’t get less willful in the last fifty years. Might as well say that all those people who died of the plague lacked the willpower to keep...
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“They’ve been saying it for years, haven’t they? The scientists and...”
– The villain, of course. Right close to his end, of course.
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king continued
“So let us go then, you and I, while the evening spreads out against the sky like a patient etherized on a table. Let us go while the first discolored stars begin to show overhead. This is the only town in a four-state area where they’re out tonight.”
King’s constantly pulling from a deep well of references — the recurring James McMurtry song that’s his...
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king continued
“Hanna had started hot and finished hotter, blazing a trail that Wildcats fans would still be talking about years later (season average: 27.6 points per game). She could spot up and drop a three-pointer any time she wanted, but what Big Jim liked best was to watch her split the defense and drive to the basket, her pug face set in a sneer of concentration, her bright black eyes daring anyone...
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king continued
“That’s what I mean about how little you know. It’s like Iraq all over again, only this time you’re in Washington instead of boots on the ground, and you seem as clueless as the rest of the desk soldiers. Read my lips, sir: some intelligence is worse than no intelligence at all.”
And page 229: where the implied Iraq metaphor becomes explicit. As do all metaphors...
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stephen king, under the dome
“His iPod exploded in the wide front pocket of his bib overalls, but he never felt it. He broke his neck and fractured his skull on the nothing he collided with and died in the dirt shortly thereafter, by one tall wheel of his tractor, which was still idling. Nothing, you know, runs like a Deere.”
And here you have it — if not the whole story, then some of the major components....
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victoria moore, how to drink
“Hot water is something we should probably all drink more. It may sound unexciting, but first thing a mug of it can provide much of the reassurance of tea, not least because it warms your hands in just the same way. It also hydrates without being as boring as plain old cold H2O. And it leaves you feeling fresher and livelier than any caffeinated drink.”
From an interesting, pleasantly...
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hornby continued
“Did this question still come up, after all these years? Clearly it did, and clearly it became harder to answer as you got older. In the time before Duncan, it had been easy: she was young, and she liked exactly the same kind of music as the young man asking the question, who, like her, was either on his way to university, or an undergraduate, or recently graduated. So she could say that she...
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"By an admittedly cynical and reductive reading,... →
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“Annie wondered whether there was, anywhere in the country, a DJ wondering how to...”
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nick hornby, juliet, naked
“Sometimes Annie felt less like a girlfriend than a school chum who’d come to visit in the holidays and stayed for the next twenty years… . They started drinking together in the evenings and sleeping over at weekends, until eventually the sleepovers turned into something indistinguishable from cohabitation. And they had stayed like that forever, stuck in a perpetual postgraduate...
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goodis continued
“She sat there and listened. He talked for almost a half-hour. When it was all over, when there was nothing more to say, they looked at each other, breathed in and out in unison. He started a smile, worked at it, got it going, and she helped him out with it. Then she stood up.”
Complete mastery of pacing. So much of what Goodis does is crude and lurid — simple plotting and...
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david goodis, nightfall
“It was reasonable. It checked. It was a typical John manipulation. Because John had so much brains and no more. John wasn’t exactly a fool, but he was harder than he was clever, and probably he knew that about himself, because he had a habit of laboring to be clever.”
Stylistically clean as Hemingway: no fat, no embellishment, no fancy punctuation, just facts. And each of the...
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mauro continued
“Instead, here they are, digging a dead body out of the garden like it was any old Friday night.”
This is the kind of sentence you’d expect to see used in the first paragraph of a novel, because when it crops up at the end it sure seems like things have gotten far enough out of hand to, well, make exhumation sound routine.
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mauro continued
“Skinner’s son, occupying the ‘first’ position, dips the sponge end of his rod into a bucket of water and then drives it up into the tube. Lily senses there’s something moist and loathsome about him. The sort of creature found under bridges, awaiting the crossing of the billy goats. Even the though of Lloyd circling through his comprehensive collection of perversions...
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nancy mauro, new world monkeys
“She changes her mind. Lloyd cannot be taken into her confidence. Their mutual confessions will never be of a similar nature. Hers are brusque and uncomfortable, divulged only so that she may receive some degree of clemency, while Lloyd’s provide him with pleasure. He takes them out of their silk pouch only to hold them up to the light.”
This relationship, this story arc,...
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“I was staring at the book,” Mr. Demme said in a... →
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michael connelly, the brass verdict
Lately, the strong days far outnumbered the weak and I probably could have gotten by with the traditional lawyer’s leather briefcase. But I liked the bag and was going to keep using it. It had a logo on it — a mountain ridgeline with the words ‘Suitcase City’ printed across it like the Hollywood sign. Above it, skylights swept the horizon, completing the dream image of...
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An old saw in science fiction is that a sci-fi... →
Cory Doctorow, on “radical presentism.”
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lodato continued
“Ma and Da are too smart to save anyone. Smart people always turn out to be weaklings. Smart people are not going to be the ones to help you when you have to move a piano out of the house… . I don’t want to be weak when I grow up and I don’t want to be surrounded by weaklings.”
See below. This is interior monologue — but the trouble with Mathilda, which...
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victor lodato, mathilda savitch
“Have you ever seen a picture of Krishna? He has blue skin and he was actually born that way, it’s not a dye job. Sometimes he has two arms, sometimes four. He wears a gold crown with a peacock feather at the top. He’s fairly attractive in a foreign sort of way. In the introduction to the Bhagavad Gita there’s a whole history of his life. When he was young he hung out with...
“if you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really.”
– philip roth, in this interview with the daily beast. (via paperbackgirl)
(hm. really? oh, come on.)
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kjærstad continued
“The effect was even better. To begin with they both shone their torches on the same part, so that they were able to see more at one time, but after a while Jonas began to aim his beam at different areas from Moe’s. While his grandmother talked about the images caught in the head warden’s beam, Jonas could light up a detail some way off, so that it presented a kind of parallel...
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“One weekend I stumbled upon a fresh source of inspiration. I was on a visit to...”
– Jan Kjærstad, The Discoverer | Open Letter 09.09
(Oh. Spiderwebs. Also fjords. And lighthouses. One occasionally gets the sense that Kjærstad writes about his own work as much as his character’s.)
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kjærstad continued
“He had closed To the Lighthouse. In the middle of the chapter entitled “Time Passes.” He pressed a palm against each cover, as if to stop it from falling open again. It actually took some effort. The bang made Margrete look round, a question on her face. He made the excuse of a sudden headache. ‘I’ll read the rest some other time,’ he said, trying to smile. But...
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kjærstad continued
“From a more objective point of view, it seems only fitting that my break-up with Margrete should be bound up with this music. Because as I began to get things into a broader perspective I realized that the Beatles had left a more indelible stamp on the sixties than all the assassinations and political debacles, or phenomena such as Woodstock and the rise of the Black Panthers. I venture to...
