Book Beginnings on Friday
is a bookish meme now
sponsored by Rose City Reader (who originally inspired the meme).
Here's what you do: Share the first line
(or two) of the book you are currently
reading on your blog or in the comments
section. Include the title and author so
we know what you're reading. Then, if you
are so moved, let us know what your
first impressions were based on that first line
and if you did or did not like that sentence. Link up each week
at Gilion's place.
Here's mine from The Devil to Pay by Ellery Queen:
Hollywood, like the Land of Oz, possesses a quaint and fluty flavor: it is the place where tin Christmas trees suddenly sprout around lamp-posts in December under a ninety-degree sun, where restaurants take the shape of lighthouses and hats, ladies on Saturday nights stroll the boulevards in trousers and mink coats leading baby leopards on a leash, where morning newspapers cost five cents and evening newspapers two, and people wait in queues for unexhausting hours to witness other people pressing their hands into juicy cement.
Here's mine from The Devil to Pay by Ellery Queen:
Hollywood, like the Land of Oz, possesses a quaint and fluty flavor: it is the place where tin Christmas trees suddenly sprout around lamp-posts in December under a ninety-degree sun, where restaurants take the shape of lighthouses and hats, ladies on Saturday nights stroll the boulevards in trousers and mink coats leading baby leopards on a leash, where morning newspapers cost five cents and evening newspapers two, and people wait in queues for unexhausting hours to witness other people pressing their hands into juicy cement.
{On the one hand, it would seem that Queen--30 years after L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, has had just as little contact with the period as the turn-of-the century author. On the other, the tone of this is so exactly right--and it is such a relief to hear the familiar cadence of Dannay and Lee (the writing duo who produced most of the Queen stories). The last "Queen" novel I read was penned by someone else...and it showed.}
Here's mine from The Devil to Pay by Ellery Queen:
The room was drowned in a silence that crushed the eardrums.
2 comments:
I love silence, but the golden kind not the dreaded one.
Those are the kinds of rambling opening sentences that I fall for every time.
I love visiting your blog, because you always inspire me to tackle yet another vintage mystery series. I haven't read an Ellery Queen book since high school.
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