Book First Lines

 "On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach." Tender is The Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1933

"In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul."  Dune, Frank Herbert, 1965

“When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventyifirst birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.”  The Fellowship of The Ring, Tolkien, 1954

"THE SNOW in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."  The Secret History, Donna Tartt, 1992

"THE EMPIRE GRILL was long and low-slung, with windows that ran its entire length, and since the building next door, a Rexall drugstore, had been condemned and razed, it was now possible to sit at the lunch counter and see straight down Empire Avenue all the way to the old textile mill and its adjacent shirt factory."  Empire Falls, Richard Russo, 2001

"The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended."  2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clark  1968

"Hapcomb's Texaco sat on number 93, just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston."  The Stand, Stephen King 1978

"A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment."  Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy 1878

"I am a very old man; how old I do not know."  Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs 1912

"A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories." Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932

"Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy." The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C.S.Lewis, 1950

"In the hospital of the orphanage—the boys' division at St. Cloud's, Maine—two nurses were in charge of naming the new babies and checking that their little penises were healing from the obligitory circumcision." The Cider House Rules, John Irving, 1985

Sounds about right.

 "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." - Dickens 1859

like leaves

But the distant deadly Archer volleyed back, "God of the earthquake- -you'd think me hardly sane if I fought with you for the sake of wretched mortals . . . like leaves, no sooner flourishing, full of the sun's fire, feeding on earth's gifts, than they waste away and die. Stop. Call off this skirmish of ours at once- let these mortals fight themselves to death."'. Illiad XXI.526

book quotes

"...when Ulysses on the Larboard shunned Charybdis."

Paradise Lost, Milton 

“Leisure follows the consumption pattern,” Alice said, “and is managed by an industry that sells boredom-compensating commodities.”

The Quick and The the Dead by Joy Williams

"Let peace brood over this carass"

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson 

"She had a mature distrust of the trivial, the facile and the vulgar."

Tender is the Night, F Scott Fitzgerald 

"A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death"

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

"We are dining in a room with a bed in it. I am disgusted with life."

"I am so; I do my work! the rest is not my affair."

"Like two goats of darkness upon the bridge of the infinite."

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

"... they already represented all human society; on one side envy, on the other disdaine."

"The good must be innocent"

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

"Olympian Zeus: your urgings rule the world."

The Iliad, Homer

"...the perfectly indifferent chill night air..."

"... sharing a joke with nothingness."

"He was not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence."

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf 

the portfolio of time

"...peering with steady blue eyes into the portfolio of time."

Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer

Tropic of Cancer -- Henry Miller quote

 "Lawyer, priest, doctor, politician, newspaperman—these are the quacks who have their fingers on the pulse of the world. A constant atmosphere of calamity. It's marvelous. It's as if the barometer never changed, as if the flag were always at half-mast. One can see now how the idea of heaven takes hold of men's consciousness, how it gains ground even when all the props have been knocked from under it. There must be another world beside this swamp in which everything is dumped pell-mell. It's hard to imagine what it can be like, this heaven that men dream about. A frog's heaven, no doubt. Miasma, scum, pond lilies, stagnant water. Sit on a lily pad unmolested and croak all day. Something like that, I can imagine." 

Tropic of Cancer — Henry Miller

reading notes

From The Razor's Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham

Masterlink, Ruysbroek, 

Plotinus, Denis the Areopagite, Jacob Boehme, Meister Eckhart, "Eleven Thousand Virgins," Cologne

"The Alone to The Alone","Dark Night of The Soul", "The Ineffable", Brague (painter), Gaugin, Renoir, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb", Rastignac, Andre Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, "A play of Masterlinck's", "Paolo and Francesca", Berenice(play), Tacitus, Racine (poet? playwrite?), Houdon's Voltaire, Spinoza, Aeschylus, lumbago, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Holderlin, Rilke, Rolla, Valasquez, El Greco, Veronal, "Seven veils of Ingorance", Spinoza, Valery (writer), Baudelaire, Rimibaud;

General:

thalassocracy, The Winged Victory of Samothrace, Pindar, Rabelaisian

"The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind."

weekend

Started reading Other Voices Other Rooms by Truman Capote. Started reading Civil Disobedience by Thoreau. Finished "The IT Crowd"

Put up towel racks. 

Started <The Casual Guild>

Started the Timon of Athens app.

Books I Might Read

Some books I might read, as opposed to 

some books I have read

The Castle of Crossed Destinies

Beowulf Michael Alexander version (prose) Seamus Heaney (verse)

Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, Ferdowsi

Storm of Steel, Junger

Heraclitus

Discourses, The Social Contract, Confessions, Rousseau

The Private Memoirs...James Hogg

Ghost Stories, Uncle Silas, Sheridan Le Fanu

Collected Ghost Stories, M.R. James

Satyricon, Petronius

The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton

The Golden Bough, Frazer

The House of Mirth Edith Wharton

Castle of Otranto by Walpole

Android Down, serialized, Chapter 7

Android Down, serialized, Chapter 7 http://www.danmanning.com/androidWeb/chapter7.asp

Android Down, serialized, Chapter Five

Android Down, serialized, Chapter Five

http://www.danmanning.com/androidWeb/chapter5.asp

Reading

Reading Why Buddhism is True, by Robin Wright

I wrote you another book. You can order it at Amazon.com

A Little Self-Promotion.

Reading Ayn Rand To My Dog

I've been reading Ayn Rand's /Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology/ (which I got for a buck at the Salvation Army) to my dog, Ginger. She won't pay attention, and I don't think any of it is sinking in. {please note: I am not a Rand Kool-Aid drinker, I'm just curious to see what affect this information will have on my dog. Will she abandon her dog-like tendencies and follow a path of ruthless Machiavellian selfish motivation?}

Wrote a new book

Hey now. I wrote another book, Robot Stories (Ten Stories for Humans). It is available on Amazon.com, and you should get a copy.

You can find it here: http://amzn.com/1499164793

My Short Story Collection, Free Kindle Download This Week

My short story collection, Firewood for Cannibals, is available as a free Kindle download this week.

Here's the link:  http://amzn.com/B003HS4UMQ


And here's the cover:
 

Authors mentioned in Herman Wouk's novel, Aurora Dawn

"Spinoza rubbed bindings with Mark Twain, Jane Austen with La Rochefoucauld, James Joyce with Lord Chesterfield, Keats with Clarence Darrow..."

The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien (1955)

5 out of 5, of course.  So much has already been said about this book.  I've read it 4 or 5 times now, and I won't read it again until I'm 65.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (1963)

The Bell Jar: 4 out of 5.

Well built scenes.  Tragedy with understatement.  No self-pity in it, although the subject matter calls for it.  Shock therapy is pretty shocking!