Category: The Friday 56 Page 4 of 15

This is a weekly bloghop hosted by Freda’s Voice.

RULES:
Grab a book, any book.
Turn to Page 56 or 56% on your ereader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find a snippet, short and sweet.
Post it.

from Page 56% of:

The Perception Of Dolls by Anthony Croix, edited by Russell Day

“I can remember that evening, when the three of us were eating dinner in the caravan, he stank to high heaven, he’d been sweating like a pig all day. Me and Steve weren’t saying much, we were both sulking like a pair of kids and Jed was rabbiting away 19 to the dozen. If I thought about it at all I guess I thought he was chattering to cover the silence. You know the how people do, they get caught up in someone else’s argument and talk out of embarrassment. But I don’t think it was that at all. He was hyped up about finding the flights of stairs didn’t match. I remember Steve asking him if that was unusual in houses of that age. I don’t remember the answer, but I know it went on for a long time and the crux of it was Jed just reiterating that he’d checked, checked and triple checked the results and there was an anomaly. He kept coming back to that word, anomaly.

“I slept in the house that night. Partly I wanted to get away from Steve, but mostly I wanted to get away from Jed’s chatter, and his BO.”

This is a weekly bloghop hosted by Freda’s Voice.

RULES:
Grab a book, any book.
Turn to Page 56 or 56% on your ereader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find a snippet, short and sweet.
Post it.

from Page 56% of:

Pieces of Eight by Peter Hartog

I positioned myself behind the chair next to Deacon, my hands resting on its curved back. Beyond the windshield, Empire City blurred, blended streaks of shifting colors without beginning or end. Night had long fallen, soaking the world beneath a snowy abstract blanket where truth slept with lies and deceit. So many thoughts crowded my mind vying for my attention: the Flynns, the One, Pop, Ivan and the bratva, Jack, Mahoney, my feelings for Charlie.

And Leyla.

“It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones,” I quoted quietly.

I shook my head in bemusement. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had been right. My brain-attic was near capacity. Questions bounced around in my mind, banging off of dusty facts, clues, details and other minutiae, a vast amorphous jumble that up until now, had formulated little to no answers.

This is a weekly bloghop hosted by Freda’s Voice.

RULES:
Grab a book, any book.
Turn to Page 56 or 56% on your ereader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find a snippet, short and sweet.
Post it.

The rules say I can improvise, and I almost never do. But I have to this time–I had a snippet of another book picked out, and I was okay with it, but I wasn’t completely sold. Then yesterday I came across this and just had to repeat it.
from Page 57 of:

E.B. White on Dogs edited by Martha White

I would like to hand down a dissenting opinion in the case of the Camel ad that shows a Boston terrier relaxing. I can string along with cigarette manufacturers to a certain degree, but when it comes to the temperament and habits of terriers, I shall stand my ground.

The ad says: “A dog’s nervous system resembles our own.” I don’t think a dog’s nervous system resembles my own in the least. A dog’s nervous system is in a class by itself. If it resembles anything at all, it resembles the Consolidated Edison Company’s power plant. This is particularly true of Boston terriers, and if the Camel people don’t know that, they have never been around dogs.

The ad says: “But when a dog’s nerves tire, he obeys his instincts—he relaxes.” This, I admit, is true. But I should like to call attention to the fact that it sometimes takes days, even weeks, before a dog’s nerves tire. In the case of terriers it can run into months. I knew a Boston terrier once (he is now dead and, so far as I know, relaxed) whose nerves stayed keyed up from the twenty-fifth of one June to the sixth of the following July, without one minute’s peace for anybody in the family. He was an old dog and he was blind in one eye, but his infirmities caused no diminution in his nervous power.

This is a weekly bloghop hosted by Freda’s Voice.

RULES:
Grab a book, any book.
Turn to Page 56 or 56% on your ereader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find a snippet, short and sweet.
Post it.

from Page 56 (and 57) of:

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

He was threaded with nothing but gentleness. Even when he fought, Redemption fought for the beauty of what his body could do, for the frailty of being human, the power and vulnerability tangled up in being flesh. It wasn’t personal; it wasn’t about his ego. It was about being alive. She remembered when he’d explained this to her, when she’d asked him why he loved something so violent.

“I don’t hold violence in my hands,” he’d answered, holding them up in front of his face…She watched as he rotated his wrists to look at his palms and then the backs of his hands, a few nicked scars marking his knuckles.

You fight, she’d said. Of course you hold violence in your hands, she meant.

Redemption heard what she hadn’t said out loud, and shook his head. “Here,” he said, tapping his chest. “Here is where I hold it, and I look at it and I fold it into something aise. Even when I fight, it’s not about letting it out. Especially when I fight.”

This is a weekly bloghop hosted by Freda’s Voice.

RULES:
Grab a book, any book.
Turn to Page 56 or 56% on your ereader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find a snippet, short and sweet.
Post it.

from Page 56 of:

Sacrifices by Jamie Schultz

“You know they’re chock-full of demons, right?”

“I don’t know that. This is the twenty-first century. We tend to be extremely careful about calling aberrant behavior demonic possession when it might simply be mental illness.”

“Seriously? Under these circumstances?”

“None of them appear to have any history with the occult, that I can turn up, let alone the kind of lengthy history that results in end-stage possession . . .” Elliot spoke quickly and precisely, dressed it all up with technical-sounding jargon, but a note of uncertainty clung to her voice like a parasite, sucking the life out of it.

This is a weekly bloghop hosted by Freda’s Voice.

RULES:
Grab a book, any book.
Turn to Page 56 or 56% on your ereader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find a snippet, short and sweet.
Post it.

from Page 56 of:

Aether Powered by James T. Lambert

…if I figured it out myself, I could make even more. Build flying cars. Hell, sell conversion kits to make regular cars fly! Airplanes without wings, no airports, and a lot less fuel. Replace Boeing. Why think small? Replace NASA and build ships that go to the moon without fuel. Mars in days instead of months. And no weight limits.

Carol must have seen my eyes glaze over. “Snap out of it! You aren’t Henry Ford. Hell, you’re not Ford Fairlane! You know nothing about manufacturing, venture capital, entrepreneurship, or even patent law. Yeah, someone could turn this into a multi-billion-dollar industry, but you are not that guy. Take the money and run.”

This is a weekly bloghop hosted by Freda’s Voice.

RULES:
Grab a book, any book.
Turn to Page 56 or 56% on your ereader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find a snippet, short and sweet.
Post it.

from Page 56 of:

Dead Lions by Mick Herron

She said to Ho, “You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to.”

As an interrogation technique, thought River, this lacked bite.