They Said WHAT? - June

June was a rather crazy month for me with lots of fun trips and a slew of crazy, wonderful reads. However, that didn't translate into a lot of blog work time, so I'm a bit behind. And since I was out of town last Sunday, I didn't get to post my favorite lines from June. So, I'm going to share those with you today, and then I have a wonderfully packed line-up for the rest of the week. I hope you'll check back often. Also, don't forget to enter to win one of the stunning book soundtracks from John Connolly in honor of his upcoming U.S. release of THE WHISPERERS.

Have a happy 4th of July and enjoy these great lines:

• from Gar Anthony Haywood's amazing CEMETERY ROAD;

"Because sometimes ignorance truly is bliss, and once it is gone, asking God to have it back is a wasted prayer."

"What I saw and heard during that time gave me no reason to think she would outlive me. She had taken the sorrow of a motherless child and made a funeral blanket out of it, a shroud she could curl up in to retreat from all the warmth and light of the world."

"He was fourteen years old at the most and, already, life and death to him were but interchangeable, equally valueless sides of the same coin."

"Some memories lose their shape and form faster than others. Details dim and disappear, forever out of reach of the conscious mind. Settings shift and grow vague, while the people in them perform all nature of tricks, morphing into others and moving about at will, either imposing themselves upon a time and place in which they played no part, or vacating one that holds little meaning without them. Six men in a room become two, three become five. The variations are endless."

• from Marcus Sakey's outstanding thriller, THE AMATEURS:

"The world narrowed to a long hallway, like the gun had black-hole gravity that warped space."

• from Charlie Huston's stunning novel THE MYSTIC ART OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH:

"I looked up at the sky outside the window.

A piece of it snapped off and dropped and hit me on the head.

And it was all there again, the whole thing, back in my head, one picture, entire. No longer broken into the little fragments I liked to keep it scattered in. Fragments hidden on ghost buses cruising L.A. Freighters of lost things. But not of me."

• from Ken Bruen's heart-wrenching THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS:

"Serena didn't have an extra chromosome; it was us, the normal ones, who were lacking the added spark. Would I could have held on to that moment, I could have just sampled the energy for a little longer. I'd no longer need oblivion."

• and finally, from Craig Johnson's magnificent JUNKYARD DOGS:

"It was a tough business coming to terms with your own mortality, and some people, once they are confronted with its face, never forget its features."

"Dog was seated in the front. He turned to look at me as if I'd lost my mind. He had Saint Bernard in him and some German shepherd with a bunch of other things, most of them domesticated except for when you had bacon - then he was part great white shark."

Happy Holidays and Happy Reading!!!!

Technorati Tags: Craig Johnson, Ken Bruen, Charlie Huston, Marcus Sakey, Gar Anthony Haywood

They Said WHAT?

I can't believe another month in 2010 is gone already! Since it is the last Sunday of May, it is time for my favorite lines from books I've read this month. This was a great reading month, and I still have quite a few reviews to catch up on, but here are my favorite lines.

REDEMPTION STREET by Reed Farrel Coleman is simply packed with wonderfulness. I could almost just reproduce the entire book for you here, but since Reed would probably take issue with that, I'll limit it to these lines:

"The funny thing about forgiveness is that it comes from the inside out, not the other way around."

"There's just something men and hardware stores. I am by no means a handy sort. The tool I use best is the telephone, to call the superintendent. It's to civilization's benefit that it was never dependent upon my dexterity to move from one state of development to the next, or we'd still be without fire, stone tools, and the wheel."

This month I also listened to HELL HOLE by Chris Grabenstein. Another book that I could simply give you the whole book. And I guess since that's the case, I'm saying both books are ones I think you should add to your TBR list if they aren't already there. But in the meantime, here's some snippets of goodness from HELL HOLE:

"I'm thinking a deep-fried Baby Ruth would be delicious, once you got past a name that sounds like a gruesome form of child abuse."

"One step at a time. That's Ceepak. Me? I'm forever jumping to conclusions. It's how I wind up flat on my ass so often."

"These people are on vacation. Beer and chips? Down the shore, they're like beef: it's what's for dinner."

"Ceepak steps into the stall. I don't follow. I could easily fit in there with him but two guys squeezing into the same toilet booth at the same time might earn more stares than Ceepak's Kodak moment with the commode. People might think we'd just been playing footsie between stalls and have decided to run for Congress."

