First and last for Mockingjay

Did not like as much as the first two.

First line:

I stare down at my shoes, watching as a fine layer of ash settles on the worn leather.

Last line:

But there are much worse games to play.

First and last for State of Wonder

First:

The news of Anders Eckman's death came by way of Aerogram, a piece of bright blue airmail paper that served as both the stationery and, when folded over and sealed along the edges, the envelope. Who even knew they still made such things?

Last:

She didn't see Karen open her door but there she was, flying into his arms, her feet never touching the lawn. She was as small and golden as a child herself. It was as if they had waited for him everyday he had been gone, holding their burning sticks above their heads, pouring their souls up to heaven in a single voice of ululation until he came back. And Marina brought him back, and without a thought that anyone should see her, she told the driver to go on.

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.

First and last for The Moviegoer

Sigh, for the sake of completeness recording first and last for this book that I was semi-indifferent to. Loved the prose and Percy's descriptive powers. Not so much into anything else. Unable to pick up on Catholic folderol and thus was happily unable to be annoyed by it.

First:

This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch.

Last:

I watch her walk toward St. Charles, cape jasmine held against her cheek, until my brothers and sisters call out behind me.

Ok, the lovely prose it not so much evinced by the passages above but my malaise is such that I cannot continue.

(malaise reference would make sense if you're read this. If you haven't, don't bother.)

First and last for Winter's Bone

First:

Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat.

Last:

"Wheels."

First and last for In the Cut

The last is already in the last post but anyways--

First:

I don't usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake. But Cornelius was having trouble with irony.

Last:



She knows the poem.

Finalt thoughts and First/Last for The Winter Queen

I still want to look up the order of St. Valdimir and the crisis in the Balkans they referred to (the year is 1876.)

This is kind of a schizophrenic book. A cozy mystery with a typically complicated plot (tricking someone into suicide, pretending to be a ghost, a vast worldwide orphan conspiracy) that with few modifications could be Steampunk. But then there's that surprising turn at the end that reminds you, hey a Russian did write this. Poor Erast. Poor Lizanka's arm-nevermind the rest of her. I'll probably read more of this eventually although really, I'm kind of wanting to boo and throw tomatoes at that last chapter. I'm curious to see where the series goes from here and what happens to Erast. I'm guessing the tone of the next novel must be different.

First:

On Monday the thirteenth of May in the year 1876, between the hours of two and three in the afternoon on a day that combined the freshness of spring with the warmth of summer, numerous individuals in Moscow's Alexander Gardens unexpectedly found themselves eyewitnesses to the perpetration of an outrage that flagrantly transgressed the bounds of common decency.

Last:

No, the attention of those he encountered, especially the ladies, was attracted by one particularly intriguing feature of his appearance: despite his obvious youth the bon vivant's temples were a stark white, as if they were thickly coated with hoarfrost.

Final thoughts on Horns, + first and last

Well, nothing to look up for this book. Ok, not exactly true. The book takes place in the fictional town of Gideon, NH near Portsmouth so I looked up a map of NH. It's right across the bay from Maine actually so I wondered if the reference to Derry might have been a shout-out to his dear old Dad's Derry, Maine. Evidently though, there is a very real Derrry, NH so just as likely not. Especially since the name Pennywise didn't come up.

JB had said this book was good, if blasphemous. I guess I can see someone thinking it's blasphemous, although the only part that bothered me was the animal cruelty (too many gruesome snake killings-especially the poor rat snake who gets tricked into swimming into the killer's gullet.) We all have our bailiwicks. I wonder was it the scene where the newly demonic Ig gives a loopy speech to a forest full of snakes:

"I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. the author is unworthy of His own characters. The devil is first a literary critic, who delivers this untalented scribbler the public flaying He deserves."

Well, this goes on for pages. Or maybe it was the remark Ig made near the end about why wasn't the devil the hero of the Bible since he rescued Adam and Eve from a bucolic prison run by a megalomaniac? That actually was kinda funny. Or maybe it was just that the devil isn't nearly as bad as some people in this book.

Anyways, this is good but for scares, nothing can top his short story "Twittering From the Circus of the Damned." It's crazy that a story told in Twitter format worked for starters, nevermind that is is piss your pants scary.

First:

Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things.

Last:

"Poor devil," Terry said before he got into his rent-a-car and drove away.

First and last for After Dark

First:

Eyes mark the shape of a city.

