Showing posts with label 2013. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2013. Show all posts
To read or not to read?
Read these opening paragraphs to decide if you may like to read or not to read the rest of the book!
Kaya.
Writing such a word, Bobby Wabalanginy couldn't help but smile. Nobody ever done writ that before, he thought. Nobody ever writ hello or yes that way!
Roze a wail...
Bobby Wabalanginy wrote with damp chalk, brittle as weak bone. Bobby wrote on a thin piece of slate. Moving between languages, Bobby wrote on stone.
With a name like Bobby Wabalanginy he knew the difficulty of spelling.
Boby Wablngn wrote roze on a wail.
But there was no whale. Bobby was imagining, remembering...
Rite wail.
Bobby already knew what it was like to be up close beside a right whale. He was not much more than a baby when he first saw whales rolling between him and the islands: a very close island , a big family of whales breathing easily, spouts sparkling in the sunlight, great black bodies glossy in the blue and sunlit sea. Bobby wanted to enter the water and swim out to them, but swaddled against his mother's body, his spirit could only call. Unlike that Bible man, Jonah, Bobby wasn't frightened because he carried a story deep inside himself, a story Menak gave him wrapped around the memory of a fiery pulsing whale heart...
On a sunny day, walking along a long arm of rock beside a calm ocean, you see the water suddenly bulging as a great bubble comes to the surface and oh! water streams from the barnacled flesh and there is the vast back of a whale. You are enclosed in moist whale breath.
Barnacles stud the smooth dark skin, and crabs scurry across it. That black back must be slippery, treacherous like rock...But you see the hole in its back, the breath going in and out, and you think
of all the blow holes along this coast; how a clever man can slip into them, fly inland one moment, back to the ocean the next.
Always curious, always brave, you take one one step and the whale is underfoot. Two steps more and you are sliding deep into a dark and breathing cave that resonates with whale song. Beside you beats a blood filled heart so warm it could be fire.
Plunge your hands into that whale heart, lean into it and squeeze and let your voice join the whale's roar. Sing that song your father taught you as the whale dives, down, deep.
How dark it is beneath the sea, and looking through the whale's eyes you see bubbles slide past you like...
To keep reading this book request it from the Library!
Keep Reading- Book vs Movie
Read these opening lines and decide if you'd like to Keep Reading this book!
My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
Academic study and the steady, mindful practice of religion slowly brought me back to life. I have kept up what some people would consider my strange religious practices. After one year of high school, I attended the University of Toronto and took a double major Bachelor's degree. My majors were religious studies and zoology. My fourth-year thesis for religious studies concerned certain aspects of the cosmogony theory of Isaac Luria, the great sixteenth century Kabbalist from Safed. My Zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of three toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanour - calm, quiet and introspective-did something to soothe my shattered self.
There are two-toed sloths and there are three-toed sloths, the case being determined by the forepaws of the animals, since all sloths have three claws on their hind paws.I had great luck one summer of studying the three toed sloth in situ in the equatorial jungles of Brazil. It is a highly intriguing creature. Its only real habit is indolence. It sleeps or rests on average twenty hours a day. Our team tested the sleeping habits of five wild three-toed sloths by placing on their heads, in the early evening after they had fallen asleep, bright plastic dishes filled with water. We found them still in place late the next morning, the water in the dishes swarming with insects. The sloth is at its busiest at sunset, using the word busy here in the most relaxed sense.
To Keep Reading this book request it from the library now!
Keep Reading: Creepy tales from 1001 books collection
From a selection of creepy tales, this is a classic example of a psychological story by a master.
Read these opening paragraphs to see if you would like to keep reading this book...
TRUE! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees --very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.
Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded --with what caution --with what foresight --with what dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it --oh so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly --very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this, And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously-oh, so cautiously --cautiously (for the hinges creaked) --I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nights --every night just at midnight --but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And every morning, when the day broke, I went boldly into the chamber, and spoke courageously to him, calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he has passed the night. So you see he would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept.