"He had journeyed into the valley of the shadow of death and discovered he was the one casting the shadow."

And wrapping up the best lines for this month, I have a couple from Lisa Unger's upcoming FRAGILE. Looking back on these three particular reads from May, I'm seeing three entirely different books, different voices, different styles. It makes me smile. There's so much to take advantage of in this genre. Wonderfulness everywhere. And in FRAGILE, it includes:

"But she knew it was impossible to live a life that way. It was all woven together in one great tapestry - the past, the present, the future - colors and textures mingling and entwined. It was nearly impossible to extract the present moment from what came before it, from what might lie ahead."

"As she told them all about her buried memory, she felt an awe at how all their separate lives were twisted and tangled, growing over and around one another, altering, aiding, and blocking one another's paths."

There you have it. Those are my favorites this month. Did you have any fun lines from reading this month? I hope your June is jam-packed with them!

Happy Reading!

Technorati Tags: Chris Grabenstein, Reed Farrel Coleman, Lisa Unger, Great Lines

They Said What?

Since I was in L.A. last Sunday, I didn't have a chance to post my favorite lines of April. So, I'll post it today, just a tad bit late. I didn't fit in as much reading last month, but I still found some great lines to share with you.

First up are a few lines from Andrew Gross's new thriller RECKLESS. I think Andrew did an amazing job of creating images that truly represent the fear and destruction of terrorism in this day and age. His choice of imagery is a big part of what made RECKLESS so powerful. The following are some of the excerpts that had tremendous impact on me:

• "If he had ever been worth saving, the statute of limitations had long run out. The pieces of his soul had scattered across the globe. Like an F5 blowing into town. Leveling most everything. Scattering the rest."
• "'What if there were people on an organized basis, people of influence,' she suggested, 'who wanted to do our country systemic harm, using a new strategy, a 'change of direction,' as they referred to it.' She steeled herself, 'Not by flying a plane through our tallest buildings, like before, but by driving one figuratively, sir, through the heart of our most vital national asset. The root of everything we stand for.'"
• "The triumph that comes after a bloody battle. Where it's hard to tell who has won and who has lost."

I finished Don Winslow's POWER OF THE DOG and I know I've peppered the last few favorite lines posts with excerpts from this book. Had I been reading a print copy and not listening on audio, I may have had even more lines. Winslow never ceases to amaze me with his pen. But the fact that I recalled so many of these to look them up and include them, I think says a lot about the writing in this book. The final line I'm including is:

• "I'm a farmer in fields of the dead. The barren crop I cultivate with only a scythe. My landscape of devastation."

And finally, I have a few lines from Michael Koryta's SO COLD THE RIVER, which is due out in June. You'll hear a lot more about the book later, but overall, the writing in this book is amazing and I didn't think there was another level Koryta could reach in his writing but he proved me wrong with this masterpiece. Here are a couple sneak peaks:

• "Artifacts of their ambition. Only through study of those things could you truly understand people long departed. General artifacts could be over-analyzed, layered with undue importance. It was critical to find things that indicated ambitions and aspirations, that tired bit about hopes and dreams. The reality of someone's heart lay in the objects of their desires. Whether those things were achieved did not matter nearly so much as understanding what they had been."
• "The train had seemed faster than anything to her that day, dazzling in its speed. There were race cars that went faster than the train, though, and planes that went faster than the cars, and rockets that went faster than the planes, but what still blew them all away was time itself, the days and months and the years, oh, yes, the years. They went faster than anything man had the capacity to invent, so fast that for a while they fooled you into thinking they were slow, and was there any crueler trick than that?"

And finally, it's subtle lines like this one that always make me devour Koryta's work. This is a line that could easily be overlooked by someone reading too quickly or God-forbid, scanning:

• "The visitor got out, a man with short hair of a color that had gotten confused somewhere between blond and brown."

I just love that image.

