Friday Memes (On Saturday)

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.

{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.}

The Friday 56 is a bookish meme sponsored by Freda's Voice. It is really easy to participate. Just grab a book, any book, and turn to page 56. Find a sentence that grabs you and post it.

Here's mine from The Devil to Pay by Ellery Queen:

The room was drowned in a silence that crushed the eardrums.