Last:

There will be time until the next darkness arrives.

Final thoughts on Madame Bovary, + first and last

I am glad to have read this book as it has such cultural weight and is such a reference point. I kind of got Emma Bovary references before (some unhappy 19th century French chick who had affairs and killed herself) but I'll really get them now. Yes, she was all of those things but she was also kind of a shitty person. She's vain, adulterous, materialistic, a shitty parent and possibly bipolar. Actually, that last part doesn't make her shitty, per se, and kind of explains the other behaviors. Anyways, as I said on Goodreads perish the thought this slutty, whiny cow is a feminist icon. And while the book was entertaining (the town of Yonville and its citizens were definitely more fleshed out than I expected them to be), I was glad to turn the last page on it for sure.

Her husband was a nice guy but was undeniably a dullard-and thanks to Dennis' clarification, he wasn't a doctor but a public health officer which clears up some scenes like Homais and Bovary having to call the doctor when something went wrong. I also could understand why the operation on Hippolyte was so outrageous-he should never have been doing it. Per the linked article above, a public health officer receives somewhat less training than an LPN.

The story takes place in and around Rouen, where Flaubert lived with his mother for much of his adult life. He never married but he did have a mistress for several years who apparently was pissed at him for some personal details he used in Bovary. Flaubert himself came to resent the book in later years as he felt it overshadowed his other writing. He's buried in Rouen. Fun fact: the 19 year old Joan of Arc was burned at the stake there in 1431 (the area was under English control at the time.) It's also the location of the Cathedral that inspired Monet's series of paintings. It's the church where Leon and Emma meet and Emma attempts to break up with him (instead, it's implied he bangs her like a Salvation Army drum as they take a carriage ride through town. Classy!)

Oh well. Before I mention first and last, here is what Dennis' literature professor friend (and Bridge partner had to say on the subject:

I think you restate what I said pretty accurately, though I also said something about the compelling characters, the depth and plausibility of Flaubert's psychological realism. The difficulty of adequately answering your question about why Madame B is considered a great novel, of course, is that it involves the larger question of what constitutes greatness in any novel, and that question immediately invites platitudes for answers. If we turn to novels for the pleasures of escaping our own cultural confines by entering into a radically different culture and reality, then Madame B is a great novel because it so plausibly represents its world, provincial France in the mid nineteenth century. If we turn to novels to gain access to another human mind in ways that exceed our own imaginative grasp of real human minds (even our own), then Flaubert's psychological realism is great because it so powerfully presents the illusion of full access to psychological depths. If we want more fully to understand the interweaving of mind and culture, Flaubert provides such a compelling paradigm that the word Bovarisme enters the French (and English) language to describe the achievement. If we want to experience the tragedy of balked yearning, of what Browning calls the "infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn," it can be argued that Flaubert's stark realism offers us access to these emotions in ways unsurpassed even by Sophocles or Shakespeare. 

First:

We were in Study Hall when the Headmaster entered, followed by a new boy dressed in regular clothes and a school servant carrying a large desk.

Last:

He has just been awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

(That refers to the apothecary Homais of course, not Charles Bovary who dropped dead basically because he married some skeeze.)

Final thoughts and first and last for The Redbreast

There weren't a lot of memorable lines although there were memorable scenes, like the murder of one character-which I kind of like that Nesbo had the balls to leave unresolved. One of the killers is still a policeman. I really learned a lot about Norway, specifically how they are still dealing with WWII and Nazism which is of course relevant to helping understand current events, unfortunately. Would that Nazi shit were only a handy plot convention.

I wasn't sure if Harry Hole was really coming through to me as a character until he gets a call from a crying woman one night (it's never said but it must be Rakel although who knows, maybe people just do that in Norway) and he keeps her on the phone talking about a documentary he just watched on TV about a brother and sister who traveled the world. I knew then I liked him. Also, how guilty he felt at the end when the informer in South Africa received the death penalty after Hole promised him and his sister he'd help them in exchange for information and then didn't.

Anyways, as I said the lines are really memorable but here are first and last anyways:

First:

A grey bird glided in and out of Harry's field of vision.

Last:

Harry sighed, stuffed the newspaper under his arm and walked out into the shimmering afternoon heat.

First and last for The Paris Wife

First:

Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.

