The Translator by John Crowley

A beautifully written book about two lives colliding:  a Russian poet and his student at a Midwestern university.

It's always a surprise and wonderment when our plane breaks through a ceiling of cloud and, as though shedding some huge entangling dress of tattered lace, comes out naked into the naked blue sky and sun.

[The hotel] was vast, concrete and glass.  The rainy gulf was what it looked at or glowered at.

Her poem "The Split Level" would be about that; about a woman learning the names of flowers, and thus (she believes) coming closer to nature and really coming closer too, even though by means of the one thing nature doesn't possess of itself, its names.

This grief was something and not nothing, it rose continually to sweep over you, making you sob or cry out unexpectedly, to lose your footing even, like a riptide.

No rain fell that night on the University campus, but the leaves of all the trees, yellow elm and hickory, gray-green ash, coppery oak and beech, seemed to have fallen at once in the night:  long wind-combed rows of them moving in the still-restless air, dead souls lifted and tossed on gusts.
She whispered to herself okay, let's go, in that motherly or fatherly way we forever speak to ourselves so that we will do what we should or must.

A Horse of Her Own by Annie Wedekind

A tiny bit of a slow read--but I'm sure enthralling to anyone who loves to ride--about a girl who lives to ride, but knows she'll never be able to own her own horse.

Susan stalked the farm like a guard dog, yelping at and shepherding and instructing everything that came in her path.

Hush by Jacqueline Woodson

Amazing book about a father, a policeman, an African-American who does the right thing and turns in two policemen for shooting an African-American adolescent.  Following this, he and his family goes into the witness protection program and the book relates how the different family members cope wth their loss of identity.

The mother's dark brown fingers move quickly through a rise of white dough.

Look for the beauty, my mama says.  Always look for the beauty.  It's in every single body you meet.

Montmorency On the Rocks by Eleanor Updale

Detective novel set in turn-of-the century England full of aristocrats, commoners, and street people.  Considers addiction and sins of pride with great aplomb.

The sun seemed to spread cleanliness all around, picking out the detail of the ancient castle hundreds of feet up on its mysterious volcanic cliff.

Lucky by Rachel Vail

Not exactly a riches to rags story, but a riches to not-so-rich story.  Amazingly insightful writing about friendship dynamics in middle school.

Years ago we liked to imagine stuff together, adventures in her backyard or mine where we took turns being the tragically dying younger sister (she only has a younger brother) or back in time to prairie days (she'd been obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which I couldn't get through at all; it just seemed like long stretches of weather punctuated by Pa making another chair).

Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman

The story of a girl who wants to go to college which takes place in India during WWII and the non-violent fight of India for independence from Britain.  The author grapples with a lot of issues:  non-violence vs. just war, women's rights, and education for all.

Great opening paragraph that sets the scene:

I still remember the day we celebrated Krishna Jayanthi, the festival of Lord Krishna's birth, at our home in Bombay.  The drive was drenched with the juice of fallen jamun fruit and the sand of Mahim beach gleamed like a golden plate in the afternoon sunlight.  Whispers of heat rose from the tar road and shivered toward the slumbering Arabian Sea.

Wringer: Not All Birthdays Are Welcome by Jerry Spinelli

Wringer is a must read for anyone dealing with peer pressure and trying to learn how to be yourself.

Lead:
He did not want to be a wringer.

THis thing, this not wanting to be a wringer, did it ever knock him from his bike?  Untie his sneaker lace? Call him a name?  Stand up and fight?
No.  It did nothing.  It was simply, merely there, a whisper of featherwings, reminding him of the moment he dreaded above all others, the moment when the not wanting to be a wringer would turn to becoming one.

Sights by Susanna Vance

A quirky novel about an accordian-playing, future-seeing, father-fleeing girl, who's named Baby Girl, and her mother.  A delight.

Lead:
I was in the womb eleven and a half months, came our fat, durable and gorgeous.  I've seen the newborn pictures:  smooth broad ears, a few sharp little teeth glinting like Chiclets.

Closing:
My past and future lives gathered in the dark, so many of them, I fell asleep counting.

