Welcome to another edition of Grab-A-Line Monday, where you, my wonderful blog reader, bring passages from what you've read that have caught your attention. This is a place to discover new books and find new authors.
Nandini emerged from her intensive revision to share this passage from A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner.
"I had been happy. And I could stay if I wanted. I could spend my life contemplating olives and reciting old plays to a friendly audience and building excellent walls that would outlast my lifetime. I could save the occasional coin that came to me by way of the baron's feast day generosities and in time buy a book or two, a blank scroll, ink. In thirty years I might be the poet Leuka. He wasn't a field hand, but he had been a slave and his poetry had survived him by four hundred years. No one would know but me and the gods, and I was sure the gods didn't care. All I had to do was hold my peace, and I knew that I couldn't do it."
The old women were staring at me as if I were a needle they were trying to thread...
Or
"Oh, girls," Madame Dabney soothed, turning around to make sure that Liz and I were still in our original one-piece bodies.
Here is a passage from one of the stories, No Other Country:
The green painted concrete out in front of the house, which at first seemed like a novel way to save money on lawn-mowing, was now just plain depressing. The hot water came reluctantly to the kitchen sink as if from miles away, and even then without conviction, and sometimes a pale, brownish color. Many of the windows wouldn't open properly to let flies out. Others wouldn't shut properly to stop them from getting in. The newly planted fruit trees died in the sandy soil of a too-bright backyard and were left like grave-markers under the slack laundry lines, a small cemetery of disappointment.
Before you say, "depress much?" read on to where:
They all inspected the hold closely...
No, I won't tell you what comes next. I'll promise you this: the hole brings discoveries that more than balance the bleakness of what I've shared above.
What caught you this week?
3 comments:
Thanks for the link Yat-Yee! I'm having lots of fun with the challenge. As for a line to grab...I don't have one for you today.
Oh, boy, there are some wonderful ones in this post.
I'm currently reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, a dystopian novel.
"Out of habit he looks at his watch--stainless-steel case, burnished aluminium band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is."
Hi Yat-Yee,
Here's a (very late, sorry!) line from an ARC I'm reading of Mistwood by Leah Cypress.
It was a moonless night too dark for shadows, the stars a swirl of light against an ocean of black.
I always notice night sky descriptions. The book's out next month BTW, watch out for it!
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