Winner from the GALM retirement party

Thanks for attending my party! Sorry I didn't post this earlier; you know how it is after a party, there's all that cleaning up to do.

Anyway, I've decided to pool all the comments together and award a prize. Those of you who entered in multiple categories got multiple chances. Here's the winner:

Tricia!

Tricia, please send me your address at yatyeechong at g mail dot com and tell me which one of the three books you'd like.

And to all who participated, THANK YOU. I know I will continue to mull over some of the quotes and remember the books you've recommended. And I am so glad to hear some of you have allowed GALM to help you choose your books.

Retirement Party for Grab-A-Line Monday

Welcome to my party! Come in, come in! Enjoy some
confetti.

Have a drink.


Grab something to eat, Remember, virtual foods pack zero calories or stuff that our bodies don't need, so go crazy with the tiramisu and the nutella crepes.











Thanks for dropping by the retirement party for Grab-A-Line-Monday, my weekly blog event that started with this post in September:

Quick, grab a book from your bookshelf and find a memorable sentence. Or if you have one that you carry around in your mind, even better. Here's one that struck me the first time I read it and continued to occupy my mind:

In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.

Flannery O'Connor
in A Good Man Is Hard To Find

If you've missed my multicolored, super-hyper announcement of a new feature on my blog, here is a recap:

Grab-A-Line Monday is the place to share sentences that stopped you in your tracks, or made you spew coffee or have stayed with you for years for other reasons. The moments when I read those sentences I count among the best in life. Since there are more books than any one of us can finish in a life time, I hope that this will become a place where we can share our treasures.

So I'd love it love it love it if you would grab a line and put it in the comments. And if it turns out you like the idea, please blog about it and share the word. Let's celebrate excellent writing and memorable moments!


Thank you so much to many of you who have come by and offered lines and passages that have caught you. Some of the quotes have so intrigued me that I have sought out out the books or short stories: Leviathan, Wee Free Men, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, The Adoration of Jenna Fox, just to name a few.

Other times, the quotes themselves have given me pause:

"What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

(A question asked by Lady Glamis via Crime and Punishment)


or made me sad:

"She had nothing left to say, so she said she loved me. And I stood there grateful for the lie."

(A line from a song by Gin Blossoms brought to GALM by Solving Sherrie)


or made me chuckle:

"Kidnapping children is not a good idea. All the same, sometimes it has to be done."

Eva Ibottson, ISLAND OF THE AUNTS

(From Shelley the story queen.)


And then there was the fast bullock confusion. It started with an innocent quote Nandini offered:

"Greetings, Ancient Uncle," he panted, "you have a very fast bullock."

YOUNG UNCLE COMES TO TOWN by Vandana Singh

But for some reason, I misread it to say "fast buttocks". which disintegrated even further in the comments...


GALM has had a great run and again, thanks to all of you who have supported it.

Now, to the contest (I hope you got the BYOQ--bring your own quote--memo on the party invitation) Please leave me one or more in the following categories:

• your favorite quote from previous GALM posts
  
• books you've read because of the quotes you've found here
• an all-time favorite quote

The contest will be open till midnight Mountain Time tonight. The categories that reach 10 comments will generate one of the following prizes, hard copies of:

How Fiction Works by James Wood
The Maze Runner by James Dashner
If I Stay by Gayle Forman


Added later: forgot to re-iterate that I can only send prizes to addresses within the continental US.

Speech over. Let the party begin.

Grab-A-Line Monday: Penultimate Edition and A Contest

There is a season to everything.

I am a firm believer in that. And I think the season for Grab-A-Line Monday is over. Maybe it'll return in a different format in the future, but right now, I wish to celebrate the end of a good season. I've enjoyed reading the quotes and I hope you have too. I've also read many books that I wouldn't have otherwise. And for that, I am very grateful.

The party to send GALM off is on next Monday, during which time I invite you to come with:

• your favorite quote from previous GALM posts
  
• books you've read because of the quotes you've read here
• an all-time favorite quote
  

I hope to award one prize for each category and I will do so if there are at least 10 entries in each. The prizes include How Fiction Works by James Wood, and hard cover editions of two recent YA books that have garnered lots of praise: The Maze Runner by James Dashner, and If I Stay by Gayle Forman.

And maybe a mystery gift. Stay tuned.


You may enter in as many of these categories you'd like, but unfortunately, I can only send prizes to addresses in the Continental USA.

