anleja

First off, hopefully this isn't a repost, I didn't know what to do the search as. This thread is sort of like "book recommendations", but instead of telling why you like the book, post a part of it in this thread, to let people judge for themselves if it is enticing enough for them to pick up the book themselves. Like on late night talk shows when a person is promoting their movie, they play the little teaser clip to hopefully get people interested in their movie. I started this with the hope of being intoduced to something new I like. Hopefully some of you are up to it!

This is from what I am reading right now, "Budding Prospects" by T.C. Boyle:

I moved to the far end of the wall, feeling foolish, feeling ashamed and naked, feeling stoned. The hole was neatly cut, edges smoothed, but it was encircled by a corona of dirt and some sad joker had scrawled "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" just above it. What is lust? I thought, dropping the ticket into the aperture. What is flesh? What is mind? I unfastened my zipper, found that I had an erection, and penetrated the wall. Gesh was laughing, Rudy concentrating. Beside me, pressed to the wall like a penitent, Raul moaned softly, his features bloated with rapture. I could hear the hum of the florescent lights, sadness crushed me like a fist and someone - something - took hold of me with a grip as moist and gentle as love.

anleja

Oh, come on, throw me a bone here! Someone? Anyone?

RedCometChar

Here's a little H.P. Lovecraft, from the book I read when I'm supposed to be working:

"But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of the ocean. Blue, green, gray, white or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and time. Sometimes at twilight the gray vapors of the horizon have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath. And these glimpses have been as often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time."

That's from the short story The White Ship. Makes me feel a little dizzy reading stuff like that. That's why I do it, of course.

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Killing that robot makes me want to go home.

Hal Incandenza

Anleja, I can't leave a lover of lit hanging. So here's a tiny lil bit from my all-time favorite novel:

"I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair. This is a cold room in University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside, at which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint and I were lately received.

I am in here."

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace, pp. 3.

T. C. Boyle ain't half bad. Lovecraft's pretty great, too. More lierature-based threads, please....

Jack Ruby

I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why ?"
Why did I cause so much pain ?
Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness ?
Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love ?
I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong.
We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either.
We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
And God says, "No, that's not right."
Yeah, well, whatever. You can't teach God anything.

-- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

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You don't know what you don't know.

phredgreen

okay... i'll give mad love to anyone who finds the captain crucnh scene from cryptonomicon. i'm just not willing to type it all out by hand, but it is by far the most amusing thing i've ever read.

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My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
- Thomas Paine

Ganguro

i hope you all have brushed up on your copyright laws,
please be mindful of how much of an excerpt you post

battlemouth

"Was the world first created or ended? When the lord our God breathed on the Universe, was that a genesis or a revelation? Should we count those seven days forwards or backwards? How did the apple taste, Adam? And the half worm you discovered in that sweet and bitter pulp : was that the head or the tail?"

thats from one of my most recent reads, "Everything is Illuminated" i highly suggest it, its by Johnathan Safron Foer

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like a bullet through a flock of doves

anleja

§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use38
...the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include —

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Nefir

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

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You do not use a Macintosh, instead you use a Tandy
Kompressor break your glowstick, Kompressor eat your candy
Kompressor open jaws, Kompressor release ants
Kompressor watch you scream, Because Kompressor does not dance

gremlinx8

I think my favorite excerpt from a book comes from the last paragraph in John Knowles' A Separate Peace:
All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way – if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.

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Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted. -Lennon

SabrinaFair

"From that time on he was completely lost. It came when the moon was full and he romaed the fields, or during his sleep, in the silence of the night; and most often in the springtime, when the whole world was in bloom and fragrant. At every oppurtunity he had to be hapy, to taste the simplest human joys--to eat, sleep, to mix with his friends and laugh, to encounter a girl on the street and think, I like her--the ten claws immediaetly naild themsilves down into him, and his desire vanished"
-from The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis

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"With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy."
-Desiderata

anti fishstick

It was cold in my room and I took a shower and hid my underpants because they were all gross from sex. I got in my nightie and the wind was blowing outside and the window was rattling and I put on a tape and got deep under the covers. But then I couldn't sleep because all these ideas were coming into my head, like I was a terrible person and conceited and a slut and I hadn't even tried to help Darcy, who was anorexic and on speed. And everything in the world seemed like it was pressing down on me and I started to cry and I swore to be a better person and get interested in college and not smoke cigarettes and not have sex except if I really loved the person. And also not to wear eye shadow or go in the slamming pit or be insincere to my mother. But it seemed so hopeless because I had already changed so much and broken so many pacts and it just seemed like the older you got the more corrupt you became and really, if you thought about it, in terms of your morals and stuff: you were dying from the day you were born.
-Andrea Marr, from the book GIRL by Blake Nelson

love the first person narrative. kind of a modern day catcher in the rye for the indie scene :P

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And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
~Anais Nin

PeaceFrog

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"-----"

From my favorite book, On The Road - Jack Kerouac

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The only people for me are the mad ones...

anleja

This is from the book "Polar" by T.R. Pearson. I just started it, but it seems pretty good so far.

...Ray had hit town, after all, along about when Larry was flaunting his tactlessness. One of those planer mill Caudles had slipped from his bass boat and drowned in the reservoir, and Larry had gotten dispatched to pass the news to his brother who he'd found trimming limbs in his yard.

Now the brother, it seems, was piling the unsacked limbs down by the curbing which violated an ordinance that Larry straitaway acquanted that Caudle with. That Caudle thought the provision a sorry blight on his civic liberties, and he made his opinion known to Larry in a free and salty fashion which served to Prompt Larry to write that Caudle up.

In fact, Larry was ripping that Caudle's citation out of his ticket book when he remembered why he'd stopped by in the first place, and he was shoving the thing, by all accounts, at that Caudle as he spoke.

"Elvin come out of his boat somehow."

"Is he all right?"

"No. He's dead."

Sparhawk

Nefir, I gotta laugh, because that was the exact piece I was thinking about posting when I clicked into this thread...

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"In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard. It's - and it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work. We're making progress. It is hard work."

Jizz-Fritter

"The years between twenty and thirty are full of perils of all kinds, full of great perils, ay, perils of sin and death, but also full of God's light and comfort; struggling, thou shalt prevail, and when the dangers are past, thou shalt recall them poignantly and say, It was a good time after all."

--Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother, Theo, from Isleworth 25 Nov. 1876 (82a)

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"Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose." Dick Cheney

Kadath

-- Harlan Ellison, Lonelyache

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it's quiet in here

tropple

I love that book. The zen of sugar coated cereal...

From Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson...


The condemned man showers, shaves, puts on most of a suit, and realizes that he is ahead of schedule. He turns on the television, gets a San Miguel out of the fridge to steady his nerves, and then goes to the closet to get the stuff of his last meal. The apartment only has one closet and when its door is open it appears to have been bricked shut, Cask of Amontillado-style, with very large flat red oblongs, each imprinted with the image of a venerable and yet oddly cheerful and yet somehow kind of hauntingly sad naval officer. The whole pallet load was shipped here several weeks ago by Avi, in an attempt to lift Randy's spirits. For all Randy knows more are still sitting on a Manila dockside ringed with armed guards and dictionary-sized rat traps straining against their triggers, each baited with a single golden nugget.