To keep reading this story request it from the library now!
1001 books
,
2013
,
January
,
Keep reading
Keep reading - Chicklit
Delightful and engaging, here is a chicklit novel, set in Sydney in the late1950's, by an Australian author.
Read the opening paragraphs to see if you would like to keep reading this book!
At the end of a hot November day Miss Baines and Mrs Williams of the ladies frock department at Goode's were complaining to each other while they changed out of their black frocks before going home.
'Mr Ryder's not so bad, ' said Miss Baines, in reference to the floor manager; 'its that Miss Cartwright who's a pain in the neck, excuse my French'.
Miss Cratwright was the buyer, and she never seemed to give them a moment's peace.
Mrs Williams shrugged and began to powder her nose.
'She always gets worse this time of year,' she pointed out.
'She wants to make sure we earn our Christmas bonus.'
'As if we could help it!' said Miss Baines. 'We're run off our feet!'
Which was quite true: the great festival being now only six weeks away, the crowds of customers were beginning to surge and the frocks to vanish from the rails in an ever-faster flurry, and when Mrs Williams was washing out her undies in the handbasin that night she had a sudden sensation that her life was slipping away with the rinsing water as it gurgled down the plughole; but she pulled herself together and went on with her chores, while the antipodean summer night throbbed outside all around her.
Mrs Williams, Patty, and Miss Baines, Fay, worked together with Miss Jacobs on Ladies' Cocktail Frocks, which was next to Ladies Evening Frocks, down at the end of the second floor of Goode's department store in the centre of Sydney. F.G Goode, a sharp Mancunian, had opened his original Emporium )Ladies and Gents' Apparel - All the Latest London Modes) at the end of the last century, and had never looked back, because the people of the colony, he saw straight away, would spend pretty well all they had in order to convince themselves that they were in fashion.
To Keep on reading this book request it from the Library now!
Read the opening paragraphs to see if you would like to keep reading this book!
At the end of a hot November day Miss Baines and Mrs Williams of the ladies frock department at Goode's were complaining to each other while they changed out of their black frocks before going home.
'Mr Ryder's not so bad, ' said Miss Baines, in reference to the floor manager; 'its that Miss Cartwright who's a pain in the neck, excuse my French'.
Miss Cratwright was the buyer, and she never seemed to give them a moment's peace.
Mrs Williams shrugged and began to powder her nose.
'She always gets worse this time of year,' she pointed out.
'She wants to make sure we earn our Christmas bonus.'
'As if we could help it!' said Miss Baines. 'We're run off our feet!'
Which was quite true: the great festival being now only six weeks away, the crowds of customers were beginning to surge and the frocks to vanish from the rails in an ever-faster flurry, and when Mrs Williams was washing out her undies in the handbasin that night she had a sudden sensation that her life was slipping away with the rinsing water as it gurgled down the plughole; but she pulled herself together and went on with her chores, while the antipodean summer night throbbed outside all around her.
Mrs Williams, Patty, and Miss Baines, Fay, worked together with Miss Jacobs on Ladies' Cocktail Frocks, which was next to Ladies Evening Frocks, down at the end of the second floor of Goode's department store in the centre of Sydney. F.G Goode, a sharp Mancunian, had opened his original Emporium )Ladies and Gents' Apparel - All the Latest London Modes) at the end of the last century, and had never looked back, because the people of the colony, he saw straight away, would spend pretty well all they had in order to convince themselves that they were in fashion.
To Keep on reading this book request it from the Library now!
2013
,
Chicklit
,
January
,
Keep reading
Keep Reading- Book vs Movie
You may have already read this and/or seen the movie. Today, 3rd January, you are invited to raise a glass and toast the birthday of this much loved author. The toast is "The professor".
Read these opening lines and decide if you'd like to keep on reading this book!
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.
This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.
To keep on reading this book request it from the library now!
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