Tell your friends via facebook, tweeter, blogs, forums if you wish but it's not necessary. If you like my blog and would like to follow my journey, I'd love it but again, that is not the point of this contest. I just want to have a great party.

So, come one, come all. Virtual food and beverages and balloons and confetti and will be provided, but BYOQ: bring you own quotes.

See you at the party.

Unplugging and pre-announcement for Grab-A-Line Monday next week

Between my revision




and some (ignored) tasks real life has for me, it is necessary for me to unplug this week. Kitty has to endure a shower and I have to do a few things equally unappealing.

Please come back next Monday for an announcement for Grab-A-Line Monday next week.

Wish me self-control and productivity!

Grab-A-Line Monday

Welcome to another edition of Grab-A-Line Monday, where you, my wonderful blog reader, bring passages from what you've read that have caught your attention. This is a place to discover new books and find new authors.

Nandini emerged from her intensive revision to share this passage from A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner.

"I had been happy. And I could stay if I wanted. I could spend my life contemplating olives and reciting old plays to a friendly audience and building excellent walls that would outlast my lifetime. I could save the occasional coin that came to me by way of the baron's feast day generosities and in time buy a book or two, a blank scroll, ink. In thirty years I might be the poet Leuka. He wasn't a field hand, but he had been a slave and his poetry had survived him by four hundred years. No one would know but me and the gods, and I was sure the gods didn't care. All I had to do was hold my peace, and I knew that I couldn't do it."

Bish Denham, who is going through an A to Z challenge on her blog, is on the letter "B" for "Bish" today. You have to go and find out more about her name, or at least look at her cute baby pic. Her contribution last week includes two sentences from I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have to Kill You, by Ally Carter

The old women were staring at me as if I were a needle they were trying to thread...

Or

"Oh, girls," Madame Dabney soothed, turning around to make sure that Liz and I were still in our original one-piece bodies.

I have a passage from Tales From Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan this morning. I adore this book. I am in awe of the imagination of the author, and his skill, and brevity, and power. Yes, I am jealous. And, oh, did I mention the drawings? Sigh.

Here is a passage from one of the stories, No Other Country:

The green painted concrete out in front of the house, which at first seemed like a novel way to save money on lawn-mowing, was now just plain depressing. The hot water came reluctantly to the kitchen sink as if from miles away, and even then without conviction, and sometimes a pale, brownish color. Many of the windows wouldn't open properly to let flies out. Others wouldn't shut properly to stop them from getting in. The newly planted fruit trees died in the sandy soil of a too-bright backyard and were left like grave-markers under the slack laundry lines, a small cemetery of disappointment.

Before you say, "depress much?" read on to where:

They all inspected the hold closely...

No, I won't tell you what comes next. I'll promise you this: the hole brings discoveries that more than balance the bleakness of what I've shared above.

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday: Leviathan edition

Fan of historical fiction*: no
Fan of re-imagined history: a wee bit
Fan of war fiction: not at all
Fan of Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan: YES!
Fan of my blog readers who share quotes from books they've enjoyed so I don't feel lost in the sea of new books: Yes, Yes and most definitely Yes!

This is just one of several books I've enjoyed after being enticed by the quotes from Grab-A-Line Mondays and I thought I should let you know that I really appreciate every passage that has been quoted here. Keep 'em coming!

*Turns out the genre intended by Westerfeld for Leviathan is dystopian steampunk.

Grab-A-Line Monday (a focus on Jordan Sonnenblick)

After the frivolity of my last post, I will now go back to my normal serious self. *Makes serious face...then busts out laughing.*

It's Monday! Seriousness is not allowed on Mondays! (I'll be serious tomorrow, seriously. I've already written the post, it's about voice, and you know a post about voice can have no silliness.)

I read the following in Jordan Sonnenblick's After Ever After . It's from the point-of-view of a thirteen year old boy who is completely smitten with the new girl. He sits behind her in class and has been admiring her beautiful neck when she said something funny:

I laughed. How could someone with such a perfect neck be so funny, too? Somewhere in the world, there had to be an eighth-grade girl with no neck who still told knock-knock jokes and wondered why the world was so cruel.

I laughed, as well.

Back to our regular Grab-A-Line-Monday programming. Last week, Sherrie came over with this opening line to Stormbreaker, the first novel in the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz:

When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it's never good news.

Speaking of Sherrie, she did a great interview with Jordan Sonnenblick. And since GALM is a little on the slim side this week, I thought I'd tell you what I know about him as well.

