“Tell me what it is like to die,” I answered. He dismounted from his horse, looking at me strangely the whole while. “You experience something similar every day,” he said softly. “It is as familiar to you as bread and butter.” “Yes,” I said. “It is like every night when I fall asleep.” “No. It is like every morning when you wake up.” Recommended by: Brooklyn Arden Oh how I liked this book. It’s about a girl called Keturah who goes into the forest after a white hart and meets Lord Death. She doesn’t want to die without having known…
2 CommentsReading the End Posts
Meh. Everyone kept comparing other books to The Chatham School Affair with favorable-sounding opinions, so I picked it up at the library a little while ago and started reading it, and I have to confess that I found it somewhat trying. I couldn’t get into the story because of all the frantic foreshadowing. It kept being all Little did we know when first we beheld that peaceful landscape how much BLOOD AND DEATH AND MISERY there would be there later on, and I only read a little bit of it, but I just got fed up with the way Mr.…
3 Comments“Hello,” a boy’s voice said. Dana turned. A smiling boy was sitting on the rock wall, watching her pick the sticky fruit. Though he was about her age, Dana had never seen him before; but her family tended to keep to themselves, so that was not unusual. He was skinny, with unruly blond hair that fell to his shoulders, and his green eyes shone in a friendly fashion. Even so, she did not reply to his greeting but merely returned to her berry picking. “My name is Kai,” the boy said to her back. Picked up randomly because I absolutely…
17 Comments“I’ll let you out of your contracts if you want, so you can get jobs with other circuses, but I’m telling you they’ll all go bust if this keeps up – just like the cinemas. But you know where they ain’t got the telly yet? Spain! And you know how I know? Because I been there!!”He stopped to let the magnitude of this revelation sink in. While they had been loafing the winter away, he, Sam Marvel, had been on the job and had gone ferreting out the situation. “That’s right,” he continued, “Spain. There’s telly in some of the…
3 CommentsEdward the Sexy Vampire: Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars – points of light and reason. And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn’t see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything….There was no distraction from the agony. My heart hasn’t beat in almost ninety…
4 CommentsWhen she reached the first tree she swung around it to face me, and if the trees looked like men, she looked as young as Julian.”Still here – oh, still here!” she called – halfway singing, really. “Oh, still holding to Stourhead earth, they and I.” She hooked her arm around the tree and swung again, as though she was dancing with it. I knew she couldn’t have touched it, felt the bark or the dry leaves, any more than I could have felt her arm against mine – but nobody looks as beautiful, as joyous, as Tamsin looked right…
Leave a CommentFirst my father (who was buying it for my very-difficult-to-get-presents-for mother), and then my mother told me about this book, so I heard about it from them; and in the first place it was picked up at random by my father, who knows that my very-difficult-to-get-presents-for mother enjoys reading memoirs written by neurotic people with a sense of humor. I waited until down here to put an excerpt, mainly because I wanted to defend my choice of excerpt. I am quoting this bit not because it is perfectly representative of the book at large (not that it isn’t – it’s…
2 CommentsCarlos was a minor character in the story [I was writing], a juvenile delinquent with a terminal illness. Although I had given Carlos tattoos and a bald head, he failed to impress my editor. She thought he needed a personality. And “please please please,” she urged in one of her notes, “give him a different name.” Los Angeles is the youth gang capital of the world, so I figured Duane must have had to write about them at some point. I asked if he could recommend any good books about juvenile delinquents that I could use for research. He thought…
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