Randy selects one of the bricks from this wall, creating a gap in the formation, but there is another, identical one right behind it, another picture of that same naval officer. They seem to be marching from his closet in a peppy phalanx. "Part of this complete balanced breakfast," Randy says. Then he slams the door on them and walks with a measured, forcibly calm step to the living room where he does most of his dining, usually while facing his thirty-six-inch television. He sets up his San Miguel, an empty bowl, an exceptionally large soup spoon--so large that most European cultures would identify it as a serving spoon and most Asian ones as a horticultural implement. He obtains a stack of paper napkins, not the brown recycled ones that can't be moistened even by immersion in water, but the flagrantly environmentally unsound type, brilliant white and cotton-fluffy and desperately hygroscopic. He goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge, reaches deep into the back, and finds an unopened box-bag-pod-unit of UHT milk. UHT milk need not, technically, be refrigerated, but it is pivotal, in what is to follow, that the milk be only a few microdegrees above the point of freezing. The fridge in Randy's apartment has louvers in the back where the cold air is blown in, straight from the freon coils. Randy always stores his milk-pods directly in front of those louvers. Not too close, or else the pods will block the flow of air, and not too far away either. The cold air becomes visible as it rushes in and condenses moisture, so it is a simple matter to sit there with the fridge door open and observe its flow characteristics, like an engineer testing an experimental minivan in a River Rouge wind tunnel. What Randy would like to see, ideally, is the whole milk-pod enveloped in an even, jacketlike flow to produce better heat exchange through the multilayered plastic-and-foil skin of the milk--pod. He would like the milk to be so cold that when he reaches in and grabs it, he feels the flexible, squishy pod stiffen between his fingers as ice crystals spring into existence, summoned out of nowhere simply by the disturbance of being squished.

Today the milk is almost, but not quite, that cold. Randy goes into his living room with it. He has to wrap it in a towel because it is so cold it hurts his fingers. He launches a videotape and then sits down. All is in readiness.

This is one of a series of videotapes that are shot in an empty basketball gym with a polished maple floor and a howling, remorseless ventilation system. They depict a young man and a young woman, both attractive, svelte, and dressed something like marquee players in the Ice Capades, performing simple ballroom dance steps to the accompaniment of strangled music from a ghetto blaster set up on the free-throw line. It is miserably clear that the video has been shot by a third conspirator who is burdened with a consumer-grade camcorder and reeling from some kind of inner-ear disease that he or she would like to share with others. The dancers stomp through the most simple steps with autistic determination. The camera operator begins in each case with a two-shot, then, like a desperado tormenting a milksop, aims his weapon at their feet and makes them dance, dance, dance. At one point the pager hooked to the man's elastic waistband goes off and a scene has to be cut short. No wonder: he is one of the most sought-after ballroom dance instructors in Manila. His partner would be too, if more men in this city were interested in learning to dance. As it is, she must scrape by earning maybe a tenth of what the male instructor pulls down, giving lessons to a small number of addled or henpecked stumblebums like Randy Waterhouse.

Randy takes the red box and holds it securely between his knees with the handy stay-closed tab pointing away from him. Using both hands in unison he carefully works his fingertips underneath the flap, trying to achieve equal pressure on each side, paying special attention to places where too much glue was laid down by the gluing-machine. For a few long, tense moments, nothing at all happens, and an ignorant or impatient observer might suppose that Randy is getting nowhere. But then the entire flap pops open in an instant as the entire glue-front gives way. Randy hates it when the box-top gets bent or, worst of all possible words, torn. The lower flap is merely tacked down with a couple of small glue-spots and Randy pulls it back to reveal a translucent, inflated sac. The halogen down-light recessed in the ceiling shines through the cloudy material of the sac to reveal gold--everywhere the glint of gold. Randy rotates the box ninety degrees and holds it between his knees so its long axis is pointed at the television set, then grips the top of the sac and carefully parts its heat-sealed seam, which purrs as it gives way. Removal of the somewhat milky plastic barrier causes the individual nuggets of Cap'n Crunch to resolve, under the halogen light, with a kind of preternatural crispness and definition that makes the roof of Randy's mouth glow and throb in trepidation.

On the TV, the dancing instructors have finished demonstrating the basic steps. It is almost painful to watch them doing the compulsories, because when they do, they must willfully forget everything they know about advanced ballroom dancing, and dance like persons who have suffered strokes, or major brain injuries, that have wiped out not only the parts of their brain responsible for fine motor skills but also blown every panel in the aesthetic-discretion module. They must, in other words, dance the way their beginning pupils like Randy dance.

The gold nuggets of Cap'n Crunch pelt the bottom of the bowl with a sound like glass rods being snapped in half Tiny fragments spall away from their corners and ricochet around on the white porcelain surface. World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap'n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap'n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds.