I picked up Drum, Girls, and Dangerous Pies because I was trying to find out more about an editor who was judging my middle grade novel in a contest. In an interview, she mentioned she liked this book, so I dutifully checked it out from the library. Duty might have been the original motivation for me to read this book, but it had nothing to do with why I inhaled and loved it. I have to resort to a cliched answer here: it made me laugh and cry. A longer reason is that it was written with such a big heart and such authenticity, I couldn't help but become involved in the story.

So then, I did something I'd never done before; I contacted the author. He replied the next
day, really gracious and friendly.

I just finished After Ever After, and once again, laughed and cried as I read it. Now, before you entertain the suspicion that it is yet another futile attempt to bank on the success of the original and therefore not very good, (you have seen Godfather II, haven't you?) you should (a) know that Sonnenblick resisted the idea initially, and (b) go read it.

Then come back and we'll discuss what you think. And don't put down the book just because it seems to start three times: a prologue of sorts, and then an end (I know, an end at the beginning?), and the real beginning.

I found that what I enjoyed the most in Drums are found in AEA as well:

• a close relationship (between Steven and his little brother, Jeffrey, in Drums,Jeffrey and his friend Tad in AEA)
  
• the easy humor
  

Drums is told by the eighth grader Steven, and AEA by Jeffrey as an eighth-grader. Both stories feature cancer prominently but neither is merely a cancer book. Character and plot, the king and queen of fiction, drive the story.

I'll end this post with another quote from After Ever After, which describes my current phase with my middle grade novel. Jeffrey is on a 50-mile charity biking event, and this is how he describes the last stretch:

It was my favorite part of a long ride: when you're already tired and crampy, but you're more than halfway done. And it would be so easy to tumble off your bike into the grass and quit. but you know you won't.

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday

A good Monday to you and welcome to another installment of Grab A Line Monday, where readers can post quotes from what they've read recently. The purpose is not only to share memorable lines, but also to bring up books that maybe others may not have come across. I mean, have you been to a bookstore lately? Did you see how many books there are? How is one to choose? For me, the most reliable way has been from recommendation, either from friends or reviewers whose taste you respect.

One of the best thing about blogging is the community. Recommendations from the blogging community have given me some wonderful reads and I'd like this to be a place where we can gather and share quotes and hopefully also find new books.

Last week, Fiddler shared from Ruth Reichl's Not Becoming My Mother:

"I have never known so many unhappy people. They were smart, they were educated and they were bored. Some of them did charity work, but it wasn't fulfilling. Their misery was an ugly thing, and it was hard on their families. It was a terrible waste of talent and energy, and watching them I knew that I was never going to be like them."

I am afraid to admit how deeply I understood this quote. And I suspect I will find many more such moments for me.

Bish Denham gave us this line fromThe Lightning Theif by Rick Riorda:

"Finally, she married Gade Ugliano, who was nice the first thirty seconds we knew him, then showed his true colors as a world-class jerk."

My contributions this week are both videos. The first has made the rounds, but in case you've been unplugged (as I have been) I thought I'd show it here as well.

[Edited many minutes later] Um, feeling stupid, can't seem to post videos. Onto Plan B: I'll link you to the blogs where these videos are posted.

On the fate of publishing, by DK.

On declarative sentences and invisible question marks. I love that someone has brought this topic up, and I especially love that his delivery is so spot-on. Enjoy.

What caught you this week?

[I am having a whole lot of trouble with Blogger this morning. The fonts keep changing size and type for me between writing and posting. I have tried to change it many times, and the formatting is still funky. Sorry!]

Grab-A-Line Monday

Welcome to another installment of Grab-A-Line Monday, where readers share a line or two from what they read. We've had short lines, we've had long passages, we've had serious thoughts as well as light-hearted moments. Most important, some of the lines quoted here have led some of us to read the books from which those lines are taken.

Last week, Tricia shared this quote from GOING BOVINE, by Libba Bray. a book I've placed on hold and am still the 9th person in line:

"We believe our universe may be a small part of something vast--we're one house in a cosmic subdivision of houses all right next to each other. If only we could just pop in to see the neighbors, easy as opening the front door."

MG Higgins shared from INKSPELL by Cornelia Funke:

But as soon as she tried to make something new of them, a story with a life of its own, her mind went blank. The words seemed to fly out of her head --like snowflakes leaving only a damp patch on your skin when you put out your hand to catch them.