One last thing I'd like to mention in this post today is a book I received in the mail this week. It was put together by Brad Meltzer for his son and it is stunningly beautiful. HEROES FOR MY SON. I've added the book jacket photo to this post, but I assure you it doesn't do this book justice. I wasn't expecting to receive this book, but when it arrived I couldn't stop looking at it. I'm reading the stories inside and learning many things I never knew, feeling inspired and just smiling an awful lot. The day after I received the book, I took it to work because I wanted people I work with to see this, too. In a day and age where I think our heroes are chosen for the wrong reasons, I'm encouraged by this book. I have to say that I'm incredibly thankful that Brad didn't save this exclusively for his son, but shared it with the world. We can all stand to be reminded of these heroes. They span genders, races, religions, even political parties. I don't have children myself, but I have a lot of people I'm planning to bestow this book on. I hope everyone will take time to look at this book and open their hearts and their minds.

I also wanted to share this short little video I found about the book on Brad's website. It talks about how this book came to be. I enjoyed hearing about it, so I thought you might as well:

Brad Meltzer on Heroes for My Son from HarperStudio on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: Great Lines, Michael Koryta, Brad Meltzer, Andrew Gross, Don Winslow

They Said WHAT?

It's the last Sunday of March already. Where the heck did March go? Although, I have to admit, I'm rarely sad to see March go. It means the warm weather is that much closer. However, March was great reading time for me. I hope it was for you, too. Here are some of the great lines from books I was reading this month.

In THE LOCK ARTIST by Steve Hamilton:

"I had learned on freestanding safes, where I could really get my body up next to them and feel what I was doing. As the Ghost had said so many times, when he was teaching me how to do this...It's like seducing a woman. Touching her in just the right way. Knowing what was going on inside her. How do you do that if every part of the woman except her face is hidden behind a wall?"

From Pat Conroy's SOUTH OF BROAD:

"I have an affinity for choosing the tightrope walk across the abyss and have developed a genius for the wrong turn."

"Living as I do in the backwaters of South Carolina, I had not fully appreciated the corroding effect of the celebrity obsession that has taken hold in America, leading to a maggoty and fly-spotted culture."

"As we sit there watching the water recede, I think about Niles in the orphanage on the day I met him, and I guess he had wanted someone, anyone, to hold his hand during the long, dreadful forced march of his childhood. It was the least I could do, as he had long ago taught me a lesson about the great inner strength sometimes granted to the most wounded of men. And how those men can sometimes grow up to be heroes."

In THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS by John Connolly:

"Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge."

Ed Lynskey wrote in TROGLODYTES:

"The CNN reporter talking in the background...said another GI had died in Iraq. I frowned. That made one more Gold Star mom. Before the war ended, we'd see a galaxy of them."

In May, Chris Grabenstein's ROLLING THUNDER is coming out, and I think you'll agree that this is one heck of a hook for the book:

"The day starts like so many others with John Ceepak: we bust an eight-year-old girl for wearing high heels."

I just love his opening sentences - every book!

And to round out this month's awesome lines, I was listening to the audio for THE FIRST RULE on the way back from Pittsburgh yesterday and was reminded of this great line:

"He moved back along the hall, thinking how different his own home was from the home that Frank Meyer built. Pike's furnishings were minimal, and the walls were bare. Pike did not have a family, so he had no pictures of family on the walls, and he did not keep pictures of his friends. Pike's life had led to blank walls, and now he wondered if his walls would ever be filled."

I find that excerpt hauntingly beautiful, but it was even more incredible in Robert Crais' gravelly Pike voice.

I hope your March was filled with wonderfully great lines as well. If you have any YOU'D like to share, feel free to leave them in the comments. And let's meet up here again next month to share some more! Happy Reading!

They Said WHAT?

Wow! Where did February go? I can't believe it's gone already. I sure wish the snow would have left with it. But, no such luck. We're still shoveling here in Northeast Ohio.

Very quickly, before I share my favorite lines with you for this month's reading, I want to remind you that today is the last day to put your nominations in for the "World's Favorite Detective" tournament. I will take the nominations up until 8:00 p.m. Eastern time today. Then I will begin tallying them all up. We already have in excess of 1300 nominations. At last count, there were over 200 different detectives and 90 of those detectives had 2 or more nominations. I hope to have the bracket all set up on Wednesday with the contest directions. So check back and enter the tournament.

And one more fun thing. If anyone ever needs a gift for me, I totally want one of these with an L.A. REQUIEM cover. Ha!