At this point in the videotape he always wonders if he's inadvertently set his beer down on the fast-forward button, or something, because the dancers go straight from their vicious Randy parody into something that obviously qualifies as advanced dancing. Randy knows that the steps they are doing are nominally the same as the basic steps demonstrated earlier, but he's damned if he can tell which is which, once they go into their creative mode. There is no recognizable transition, and that is what pisses Randy off, and has always pissed him off, about dancing lessons. Any moron can learn to trudge through the basic steps. That takes all of half an hour. But when that half-hour is over, dancing instructors always expect you'll take flight and go through one of those miraculous time lapse transitions that happen only in Broadway musicals and begin dancing brilliantly. Randy supposes that people who are lousy at math feel the same way: the instructor writes a few simple equations on the board, and ten minutes later he's deriving the speed of light in a vacuum.

He pours the milk with one hand while jamming the spoon in with the other, not wanting to waste a single moment of the magical, golden time when cold milk and Cap'n Crunch are together but have not yet begun to pollute each other's essential natures: two Platonic ideals separated by a boundary a molecule wide. Where the flume of milk splashes over the spoon-handle, the polished stainless steel fogs with condensation. Randy of course uses whole milk, because otherwise why bother? Anything less is indistinguishable from water, and besides he thinks that the fat in whole milk acts as some kind of a buffer that retards the dissolution-into-slime process. The giant spoon goes into his mouth before the milk in the bowl has even had time to seek its own level. A few drips come off the bottom and are caught by his freshly washed goatee (still trying to find the right balance between beardedness and vulnerability, Randy has allowed one of these to grow). Randy sets the milk-pod down, grabs a fluffy napkin, lifts it to his chin, and uses a pinching motion to sort of lift the drops of milk from his whiskers rather than smashing and smearing them down into the beard. Meanwhile all his concentration is fixed on the interior of his mouth, which naturally he cannot see, but which he can imagine in three dimensions as if zooming through it in a virtual reality display. Here is where a novice would lose his cool and simply chomp down. A few of the nuggets would explode between his molars, but then his jaw would snap shut and drive all of the unshattered nuggets straight up into his palate where their armor of razor-sharp dextrose crystals would inflict massive collateral damage, turning the rest of the meal into a sort of pain-hazed death march and rendering him Novocain mute for three days. But Randy has, over time, worked out a really fiendish Cap'n Crunch eating strategy that revolves around playing the nuggets' most deadly features against each other. The nuggets themselves are pillow-shaped and vaguely striated to echo piratical treasure chests.

Now, with a flake-type of cereal, Randy's strategy would never work. But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken-treasure-related shapes that the cereal-aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard-to-pin-down striated pillow formation. The important thing, for Randy's purposes, is that the individual pieces of Cap'n Crunch are, to a very rough approximation, shaped kind of like molars. The strategy, then, is to make the Cap'n Crunch chew itself by grinding the nuggets together in the center of the oral cavity, like stones in a lapidary tumbler. Like advanced ballroom dancing, verbal explanations (or for that matter watching videotapes) only goes so far and then your body just has to learn the moves.

By the time he has eaten a satisfactory amount of Cap'n Crunch (about a third of a 25-ounce box) and reached the bottom of his beer bottle, Randy has convinced himself that this whole dance thing is a practical joke. When he reaches the hotel, Amy and Doug Shaftoe will be waiting for him with mischievous smiles. They will tell him they were just teasing and then take him into the bar to talk him down.

Randy puts on the last few bits of his suit. Any delaying tactics are acceptable at this point, so he checks his e-mail.

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+++++++++++Boom!

Ace_O_Spades

From, you guessed it, Time Enough for Love

"The most heartbreaking thing about ephemeral's short lives, is that there is often not time enough for love - There should always be time enough for love"

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Feh.

apostasy1

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms, she was always Lolita.”
-- Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov.

Simply the most elegantly crafted opening paragraphs that I have ever read.