The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer

This is an Enola Holmes Mystery--Enola Holmes being the much younger sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes.  It is a delightful look at the late 1800s.

Opening:

The only light struggles from the few gas street lamps that remain unbroken, and from pots of fire suspended above the cobblestones, tended by old men selling boiled sea snails outside the public houses.

What Hearts by Bruce Brooks

As he ran down the winding tar path that led through the woods to the street, he took a quick inventory:  his knapsack, straining at its straps, held a blank blue composition book and three unsharpened yellow pencils (for a summer journal; everyone had gotten these), a battered hardback copy of a book called The Little Prince (no one else had received this; the librarian had slipped it in secret to "my best little reader"), a mimeographed copy of the school handbook complete with all kinds of forms to be brought in on the first day of second grade in September (everyone, of course), six certificates stamped with foil medallions (one for completing the dumb first-grade reader with its "See Spot jump!" stories, one for being able to print the alphabet in upper and lower case, one for being able to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "You're a Grand Old Flag," all of which everyone got, even Gordon Firestone, who never got the words right to the latter song and still couldn't tell the difference between  small "d" and "b," "g" and "q"; the other three were from gym class, for being able to run and jump and roll (some boys had gotten more than the three, but they were show-offs); a big, glossy bland-and-white photograph of the whole class (for everyone, even the two kids who had missed school on the day the picture was taken; Asa had been sick with a bad cold himself, but his parents had made him come for the picture, in which he was the only one wearing a jacket and tie); and, finally, a report card.

War Games by Audrey & Akila Couloumbis

Above them, the weight of the grapevines rested on thick beams, the leaves trembling with the activity of so many small birds they could not be counted.

Petros understood the war to be something large and rolling toward them like an avalanche.

The Pox Party: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson

I was raised in a gaunt house with a garden; my earliest recollections are of floating lights in the apple trees.

On some summer nights, when it was hot and the atmosphere itself seemed cut with anger--the buzzing of the cicadas in the trees of the avenue harsh with it, broiling--on those nights, we could hear mobs go by in the streets, issuing out from the docks.

The Killer's Tears by Anne-Laure Bondoux

No one ever arrived here by chance.  Here was nearly the end of the world, close to the southernmost tip of Chile, which resembles lace in the cold Pacific waters. ~ opening

Her eyes met those of Angel Allegria--small eyes, deeply set, as if pushed into their sockets by blows; eyes that betrayed a brutal wickedness.

Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy

More rock had fallen from the rock above, piling between the stems of the thorn-trees like froth among the reeds of a backwater.

Into this great, still lake the jutting ribs of the cave walls ran like buttresses to meet the angle of their own reflections, then on down into the darkness.

The small light of the flame pushed the darkness back, a palpable darkness, deeper even than those dark nights where the black is thick as a wild beast's pelt, and presses in on you like a stifling blanket.

As far as I could see, we were in a small cove sheltered by the wind by a mighty headland close to our left, but the seas, tearing past the end of the headland and curving round to break among the offshore rocks, were huge, and came lashing down on the shingle in torrents of white with a noise like armies clashing together in anger.

The waves must have been rushing up forty feet, and the master waves, the great sevenths, came roaring up like towers and drenched us with salt fully sizty feet above the beach.

The sea soughed and beat below the window, the wind plucked at the wall, and ferns growing there in the crevices rustled and tapped.

The land after the rain smelled rich and soft, ploughing weather, nutting weather, the squirrel-time for winter's coming.

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork

The parking lot is empty except for Rabbi Heschel's car, a red Volkswagen Beetle she calls Habbie, after the prophet Habakkuk, because, she says, the car, like the prophet, has been crying for years without anyone paying attention.

I am not supposed to, but I open the top drawer of his desk. There are pen refills, paper clips that have been extended and can no longer serve their function, lots of pennies, business cards, a menu for a Thai restaurant, a small ball made from rubber bands, a drawing of a spiderweb on a sticky, a magnifying lens, three plastic spoons, a napkin, dental floss, a cough drop that is stuck to the bottom, a dozen Pepto-Bismol tablets.

