Some declarative sentences from P.G. Wodehouse’s Full Moon:

"It’s all perfectly on the level. My name is Lister. Miss Garland and I are engaged. And this blighted Wedge woman is keeping her under lock and key and watching her every move. A devil of a female. What she needs is a spoonful of arsenic in her soup one of these evenings. You couldn’t attend to that, I suppose?" he said genially, for now that everything was going so smoothly he was in a merry mood.

Tags: Books  Reading Writing

From Chapter III of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Vol. I 1776):

The obvious definition of a monarchy seems to be that of a state, in which a single person, by
whatsoever name he may be distinguished, is intrusted with the execution of the laws, the
management of the revenue, and the command of the army. But, unless public liberty is
protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, the authority of so formidable a magistrate will
soon degenerate into despotism. The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be
usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the
throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the
people. * A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property,
and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free
constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince.

Tags: Books  Reading Writing

Today an extended passage from Chapter II Volume I of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire :

The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily
seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their
subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all
considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the
magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even
religious concord. 

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From the first chapter of P.G. Wodehouse’s Full Moon:

Lord Emsworth gave a quick, convulsive leap, then became strangely rigid. Like so many fathers of the English upper classes, he was somewhat allergic to younger sons, and was never at his happiest when entertaining the one whom unkind Fate had added to his quiver. Freddie, when at Blandings, had a way of mooning and looking like a bored and despairing sheep, with glassy eyes staring out over an eleven-inch cigarette holder, which had always been enough to bring a black frost into this Eden of his.

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From the soon to be missed Scifi.com, Gerald Kersh’s "The Queen of Pig Island":

The story of the Baroness von Wagner, that came to its sordid and bloody end after she, with certain others, had tried to make an earthly paradise on a desert island, was so fantastic that if it had not first been published as news, even the editors of the sensational crime magazines would have thought twice before publishing it.

Tags: Fiction Books

Best American Short Stories 2005. For the first time in a long time I finished most of the stories in an entire collection. These are my very favorites, the cream of the cream, listed in the order they appear in the book:

"Until Gwen" Dennis Lehane
"Old Friends" Thomas McGuane
"Death Defier" Tom Bissell
"Anda’s Game" Cory Doctorow
"The Cousins" Joyce Carol Oates
"Natasha" David Bezmozgis
"Hart and Boot" Tim Pratt

Tags: Books Reading Writing

Am nearing the end of the Best American Short Stories 2005 edited by Michael Chabon. I’ll post a list of my favorites soon. Today’s quote is from one of those favorites, Tim Pratt’s "Hart and Boot":

The man’s head and torso emerged from a hole in the ground, just a few feet from the rock where Pearl Hart sat smoking her last cigarette.

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From Tobias S. Buckell’s Crystal Rain.These sentences are from the free excerpt on the novel’s official site:

Oaxyctl ran through the jungle towards Brungstun in the double- shadowed light of the twin moons that peeked out from between a break in the rain clouds. He was so close to safety since making it out of the mountains, skirting well wide of Mafolie Pass and a few mongoose outposts along the way. He’d come too far not to make it now.

Tags: Books Science Fiction

Am still slightly over halfway through Best American Short Stories 2005 edited by Michael Chabon. Today’s quote is from Cory Doctorow’s "Anda’s Game" second paragraph:

But when Anda was twelve, she met Liza the Organiza, whose avatar was female but had sensible tits and sensible armor and a bloody great sword that she was clearly very good with.

It’s a great story, probably the most risky inclusion of all Chabon’s genre picks. Because if any is, I suspect this one will be the most off-putting to non-genre readers. Fantasy and mystery the lit-snob will let slide if the packaging is sufficiently tasteful, but SF? SF about gaming? I’m also glad that the definition of an American short story is broad enough this year to include a piece by a Canadian writer living in London published in cyberspace. The world really is flat!

Am slightly over halfway through Best American Short Stories 2005 edited by Michael Chabon. Opening sentence of Tom Bissell’s "Death Defier":

Graves had been sick for three days when, on the long, straight highway between Mazar and Kunduz, a dark blue truck coming toward them shed its rear wheel in a spray of orange-yellow sparks.

I don’t know what scheme or plan Chabon used to order the stories in this anthology but it certainly isn’t to bury weaker entries in the middle. Maybe it was to place longer stories in the middle. At 35 pages Bissell’s is better an more substantial than most novels I’ve read this year, doing what fiction used to do and is what fiction is meant to do: it illuminates the world around us — the whole world not just the bits of it that people who write and read fiction mill about in. Balzac, Dickens, Stephen Crane, Chekov did it, and in the century just passed, John O’Hara, Ring Lardner and others carried on the tradition. Based on serious scholarship I performed last week by seeing the movie Capote I’m guessing that this started to change at the beginning of the 1960′s when Capote published his last masterpiece In Cold Blood, and narrative non-fiction began to supplant fiction in the role of examining the zeitgeist. It now may be turning back and Chabon’s done a lot to say that yes, narrative fiction is a legitimate form, (as opposed to slice-of-life fiction). "Death Defier" appeared in a literary journal, not a mass-market slick as it would have a half-century ago, but at least it shows that the stories are out there, whether the market exists for them or not. 

Tag: Books