OPENING LINES:
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. First I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.
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In Old Man’s War, we learn that Earth has a surplus of senior citizens and a shortage of soldiers to fight all the hostile alien races trying to chase us out of space and back to our own ball of mud. The solution that the Colonial Defense Force (CDF) has come up with is to convince aging Earthers to join the army. Their minds are transferred to new bodies pumped full of genetic enhancements and handy technology, and they are sent off to war. Scalzi takes us along with recruit John Perry as he leaves everything he knows behind to fight the CDF’s wars; going through basic training, fighting his first battles, and even a little romance. The author has admitted to playing on the pattern laid down by Robert Heinlein, but he managed to go beyond that inspiration to develop a new space opera universe where he has set multiple bestselling novels. This is a story that packs a lot of action and excitement, but also manages to subtly explore issues of aging, loss, humanity and the futility of war.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Old Man’s War
OPENING LINES:
Perspective. I need to get perspective. It’s not an earthquake or a crazed gunman or a nuclear meltdown, is it? On the scale of disasters, this is not huge. Not huge. One day I expect I’ll look back at this moment and laugh and think, Ha-ha, how silly I was to worry—
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Poppy Wyatt feels like the luckiest girl in the world, about to marry a gorgeous man and celebrating her engagement at a hotel with all her friends. But when she loses her expensive heirloom engagement ring and her phone on the same day, she panics. Salvation appears in the form of a cell phone she finds in a trash bin, and under the age-old rule of “finders keepers” she takes possession, giving the number to the hotel staff who are looking for her ring, as well as to all her friends. The trouble is the phone used to belong to the personal assistant of businessman Sam Roxton and he not only wants it back, he really wants Poppy to stop reading his personal texts and emails. Kinsella has a great ear for dialogue and character and her comic timing helps carry the reader over any of the more wacky plot points. The frothy premise works, thanks mostly to loveable Poppy who struggles with self-esteem issues but remains plucky and adorable.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: I’ve Got Your Number
OPENING LINE:
Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-six years: with an idiot — in this case, my brother, Shaun — deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens.
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Many stories of zombies give a glossed over explanation involving a disease run amok, but few tales of the living dead bother to think through the epidemiology of how a zombie plague might behave, and what it would be like for the survivors of that plague. In Feed, author Mira Grant has thought about it a great deal, and the life for brother and sister Shaun and Georgia is one where every place you go, every thing you do, is about just staying alive and proving that you haven’t been infected. When a medical cure turns into a medical nightmare where the dead rise again, the survivors are still trying to go on with a semblance of civilizaition, including electing an American president. Shaun and Georgia are bloggers who are picked to follow the campaign of a promising candidate, hoping it will be their ticket to success and ratings. They just have to stay alive in a world still riddled with pockets of zombies, where everyone left on the planet harbors the infection and could turn into a zombie themselves. Not only is this a remarkable look at a post-apocalyptic world, it is a page turner that will have you racing to the end as you are rooting for characters that are funny and loyal and true.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Feed
GREAT LINES:
Now, get this, you double-crossing chimpanzee: There ain’t going to be any interview and there ain’t going to be any story. And that certified check of yours is leaving with me in twenty minutes. I wouldn’t cover the burning of Rome for you if they were just lighting it up. If I ever lay my two eyes on you again, I’m gonna walk right up to you and hammer on that monkeyed skull of yours ’til it rings like a Chinese gong!
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Reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) plans to quit the newspaper business, get married, and settle down to a quiet life. However she doesn’t count on stumbling upon what could be the biggest story of her career when a convict on death row escapes from custody. She also underestimates the tenacity of her boss and ex-husband, Walter Burns (Cary Grant), who pulls out all the stops to keep Hildy on the job and away from her husband-to-be. But is it because he still loves her or because she is his star reporter? Based on a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, director Howard Hawks engineers some of the funniest, fastest dialogue ever caught on film. His Girl Friday mixes political satire with screwball comedy to create a classic battle of the sexes.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: His Girl Friday
GREAT LINES:
She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.”.
Jackson Brodie, a tender-hearted, run-down Cambridge private detective, investigates three separate cold cases: a missing child, a slain teen, and an axe murder. The detective story framework allows the author to playfully scatter clues while giving us vivid psychological portraits of the families affected by the crimes, all the while turning our assumptions on their heads. Atkinson’s humor and style make this a new take on an old genre.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Case Histories
OPENING LINE:
We had voyaged far into space and now we were returning.