So, February's favorite lines are heavily Don Winslow. I have been listening to POWER OF THE DOG and I finished THE GENTLEMEN'S HOUR. Winslow's wit is famous, so this is just a sampling because I could have copied most of the content of the books! So, I hope you enjoy these and they tempt you to read the books.

From THE GENTLEMEN'S HOUR:

• “He looks like he might actually cry, which would violate an important addendum to the rules of the Gentlemen’s Hour: There’s no crying, ever. These guys are old school – they think Oprah’s a mispronunciation of music they’d never listen to. It’s okay to have feelings – like if you’re looking at photos of your grandchildren – but you can never acknowledge them, and showing them is way over the line.”


• “The small shop is a creepy little place in a strip mall in Mira Mesa, its customer base being a few actual PIs, a lot of wannabes, hard-core paranoids, and not a few of the grassy-knoll, wrap-your-head-in-tin-foil-the-government-is-attacking-you-with-gamma-rays set who won’t buy off the internet because the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and Barbara Bush are all tracking their downloads. The store is usually filled with a lot of browsers who just like electronic gadgets and cool spy shit.”


• “He already has the camera – it came with the basic Private Investigator Starter Kit along with the cynicism, a manual of one-liners, and a saxophone soundtrack.”


• “Alan looks at Petra and Boone and says, ‘I’d better get with Mary Lou before Boone helps us anymore and puts Corey on the Grassy Knoll. You don’t have him on the Grassy Knoll, do you? Or anywhere in the vicinity of the Lindbergh baby? You got him nailing Christ up, too, Daniels?”


• “Go to your thesaurus, look up every synonym for hatred, add them together, multiply them by ten, and you still don’t come up to the level of malice that these two guys hold for each other.”


• “Motives are like colors – there are really very few basic ones, but they have a thousand subtle shades.
  
  Your primary motive colors are crazy, sex and money.
  
  Boone doesn’t linger on the first. Crazy is crazy, so there’s no line of logic you can pursue. It’s too random. Of course there are shades of crazy: You have your basic, organic, Chuck Manson or Mark Chapman crazy. There’s also ‘temporary insanity’ crazy, aka ‘rage’ – a tsunami of anger that washes away normal restraint or inhibition – a person ‘sees red’ and just goes off. A sub-category of rage is drug- or alcohol-induced rage – the booze, pills, meth, ice, steroids, whatever, make a person commit violence they otherwise would never do.”

The lines from POWER OF THE DOG include:

• “ Scachi stares at him, then says, ‘Keller, you just earned first-ballot entry into the Asshole Hall of Fame.’”


• “As O-Bop says, ‘if I’m going to hell it’s going to be on a crowded bus.’”

And finally, I'm going to wrap up with a few stunning lines from Pat Conroy's new novel SOUTH OF BROAD. Conroy stands with Burke as the two writers I believe to be the greatest living American writers today. Like Burke, Conroy creates a tone for his novels with his setting. His language is beautiful and his words brilliant. Here are a few examples. As I'm not yet finished with this novel, you can probably count on more to come in March:

• "I consider it a privilege to be a native of one of the loveliest American cities, not a high-kicking, glossy, or lipsticked city, not a city with bells on its fingers or brightly painted toenails, but a ruffled, low-slung city, understated and tolerant of nothing mismade or ostentatious. Though Charleston feels a seersuckered, tuxedoed view of itself, it approves of restraint far more than vainglory."



• "It would be many years before I learned that your fate could scuttle up behind you, touch you with its bloody claws, and when you turn to face the worst, you find it disguised in all innocence and camouflaged as a moving van, an orphanage, and a drug bust south of Broad."



• "Of all the elements of my childhood that rang a false note, I was the only kid the American South whose mother had received a doctorate by writing a perfectly unreadable dissertation on the religious symbolism in James Joyce's equally unreadable ULYSSES, which I considered the worst book ever written by anyone. June 16 was the endless day when Leopold Bloom makes his nervous Nellie way, stopping at bars and consorting with whores and then returning home to horny wife, Molly, who has a final soliloquy that goes on for what seemed like six thousand pages when my mother force-fed me the book in tenth grade."

