First and last for Boneshaker

But first a word on Spencer Rifles, like Briar used.

The Spencer was invented in 1860 for use by the Union Army. I'm not certain that it would therefore have made it into the hands of a Seattle lawman (Briar's father) by 1863 but it's alt history anyways so, of course it would. Unless you are a rifle buff perhaps (I'm not), there isn't anything that distinguishing in its looks:

It could fire 20 rounds a minute which made it a huge advantage for the Union in combat. The South did capture a few but lacked the raw materials to manufacture new cartridges.

And, here's a sequence I particularly liked between Angeline and Zeke on the death of possible deserter and tragic but rightfully doomed figure Rudy:

"We should do something," he said weakly.

"Like what? Like help him? Boy, he's so far beyond help that even if I wanted to, there's nothing to be done for him. Hell. The kindest thing we could do is shoot him in the head."

"Angeline!"

"Don't look at me like that. If he were a dog, you wouldn't let him suffer. Thing is, he ain't a dog, and I don't mind him suffering. You know what's in that bottle? The one that he's holding there, like it's his own baby?"

{it's a bottle of Blight made to be drinkable-not sure how it differs from the distilled Blight beer that is safe to drink}

....

"This miserable poison was bound to kill him one day, and I think today will be that day."

"We should help him," Zeke said, protesting the man's death as a matter of formality.

"You want to shoot him after all?"

"No!"

"Me either. I don't think he deserves it...Cover him up if you think that's polite."

Ok, first line:

She saw him and she stopped a few feet from the stairs.

Last line:

Hale Quarter jabbed a pen against his tongue to moisten it, and began to write.

First and last for The Hunger Games

Ok, it was mad entertaining and not something I'd feel horribly guilty about reading like Twilight (not that I've read it but I hear it has that affect on people and frankly, if I found myself loving that Mormon purity fable I'd have to re-evaluate my life.)

Also, check out:

http://aimmyarrowshigh.livejournal.com/32461.html

A map of Panem rendered in obsessive geographic detail.

First:

When  I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.

Last:

I take his hand, preparing for the cameras, and dreading the moment when I will finally have to let go.

First and last for In the Miso Soup

I think I'll have to think about this book for a few days before I can decide what I think of it (or even if I liked it-which usually means I did but it's complicated. This book is like meeting a married man in a hotel room. Who might follow you home and tape human skin to your door.)

First, here is the section that gives the book it's title and is my favorite part:

"There's just one thing I was hoping we could do that we never got around to. I wanted to have some miso soup with you, bit it's too late now. We won't be meeting again."

"Miso soup?"

"Yeah. I'm really interested in miso soup. I ordered it at a little sushi bar in Colorado once long ago, and I thought it was a darned peculiar kind of soup, the smell it had and everything, so I didn't eat it, but it intrigued me. It had that funny brown color and smelled kind of like human sweat, but it also looked delicate and refined somehow. I came to this country hoping to find out what the people who eat that soup on a daily basis might be like. So I'm a little disappointed we didn't get to have some together."

I asked him if he was going back to America right away. No, not right away, he said, so I suggested we could still have miso soup together sometime.....

"I don't need to eat the stuff now because now I'm here-right in the middle of it! The soup I ordered in Colorado had all these little slices of vegetables and things, which at the time just looked like kitchen scrapings to me. But now I'm in the miso soup myself, just like those bits of vegetable. I'm floating around in this giant bowl of it, and that's good enough for me."

I'd never say this to anyone who had never had miso but that's actually an excellent, indeed elegant, description. Smelling sort of like sweat but delicate.

Anyways, first and last.

First line:

My name is Kenji.

Last line:

"The feather of a swan," I said.

What I've learned from Vinyl Junkies thus far

I love Brett Milano's writing for starters. He has a new book about the music of Boston (sure Aerosmith comes to mind right away but Mission of Burma and Dresden Dolls-sure dark cabaret is kind of majorly over but still-didn't.) Here is his website.

This book is dangerous to read. I feel myself tipping on the precipice of collecting vinyl when they describe the gatefolds, the smell, the physical act of putting the needle on the record (which uh....I don't find Freudian, Brett.)

Here's his description from chapter one of the first vinyl recording that blew him away, Prokofiev's The Scythian Suite, listened to in a collector's home:

So now it's time to pull out the heavy artillery, as they prepare to give me the Scythian....but not just any copy. This is the 1957 recording by Antal Dorati and the London Symphony Orchestra on the Mercury label-one of the first stereo recordings ever issued. The legend "Mercury Living Presence" blazes proudly across the cover; the same design is still there on the current compact-disc edition. But we're looking to get close to the master tape and deep into the music, and the preferred path is that original 1957 pressing, made while the master tape was likely still throbbing. 

According to one collector:

"My trip is about using the music," he explains. "I don't believe in the idea of ownership-hey, we're all gonna die someday so you don't own that record, you just get to use it for a while. There is no joy in ownership, the joy comes when you play the record."

Of course, for some collectors, the joy really really is in ownership. If a mint record is played, it's no longer "mint" and the physical act of playing it can damage it-the big downside of vinyl. 

Record collecting itself has changed shape in recent decades. During the '70's, it was necessary for any serious music fan to be something of a collector, since so many important albums-by the likes of John Coltrane, the Velvet Underground, and even the Beach Boys-were either out of print or available in truncated, shoddily packaged or badly mastered editions (the Beach Boys albums with songs taken off them, or the first Velvets with the banana skin permanently pressed on, rank with the dregs of the era.)

--------

"A record is that object that you can hold and watch and learn from," notes Miriam Linna, who's made a few of those objects herself....."Look at the label, it's got all that information that somebody wanted to give you. There's the names of the people who wrote the song, the names of who published it, and maybe where the record comes from-if you don't find that one, it's just another mystery to solve."

----

From Roger Manning, formerly of the band Jellyfish:

"What really got me was the smell of the records I grew up with-maybe it was the pressing plant they used, for some reason records on the Casablanca label had a smell that blew our minds-when you smell that, it brings you right back to childhood. So we wanted to find a way to make our records smell that way, but of course nobody at our label knew what the hell we were talking about." 

I haven't thought of this in many years but I can remember sniffing the 45 of "I was Made for Loving You" and thinking it smelled intriguing and that's not a Kiss does disco joke.

Here's the sciencey part, from a guy who's the director of the Washington Psychiatric Center:

The need to collect stems from a serotonin deficiency. Serotonin is the enzyme that controls worries; with too little of the former you get too much of the latter. "It's a form of addiction, if you want to call it that. The current thinking in neuroscience is that people with serotonin deficiencies are much more driven to compulsions, including the compulsion to collect. Various life events may disturb you and prompt that compulsion."