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A boy is kidnapped from his aunt’s care during a trip to the planetarium at the start of this novel, which spans 15 years and several continents as the two slowly work to find each other again. The author is a poet, which shows in his luminously gorgeous prose and patent love of names and wordplay. This dreamy work is obsessed with notions of loss, fate, discovery and destiny; but it also grounds the reader with two fantastic characters both struggling to find what they are looking for while ending up exactly where they need to be.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: A Trip to the Stars
OPENING LINE:
They burst into the sky, every bird in creation, angry and agitated, awakened by the same primary thought, erupting in a white feathered cloudburst, anxious and graceful, angled in ever-tightening circles toward the ground, drifting close enough to touch, and then close enought to see that it wasn’t birds — it was paper.
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Brian Remy wakes to find himself lying in a pool of his own blood, from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Frighteningly, he has no memory of the incident, and this is just the first of many memory gaps for Remy. It’s only days after September 11, and Remy is a cop who was at the site that day who gives tours of The Zero to visiting politicians and celebrities. As we lurch forward with Remy through increasingly disorienting memory lapses, we discover that he has a new job with a unnamed government agency, trying to uncover a terrorist cell. Each new lucid surfacing is like joining a movie midway through, and Remy starts to fear what he may be doing during his blacked-out gaps. Walter infuses his feverish story with equal parts black humor and paranoia, and brilliantly skewers our post 9/11 war on terror.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Zero
GREAT LINE:
Here was the strangest part: I completely forgot that I’d sworn never to speak to her again, and that she’d left me years before without a word of explanation, without so much as saying goodbye, the way they abandon dogs when summer comes (as I put it to myself at the time), the way they abandon a dog chained to a tree for good measure.
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In this slim memoir, the author is looking back on a dinner party he was invited to by an ex-girlfriend. The relationship with this woman had ended abruptly, and the author had never really gotten over it. So the invitation throws him into a bit of a tizzy. What does it mean? What should he do? What should he say to her? We spend quite a lot of time in his head as he deals with the existential crisis that this invitation has provoked. And although he is pathetic as only the dumped can be, he is also sympathetic and very, very funny. Just when you are afraid that our narrator has been looking for meaning where there is none, we get a lovely pay off from an unlikely literary source. As French as can be, this work is whimsical and navel-gazing but in an endearing way. You will never look at a man in a turtleneck quite the same way.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Mystery Guest
GREAT LINE:
“For a moment Jack felt the strongest inclination to snatch up his little gilt chair and beat the white-faced man down with it…”
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That quote from Master and Commander is in the first chapter, and seems an unlikely start to a friendship that is one of the most interesting in fiction. When Jack Aubrey meets Stephen Maturin at a concert, they have a rather violent disagreement about music. The two are such opposites: Jack, a straightforward, blunt captain in the Royal Navy and Stephen a naturalist and physician with a tendency towards secrecy. In this opening volume Jack is a lieutenant desperate for his first real ship to command. When he does finally get his ship, he rather impulsively asks Stephen along as ship’s doctor. Set in the Napoleonic era, the book is full of nautical slang and ship’s jargon, but somehow that all fades into the background as the reader is swept into a vivid picture of a time, and a gripping series of adventures on the high seas.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Master and Commander
GREAT LINES:
He Zhiwu, Cop 223: If memories could be canned, would they also have expiry dates?
If so, I hope they last for centuries.
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Director Wong made a strong international impression with his loosely linked tales of two cops looking for love in Hong Kong. The first cop, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro, pines for the woman who recently dumped him, setting himself a deadline to find a new love that he measures by the expiration date on cans of pineapple. He is attracted to a mysterious woman in a blond wig who seems to be involved in drug dealing. But just as we think we will follow this couple, another take the stage. A second cop (Tony Leung) eats at the same lunchstand as Kaneshiro every day, called the Chungking Express. There he meets a waitress named Faye (the amazing Faye Wong), who longs to be part of his life. So much so that when the opportunity arises she steals his keys and starts sneaking into his apartment; cleaning and even redecorating. As astoundingly inattentive as the cop is not to notice this invasion, we know Faye will eventually get caught. The director’s intensely kinetic style, which quick cuts, bursts of color, and occasional sudden jumps, might be unsettling to those who want a traditional linear story. Not so much about story as about emotions, mood, and character, Chungking Express nevertheless manages to give vigilant viewers a stylishly enjoyable ride, giving up more of its secrets with each viewing.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Chungking Express