O.k., I admit. I put that last one in there because I, too, hate ULYSSES, so it struck a chord with me. I also want to point out that there is a magnificent paragraph at the conclusion of Alafair Burke's 212, but I decided not to include it in this post because I think it is too much of a spoiler for the novel. So, just take my word for it, it's wonderful and you need to read it to find out what it is. Once you've read it, feel free to email me and let me know what you think the part is.

Have a great week and happy reading!

They Said WHAT?

It's the last day of January already. I'm having a hard time believing that January 2010 is already over. Where did it go?

I'd like to first send out some thanks today. All the folks who have commented here, on Facebook or sent me emails about the new blog look. Thank you so much for the kind words. And those of you who have found glitches for me, thank you for that also! I'm ecstatic that so many of you have said it is easier to read and navigate. That makes it worth all the effort to change. You know it's so darned easy to stay status quo and just go day to day. But, this change was completely worth the effort.

Also, I'd like to thank all the folks who sent me such nice emails this week about my post on Robert Crais' event in Dayton. First of all, it's such a blast to be able to talk about him with you guys. I love talking to other Craisies. And I also love hearing from some of the lurkers. It's nice knowing you're out there. Thank you for sharing my love of RC with me! I was surprised at how many people on Twitter said they were reading him for the first time because I had been tweeting about him. Warms my heart. And actually I was surprised. I thought for sure everyone already knew about his supreme wonderfulness. So, thank you all!

Today's post is a new project I'd like to try this year. The last Sunday of each month, I'll round up great lines/segments from books I've read in the month. This month's will have a couple from December, too, but after this it will be books I've read in that month. There are so many times when I read a great line and think, "man, I want to tell everyone about this." And then ultimately I forget because my memory is pathetic. And this will be my effort to remember. It's my goal to document them now. They might be lines that made me laugh or ones that jolted me with an incredible use of language or ones that really made me think. Overall, they are lines that stood out to me and elicited a "wow" response.

I hope you enjoy this. AND, if you have some great lines that you loved from your reading and would like me to include them. Send them my way. This can be a collaborative post. That would be fun! So here's the first "Great Lines" post of 2010:

From Kelli Stanley's CITY OF DRAGONS:

“ ‘The Chinese say whoever learns without thought is lost. But whoever thinks without learning is in great danger.’”

From Sean Chercover's TRIGGER CITY:

“A kid in a police uniform strode toward me, his hand held up like a traffic cop.

‘You can’t park there.’ Blond wisps of hair sprouted from his upper lip, petitioning for a promotion to the rank of mustache.”

From Marcus Sakey's GOOD PEOPLE:

“Even braced for it, the roar of the first shot hit like a thousand volts, kicking every cell into life, adrenaline pounding fast and hard. People didn’t realize how loud the things were, like God clapping his hands.”

From Walter Mosley's THE LONG FALL:

"Throwing a punch is the yang of a boxer's life. The yin is being able to avoid getting hit. I'm pretty good at the yang part."

"A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant who reads is a prince in waiting."

"If anyone was an example of having too much on the ball it was my son. He would track down Satan and then try to brace him for a bad loan."

From Craig McDonald's PRINT THE LEGEND:

"Hector didn't know if he would go in this direction in life, not just yet, but the opening line of a story or novel suddenly occurred to him: When you start sleeping with women younger than your cigarette lighter, you know you've turned a sorry corner."

From Steve Hockensmith's HOLMES ON THE RANGE:

"You can follow a trail without even knowing you're on it. You can start out just ambling, maybe get to thinking you're lost - but you're headed somewhere all the same. You just don't know it till you get there."

And my last one is from Robert Crais' THE FIRST RULE, but it's a bit difficult to take this out of context and have it mean much. I'll preface it by saying the male body is a murderer named "Moon" who Joe Pike has been looking for and this is the scene where he finds him:

"The dog's face and chest were matted with blood, and its feet were red boots. A second male body was half on a couch and half on the floor. The flesh on the second man's left forearm had been partially eaten, but his right forearm was intact. The numbers tattooed there were easy to read.

187
187
187
187
187

One for each of the people he put in the ground.

Pike said, 'Good night, Moon.'"

So there's my January roundup. Hope you enjoyed these lines. Maybe they even tempted you to read one of these books if you haven't already. They were all wonderful reads. Hope you had a January filled with great books and I hope your February finds you with even more.

Happy Reading!