What caught you this week? And don't forget, you can always pop back throughout the week and post in the comments.

Grab-A-Line Monday

I am not sure why I allowed GALM to escape me last week, since some wonderful things had happened the week before. What are these wonderful things, you ask? Well, let me tell ya! First, I had a new contributor to GALM: Tabitha!

She quoted from The Adoration of Jenna Fox:
[In looking up the link, I came across the book trailer for the first time. I am intrigued!]

I used to be someone.
Someone named Jenna Fox.
That's what they tell me. But I am more than a name.

Welcome, Tabitha, and hope you'll drop by again soon!

Second, MG Higgins offered a quote she read from a book recommended by another of my blogging friends, Bish, via GALM. Love it that this happened!

The line is from The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo:

Below him were the twisting, turning cobblestoned streets, the small shops with their crooked tiled roofs, and the pigeons who forever perched atop them, singing sad songs that did not quite begin and never truly ended.

And the third wonderful thing is that my friend, Nandini, who has been so supportive, continued to drop by and offered a passage that made an impression on her. It is The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner.

He put down his pen and listened. He was a soldier as well as a scholar, and he was not unfamiliar with the sound of men screaming.

I have something that made me laugh from The Alchemyst: The Secrets of The Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott:

"Maybe they're Mafia," Elle suggested dramatically. "My dad knows someone in the Maifa. But he drives a Prius," she added.

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday, Hot-Dog Edition

The synonym system knew that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also thought a hot dog was a boiling puppy.


That passage is from a WIRED magazine article on Google searches. Poor boiling puppies! (And poor puppies in those ridiculous outfits)

Incidentally, Mark McVeigh, super-editor turned super-agent, has a blog post on hot dogs today as well. The content is totally different but I thought it was interesting: what are the chances of two blogs devoted to writing and publishing focusing on hot dogs on the same day?

(Now my statistically-minded friends will consider that a challenge...)

Onto GALM proper. Since I am primarily a fiction writer, I will post a line from a fiction. This is from the The Elegance of Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery:

As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble.

A big thanks to those of you who came over to comment and to offer memorable lines. Last week, Bish enjoyed this line from The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo.

Peter could see the magician all too clearly. His beard was long and wild, his fingernails ragged and torn, his cloak covered in a patina of mold. His eyes burned bright, but they were the eyes of a cornered animal: desperate and pleading and angry all at the same time.

Nandini quote from Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Deryn felt brilliant, rising through the air at the center of everyone's attention, like an acrobat aloft on a swing. She wanted to make a speech: "Hey, all you sods, I can fly and you can't! A natural airman, in case you haven't noticed. And in conclusion, I'd like to add that I'm a girl and you can all get stuffed!"

And Corey will to back to the Berkshires soon to get her book!

What caught you this week? (besides hot dogs, that is.)

Grab-A-Line Monday

It's late Monday night, and only now do I have the few moments to repost the lines from last week's post. Thanks to Davin, we have two selections from Alice Munro, a writer whose writing is tender yet uncompromisingly truthful. Her observations about relationships and motivations, especially, have often made me put down the book and just live in what I've just read. These two are from her latest short story collection, Too Much Happiness:

Her graying hair was cut short and she had a mole riding on one cheekbone.

Doree was pretty sure that these people weren't as bad as Lloyd thought, but it was no use contradicting him. Perhaps men just had to have enemies, the way they had to have their jokes. And sometimes Lloyd did make the enemies into jokes, just as if he was laughing at himself. She was even allowed to laugh with him, as long as she wasn't the one who started the laughing.

Nandini, in preparation for the movie release of The Lightning Thief, has been re-reading the series with her children. She offered this line, from The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan:

The Friday before winter break, my mom packed me an overnight bag and a few deadly weapons and took me to a new boarding school.

Don't you pack a few deadly weapons for your child going off to boarding school? :)

Incidentally, I haven't watched the movie yet, but my daughter, a huge Percy Jackson fan who timed her re-reading of the entire series to coincide with the movie, saw it with her friend at his birthday party. She liked the movie but was indignant at the number and magnitude of differences in the movie. Now I don't know if I can watch it, I'd be yelling the screen: "Where is Th___? How can the story make sense without her? And what about Cl___? What? Not a single Seaweed Brain? Arrggggh! That's not what they played at the arcade! What do you mean blue and not gray eyes? I need to speak to your manager, I mean screen writer or executive producer or whoever it is who made these decisions!"

Grab-A-Line Monday

Happy Monday!

