45 posts tagged “fiction”

Favorites: When the Nines Roll Over, How We Decide, and Silver Phoenix.

June's nearly over, and I'm just now getting around to posting May's books.

Favorites: Doomsday Book, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, and Finding Nouf.

Favorites: City of Thieves, The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden, and If I Stay.

Here are a couple of quotations from the amazing City of Thieves. It's one of the best books I've read this year and I highly recommend it.

"I never understood people who said their greatest fear was public speaking, or spiders, or any of the other minor terrors. How could you fear anything more than death? Everything else offered moments of escape: a paralyzed man could still read Dickens; a man in the grips of dementia might have flashes of the most absurd beauty."

"The days had become a confusion of catastrophes; what seemed impossible in the afternoon was blunt fact by the evening. German corpses fell from the sky; cannibals sold sausage links made from ground human in the Haymarket; apartment blocs collapsed to the ground; dogs became bombs; frozen soldiers became signposts; a partisan with half a face stood swaying in the snow staring sad-eyed at his killers. I had no food in my belly, no fat on my bones, and no energy to reflect on this parade of atrocities. I just kept moving, hoping to find another half slice of bread for myself and a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter."

Favorites: A Fraction of the Whole, Death by Black Hole, and The Help.

A Fraction of the Whole

The Man Booker Prize shortlist has tipped me off to many fine books over the years. I recently read what I consider to be the best of the bunch from 2008: A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz.

The story was unpredictable and entertaining, the characters were eccentric but authentic (and sometimes unlikable), and the writing was top-notch. Highly recommended.

A few of the many passages I marked as I went along:

"Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don't have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don't have to leave anything visible jutting from the base of your best friend's spine, and afterward you can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won't hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging in your closet while you lie to yourself that it's probably not the drowning man's size."

"Democracy in crime was turning out no different from democracies everywhere: a sublime idea in theory, soiled by the reality that deep down nobody really believes that all men are created equal."

"...the girl Brett loved was tall and pale-skinned, with flaming red hair falling down her back, shoulders as smooth as eggs, and legs as long as an underground pipeline. But her dark brown eyes, often hidden behind an unevenly cropped fringe, were her secret weapon: she had a look that could have toppled a government."

"I loathed that job. The good days passed like decades, the so-so days like half centuries, but mostly it felt as if I were frozen in the eye of an everlasting time-storm."

"It's a shame you can't go out and see people for just ten minutes. That's all the human contact I need to carry me through life for three days -- then I need ten minutes more."

"I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon."

Favorites: Ghostwritten, Interpreter of Maladies, and Outliers.

Favorites: Serena, Little Brother, and Harlot's Sauce.