A Pair of Russians on First Line Friday

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina "The town was a little one, worse than a village, and it was inhabited by scarcely any but old people who died with an infrequency that was really annoying." Anton Chekhov, "Rothschild's Fiddle," from Ward No. 6 and Other Stories

Emily Dickinson for First Line Friday

I couldn't help but think of this quote by Emily Dickinson as I was writing about Geoff Hunt and Patrick O'Brian, and since April is National Poetry Month I wanted to share it with you: There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away...

Two Tales of Redemption for First Line Friday

It's First Line Friday, and because I missed last week I'll offer two opening paragraphs for your consideration. Both are from autobiographies by a pair of Catholics that some consider 20th century saints, though neither of them has been canonized. The first comes from Dorothy Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness. Day co-founded the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s. Here is how Day begins her story: When you go to confession on a Saturday night, you go into a warm, dimly lit vastness, with the smell of wax and incense in the air, the smell of burning candles, and if it is a hot summer night there is the sound of a great electric fan, and the noise of the streets coming in to emphasize the stillness. There is another sound too, besides that of the quiet movements of the people from pew to confession to altar rail; there is the sliding of the shutters of the little window between you and the priest in his "box." Next comes the opening paragraph of The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. Merton became a Trappist monk in the early 1940s and went on to be one of the 20th century's most influential Catholic writers and thinkers. On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers. Both Merton and Day offer the modern reader an honest and moving account of how one moves from selfishness to selflessness, from materialism to spirituality, and from earth to heaven. Both are well worth reading.

Dickens' Hard Times

For this week's First Line Friday here is the opening to Charles Dickens' Hard Times: "Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!" What an effective introduction to Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, the educational theorist of Coketown. Gradgrind believes that things like poetry and fairytales are "destructive nonsense." Unfortunately, judging from ongoing news about budget cuts to music and other arts programs, it appears Thomas Gradgrind is still alive and well in the 21st century.

Getting Back to Writing

I've decided to really make a big push to finish the first draft of the book I've been writing. If I really get serious about it, I could have a solid draft done by the middle of April. It's time I get this thing finished and ready to publish. Unfortunately, that means taking time away from reading. But I can't let reading keep me from accomplishing one of my major life goals of having written a book. So wish me luck, and I'll keep you posted on my progress and maybe talk a little bit about what I'm writing. I forgot first line Friday (of course!) so here it is, a little belated: "Rage: Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage, Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls Of heroes into Hades' dark, And left their bodies to rot as feasts For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done." From Iliad by Homer, translated by Stanley Lombardo

First Line Friday

Okay, so it's Saturday, but I meant to do this yesterday, so I'm going to pretend it's still Friday. And anyway, it's 5:30 in the morning and dark outside, so it's still Friday to me. If I can make myself remember to do this, every Friday I'll post some of my favorite book openings. Today I'll give you two--one opening line, and one opening paragraph. From The Princess Bride by William Goldman: "The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette." I just finished reading The Princess Bride to my eighth graders, and if your only exposure to the story is through the Rob Reiner movie, you really owe it to yourself to read the book. From The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs: Several centuries (or so) ago, in a country whose name doesn't matter, there was a tall, skinny, straggly-bearded old wizard named Prospero, and not the one you are thinking of, either. He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples. It was a house whose gutter spouts were worked into the shape of whistling sphinxes and screaming bearded faces; a house whose white wooden porch was decorated with carved bears, monkeys, toads and fat women in togas holding sheaves of grain; a house whose steep gray-slate roof was capped with a glass-enclosed, twisty-copper-columned observatory. On the artichoke dome of the observatory was a weather vane shaped like a dancing hippopotamus; as the wind changed, it blew through the nostrils of the hippo's hollow head, making a whiny snarfling sound that fortunately could not be heard unless you were up on the roof fixing slates. John Bellairs is mostly known as a writer of children's books, but this book is more for grown-up children. It's short but powerful, and both Ursula LeGuin and Lin Carter raved about it when it was first published. Try it out.