Nandini's and Bish's comments last week made me decide to clarify something about GALM, specifically about being "late" to share their lines.

There is no "late."

Come on over any time of the week and post your comments on the week's GALM and I'll re-post it the following Monday.

Last week we had three short, deceptively simple, and lovely quotes from kid lit.

Sherrie shared this simple, yet memorable line from Home of the Brave,in which a young boy from Africa describes someone laughing on a cold day:

His laughter makes little clouds.

Brought a smile to me.


Bish enjoyed this from Evolution of Calpurnia Tate:

There was my whole life for you, socks stretching all the way to the infinite horizon, a yawning valley of knitting tedium. I felt sick.

I can certainly feel the narrator's sense of hopelessness. Poor Calpurnia.


Nandini has a line from STARGIRL by Jerry Spinelli.

She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day.

There is a boy in love.

My line this week is from Tana French's In The Woods again.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to fail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high0fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

Maybe it is because I am thinking of mortality in this way a lot these days, specifically about how when you have children late in life, you have to work extra hard to keep healthy so you can be there for the important things in your children's lives. And if you see me exercise, you'll agree that my form of exercise, while not trendy, is very much of the flailing hysterically sort.

What caught you this week?

Grab A Line Monday on Wednesday

So Monday came and went and now it's Wednesday. Some weeks are weird like that.

Since I'm late in posting this week's GALM (GALW doesn't work the same way), I will post two quotes that I enjoyed this week. The first is from In The Woods by Tana French. This passage from the prologue describes the woods:

Its silence is a pointillist conspiracy of a million tiny noises--rustles, flurries, nameless truncated shrieks; its emptiness teems with secret life, scurrying just beyond the corner of your eye.

The second one, of a totally different style, is from Frank Portman's King Dork:

At moments like these, it's hard to tell whether you're being too paranoid or just paranoid enough.

Nandini, my supportive friend came back last week and offered this quote from WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON, by Grace Lin.

As he glanced upward, he realized the courtyard was like a well for the sky--the stars and night seemed to flow into it endlessly.

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday

IN last week's GALM, Nandini shared a line from Mare's War, written by my writing group's facilitator, Tanita Davis. Mare's War had just been announced as a Coretta King Honor book, in addition to the other accolades. Here is the line Nandini chose:

Now, this is a women's army, she tells Miss Ida. She's gonna be working with women to free up a man for the fight. It's her duty, she says. Well, sir, Miss Ida sure pitched a fit, said no daughter of hers was going to join no women's army like she ain't got no breeding

My line this week is thanks to Nandini as well, who brought a wonderful line from Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett a few weeks back, which of course means I would read it. I started a few days ago and am enjoying it tremendously so far. Here is an example of the low-key wit of the book:

...Tiffany retorted, feling annoyed. "Witches have animals they can talk to, called familiars. Like your toad here."

"I'm not familiar," said a voice from among the paper flowers, "I'm just slightly presumptuous."

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday

I found out about a new blog this past week, The Daily Kidlit Quote. Go check them out. (incidentally, one of the first quotes I read from the blog from the same work that Nandini shared over here, Haroun and Sea Stories.)

Here is something from Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It brought over by Tricia:

...something was yellow. I remembered yellow as the color of the sun. I'd seen the sun last July. It hurt to look straight at it, and it hurt to look at this new burst of yellow. It wasn't the sun. I laughed at myself for thinking it might be. It was a sheet of paper dancing in the crosswinds down the street. But it was yellow. I had to have it.

Nandini brought Wanting Mor by Rukhsana Khan ...

The problem with hard shiny floors that are not made of mud is that dust from the streets,from all the dung of donkeys and horses and animals in the alleyways--the same dust that clogs the air--ends up settling on those nice shiny floors, and they need to be swept and mopped every single day.

a. fortis came over this a quote from Shine, Coconut Moon by Neesha Meminger:

Molly's way more into my "Eastern" heritage than I am. It's not as if I'm not into it...it's just that it was never really into me.

The gesture described here in Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann took my breath away momentarily:

She opened a limp, resigned palm, and stared at it as if to say that she had disappeared from herself and all she had left was this starnge hand she was holding out in the air.

It reminded me of another hand gesture from another person who's lost and hurting from Broken For You by Stephanie Kallos:

"I came to him like a pilgrim," the young woman siad, and held out her hands, palms up, like she was waiting to be given something: a stack of books, a platter of sweet potatoes, an armful of clean, folded linens.