Last:

There was nothing Paul could possibly do for me except let me go--back to Paris and Pamplona and San Sebastian, back to Chicago when I was Hadley Richardson, a girl stepping off a train about to meet the man who could change her life. That girl, that impossibly lucky girl, needed nothing.

McLain mentions in her sources note in the appendix a number of books she used as research. Here are a few that might be worth looking into (I haven't looked anything up about these):

• The Hemingway Women by Bernice Kert
• Hadley: the First Mrs. Hemingway by Alice Hunt Sokoloff
• The True Gen by Denis Brian
• The Crazy Years by William Wiser
• Paris Was Yesterday by Janet Flanner
• Zelda by Nancy Milford

final thoughts on The Sign of Four, + first and last

The (in)famous Mormon interlude in A Study in Scarlet may have been a little clunky but I still think I preferred that to the second Holmes novel. Too many characters that want to tell the story "FROM the beginning." And the beginning went back a ways. It was like hanging out with someone who didn't know who to edit their own stories. Interesting detail about the 1857 war in India though which led me to a Google Books result of a version with an appendix by Shafquat Towheed about Doyle's treatment of the uprising (surprisingly accurate given he didn't witness it first-hand.)

Some of the dialogue though feels very contemporary. I'd heard of course about Holmes's predilection for cocaine but it's funny that he shoots up to keep his mind busy and interesting that Doyle book ends the story with him fixing. And then there's the Watson and Mary Morstan business. They hang out for a few hours total and decide to get married. I had never even heard that Watson was married so I googled it and Doyle evidently thought it was a bad idea too and she vanishes without explanation later on. Let the bromance continue unfettered.

First:

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.

Last:

"The division seems rather unfair," I remarked. "You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?"

"For me," said Sherlock Holmes, "there still remains the cocaine bottle." And he stretched his long white hand up for it.

First and last for The Postman Always Rings Twice

Now that I've finally read the book, Jack Nicholson was not right for that role (in the Bob Rafelson movie. Bob had worked with Jack a few times by that point though so it makes sense.) And I understand the weird lion tamer cameo (never really explained) by Anjelica Houston. One of those books that looks simple but would be hard to write. I'd like to read Mildred Pierce at some point.

I agree with Cora that I could not go tramping about the country like Frank. Was this supposed to be set in the 1920's like the Ruth Snyder case or around the time Cain wrote it (1934) which would have made a big difference. I wonder if it was before because Frank sure had no trouble finding a decent job in what would have been Depression-era California.  This of course doesn't mean I sympathize with Cora but it is sad that the moment they decide to go straight, the wheel of karma rolls over them both. Then again, would they really have mended their ways or would the baby just have grown up with two people who are always either fighting, fucking or plotting each other's demise.

First line:

They threw me off the hay truck about noon.

Last:

Here they come. Father McConnell says prayers help. If you've got this far, send up one for me, and Cora, and make it that we're together, wherever it is.

First and last for The Bell Jar

Ending, appropriately, on Esther's exit interview from the asylum.

(Also, I get why Esther hated Buddy Willard so much but I never did until the end and his "Who's going to marry you now?" remark. She was still in the asylum and Joan had hung herself. Insensitive remark, even worse timing.)

First:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

Last:

The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.

First and last for The Coroner's Lunch

First:

It was a depressing audience, and there were going to be a lot more like it. Now that Haeng, the spotty-faced magistrate was back, Siri would have to explain himself every damn Friday, and kowtow to a man young enough to be his grandson.

Last:

"Given the bad luck you've been having lately, I figured you could use a lucky charm. Like it?"

First and last for Little Altars Everywhere

First:

In my dream, I'm five years old again and it's a summer night at our camp at Spring Creek. 

Last:

And all I have to do is keep walking, with my ears tuned and my eyes wide open.

First and last for Speak

First:

It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache.

Last: (I really lived* the last chapter and this final exchange with her awesome art teacher Mr. Freeman):

He sits on the stool next to me and hands back my tree. "You get an A+. You worked hard at this." He hands me the box of tissues. "You've been through a lot, haven't you?"

The tears dissolve the last block of ice in my throat. I feel the frozen stillness melt down through the inside of me, dripping shards of ice that vanish in a puddle of sunlight on the stained floor. Words float up.

Me: "Let me tell you about it."

*Edit: Good grief, I meant "loved." I didn't live the last chapter of this book, although I would have enjoyed having a cool art teacher.