The morning sun shone brightly on the canvas of the covered wagon, promising an unseasonably warm day for mid-October. Marty fought for wakefulness, coming slowly out of a troubled and fitful sleep. Why did she feel so heavy and ill at ease–she who usually woke with enthusiasm and readiness for each new day’s adventure? Then [...]

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs I think just the first sentence is enough to get how awesome this book is, at least in the beginning. I really liked the beginning, but I’ve reached [...]

When I was a young child growing up in Korea, it was said that the image of the fading moon at daybreak, reflected in a pond or stream or even a well, resembled the speckled shell of a dragon’s egg. A dragon embodied the yang, the masculine principle of life, and it was thought that [...]

I have been arrested. For winning a quiz show. ~Q & A by Vikas Swarup Sounds pretty interesting to me!! And I like how it sort of starts off with a climatic scene. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of story can start with something as huge as winning a quiz show. Can it still [...]

| Nothing in the sky with nothing. No moon, no stars. Just a canopy of black swallowing the light. Lucky break for the fox. Tough break for the hounds. ~~Everfree by Nick Sagan This beginning is honestly pretty vague. But if you’ve read this books two predecessors, it’s not too uncommon with the way Sagan [...]

Harriet was trying to explain to Sport how to play Town. “See, first you make up the name of the town. Then you write down the names of all the people who live in it. You can’t have too many or it gets too hard. I usually have twenty-five.” Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh [...]

I am told that the first comprehensible word I uttered as a child was ‘home.’ My father was driving his secondhand Austin 7; my mother was in the passenger seat beside him holding me on her lap. As we approached our modest house, Dad braked the car to turn into the pocket-handkerchief square of concrete [...]

It was common for American expatriates to visit the U.S. consulate in Berlin, but not in the condition exhibited by the man who arrived there on Thursday, June 29, 1933. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson For a work of non-fiction, it doesn’t seem too [...]

Alec Krasnansky stood on the platform of Vienna’s Western Terminal while, all around him, the reperesentatives of Soviet Jewry–from Tallinn to Tashkent–roiled, snarled, and elbowed to deposit their belongings onto the waiting train. The Free World by David Bezmozgis Not too bad of a beginning, I think | Book Beginnings is a weekly meme, hosted [...]

Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960. A church baby we like to call it. Taking care a white babies, that’s what I do, along with all the cooking and cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, [...]