What caught you this week?

Blame it on age, or the holidays, or the sunny skies

Silly me, didn't post my line in my GALM post yesterday. Here it is:

She did everything small as if it was extraordinary and necessary.

from LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN by Collum McCann

Yes, I am still reading this book, and savoring it.

Drop me a line here or at yesterday's post.

Grab-A-Line Monday

Happy Monday! I hope those of you who made resolutions are still happy with them. I am a little behind on my old-year/new-year transition. When I have sorted my thoughts out, hopefully still within the month of January, I will post them here.

Onto our regular programming of GALM, or Grab-A-Line Monday.

What is Grab-A Line Monday? It is a weekly occurrence here at my blog, where I post a line--or two or however many it takes to capture a thought--that I've read that has stayed with me. I invite my readers to do the same. There are so many books that we'll never get to read everything that interests us. Such a shame. This is my small attempt to find writing that we shouldn't, but may otherwise, miss.

These quotes don't have to all be profound. Simple and light-hearted are great as well. I hope you find some passages that made you think and feel, or intrigue you enough that you'd want to read the book from which the passages originate.

Here are the quotes last last week's GALM:

MG Higgins shared from THE EVOLUTION OF CALPURNIA TATE by Jacqueline Kelly.

...I crept downstairs and went out onto the front porch very early before the daily avalanche of my brothers could crack open the peace of the morning.

Nandini offered this from The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex.

It was Moving Day, and everybody was crazy. You remember. It was chaos; people running around with armfuls of heirloom china and photo albums, carrying food and water, carrying their dogs and kids because they forgot that their dogs and kids could carry themselves. Crazy.

I thought I should also mentioned that Nandini's contribution from the week before struck a chord with Beth, who posted her wonderful thoughts about writing fearsome for kids. I am re-posting the poem from Salman Rushdie, who dedicated to his son while in hiding during the fallout from Satanic Verses. The acrostic spells ZAFAR, his son's name.

Z emble, Zenda, Xanadu:
A ll our dream-worlds may come true.
F airy lands are fearsome too.
A s I wander far from view
R ead, and bring me home to you.

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday

What usually happens during holiday festivities, especially with family around? Tons of food, talks till late, bouts of nostalgic recounting of events (in as many version as there are people), and the blurring together of days till Mondays feel like Saturdays and Tuesdays are indistinguishable from Fridays.

That's why I missed last week's GALM.

But here it is again, the first installment of the new year. And since this is a new year (not quite a new decade yet: that event begins in 2011 I'm told,) when there is much reflection and planning, I thought I'd throw this in:

The overexamined life, Claire, it's not worth living.

--Let the Great World Spin by Collum McCann

These are the lines from the last two weeks:

Tricia shared the short opening line from Interworld by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves. The voice is a teen-age boy who finds himself able to move between other dimensions.

Once I got lost in my own house.

Nandini took something quite different, the dedication of Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Salman Rushdie wrote it for his son while in hiding during the fallout from Satanic Verses. The acrostic spells ZAFAR, his son's name.

Z emble, Zenda, Xanadu:
A ll our dream-worlds may come true.
F airy lands are fearsome too.
A s I wander far from view
R ead, and bring me home to you.

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday

This is what Grab-A-Line Monday is.

Last week, not only did I get some excellent quotes, I also received a most appreciated validation from fellow writers. What would I do without my author-community?

Tricia grabbed some lines from THE LAST UNICORN by Peter S. Beagle:

Then the Lady Amalthea smiled at him for the first time since she had come to stay in King Haggard's castle. It was a small smile, like the new moon, a slender bend of brightness on the edge of the unseen, but Prince Lir leaned toward it to be warm. He would have cupped his hands around her smile and breathed it brighter, if he had dared.

And MG Higgins grabbed her lines from the YA novel WHAT I SAW AND HOW I LIED by Judy Blundell:

Why did the air here smell like a pocketful of promises? It was the flowers and the ocean and the sky all mixed in together.

This week I was taken by this passage, which describes in such vivid details the noise in a city I almost felt I was there. It is from the 2009 National Book Award winner LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN by Colum McCann

The thrum of the subway. The M22 bus pulled up against the sidewalk, braked, sighed down into a pot hole. A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the dankest reaches of the alleyways. Sneakers found their sweet spots. The leather of briefcases rubbed against trouserlegs. A few umbrella tips clunked against the pavement. Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out in to the street.

What caught you this week?