I like the way the future happens in front of other stuff... like today and yesterday.
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“Miniature...
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The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Published in 1621.
Noga Arikha describes it as “the apogee of Renaissance scholarship – at once the summa of classical learning spliced and rendered in the vernacular for the delight of its early modern audience, and a dense network of embedded quotations, a seemingly infinite set of hyperlinks.”
As a Lute out of Tune: Robert Burton’s Melancholy via The Public Domain Review
Russell Cawthorne confides to Detective Inspector Burden in Wolf to the Slaughter by Ruth Rendell.
‘Are you married?’
‘Yes. I am.’
‘Horrible business, isn’t it? ‘
He paused and gazed lugubriously at a pump attendant giving free stamps with change. ‘Growing old together…. Horrible!’
Image from the audiobook read by the immensely talented Robin Bailey. Oh, his rendition of Rupert Margolis… fabulous and funny!
On top of the pile was an unpublished collection called Seals, Crests, and Coats of Arms of Some British Organizations, Being an Attempt to Classify Their Genealogies and Histories. It was by somebody named H. Probisher Protherham whom Lenox thanked his lucky stars he didn’t know. A man who could write a treatise on crests was a man capable of anything, was Lenox’s feeling. Give him open rein at a dinner party and there was no level of tediousness he might not achieve.
The September Society by Charles Finch
I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?
Narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
“Ah, but your death would have distressed the dear woman. I got my thanks,” he added, with a smile that certainly would have driven Emerson to violence. “When she kissed me. it was quite a touching scene, I believe.”
“She thought you were dying. We all thought so.”
“As you see, I was not obliging enough to finish the process.”
Sethos and Ramses enjoy a warm familial moment in Lord of the Silent by Elizabeth Peters. The audio edition is read by the amazing Barbara Rosenblat.
I concentrated super duper hard on concentrating and made out three salient phrases: busy night, two homicides, ass down here.
First Grave on the Right by Darynda Jones
For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone.
The Book by HP Lovecraft
You hate change. I hate it too. But things can’t stay the same- and that’s well, for when nothing changes in your life, it’s as good as being dead.
Vin telling it like it is from The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson.
It makes me wonder what is so alluring about the real world that gives them all such a fetish for it. It’s not a very nice place these days.
Slowswift from The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson.
I’ve just been introduced to the character, Slowswift, but that hasn’t stopped me from falling for him. Brandon Sanderson reveals that he’s based on Tolkien.
“First, you must understand that Soothing is about more than just Allomancy. It’s about the delicate and noble art of manipulation.”
“Noble indeed,” Vin said.
“Ah, you sound like one of them,” Breeze said.
“Them who?”
“Them everyone else.” Breeze said.
You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Mother Slaughter
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws, till out of corruption, horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.
The Festival by HP Lovecraft
He knew that in the profundity of this deep sleep they were contemplating unplumbed vastnesses of utter and absolute Outsideness with which the earth had nothing to do…
Through the Gates of the Silver Key by HP Lovecraft (with E. Hoffmann Price)
I loosed it down the hatch, and after undergoing the passing discomfort, unavoidable when you drink Jeeves’s patent morning revivers, of having the top of the skull fly up to the ceiling and the eyes shoot out of their sockets and rebound from the opposite wall like racquetballs, felt better.
Bertie attempts to recover from a “little dinner” he’d given the night before for his pal, Gussie Fink-Nottle.
The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse. Jonathan Cecil does a wonderful job on the audiobook.
The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of ANY fairy tale.
Enchantment by Orson Scott Card