As we get closer, we see an assortment of plastic animals on the front lawn: a family of deer, two white swans (now grayish), a mother duck with six ducklings behind her (one tipped over), two rabbits kissing each other, a brown fox, a groundhog up on its hind legs, a flamingo that could have been pink at one time but is now a whitish color.

The Birds of Ecuador: Field Guide

This morning, I saw a hawk outside, memorized his features sitting on the telephone wire, and then banged on the window so I could see him in flight. He didn't move, just kept looking around. When I came out and stomped he flew away, and then I saw fresh blood where he had caught something and then lost it. I went to school, got out a guide book, and was so surprised to find this powerful sentence about the Bicolored Hawk in a bird book:

A sneaky and inconspicuous hawk; rarely seen although it can be very bold, indeed at times almost fearless of humans.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

The truth about my son is that despite his good nature, his intelligence, his extensive education, and his bulldozer energy, he is as blunt as a kick in the shins.

The valley, changing from hour to hour, battle-fronts of clouds forming along the bases of the mountains, charging, breaking, scattering in tatters and streamers wildly flying; tops of the mountains seen with ineffable colors on them at sunset and the nearer hills like changeable cut velvet.

The first of them [letters worth reading] comes eleven months, one novel, one miscarriage, some anxious cases of measles and whooping cough, and some miles of her hasty illegible scrawl after the one I have just quoted.

From the narrows the river poured white and broken into the mineral green of the pool, which smoothed it within fifty feet. At the bottom of the pool the water visibly bulged, walling against the rockslide, and twisted right to find a way through. (p. 403)

It was his capacity for feeling that she should have attended to: by failing to comprehend it, she probably contributed to his silence.

Gladness and guilt hit her like waves meeting at an angle on the beach.

Saving Grace by Lee Smith

A book about a girl-teen-woman growing up with a snake-handling, hell-raising preacher for a father. Definitely NOT recommended for young people, but it is well written.

I am and always have been contentous and ornery, full of fear and doubt in a family of believers.

I remember them shoveling dirt onto Mama's pine box, and how it turned into runny red mud in the rain, and Ruth Duty kneeling and getting all muccy ad they had to help her up.

Then I don't remember anything at all for a long time, until one day when I kind of came back to myself and found that I was sitting in Ruth and Carlton's kitchen, at their round oak table, eating homemade vegetable soup out of a blue bowl with a big spoon that said "U.S. Navy" on it. I was surprised to see that it was still summer, and that I was still alive. The soup was delicious.

"And do you know," she said, leaning forward in a kitchen chair, one hand on each kneww, "do you know, she was pregnant with that baby for ten months with no sign of labor, until the doctors gave up and done a Sicilian?"

The Human Comedy by William Saroyan

When I picked this book up I was expecting something deeply intellectual, but it is a lovely accessible tale told in vignettes about a boy who delivers telegrams during wartime and learns about love and loss.

The daytime school student and nighttime telgraph messenger brought his bicycle to a dynamic skidding halt, dropped the contraption and hurried to the fence as if there he would discover something extremely fleeting and apt to be lost if he did not hurry.

"We're poor, always have been--my father was a great man. He was not a successful man. He didn't make any more money than what we needed--ever."

Not exactly sentence stalking, but I love this!

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

Your manuscript on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already--worthy ones, more edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones.

You can easily get so confused writing a thiry-page chapter that in order to make an outline for the second draft, you have to rent a hall. I have often "written" with the mechanical aid of a twenty-foot conference table. You lay your pages along the table's edge and pace out the work. You walk along the rows; you weed bits, move bits, and dig out bits, bent over rows with full hands like a gardener. After a couple of hours, you have taken an exceedingly dull nine-mile hike. You go home and soak your feet.

To an God Unknown by John Steinbeck

Three weeks before Thanksgiving the evenings were red on the mountaintops toward the sea, and the bristling, officious wind raked the valley and sang around the house corners at night and flapped the window shades, and the little whirlwinds took columns of dust and leaves down the road like reeling soldiers.

Every night the sky burned over the sea and the clouds massed and deployed, charged and retreated in practice for the winter.

The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck

Poverty sat cross-legged on the farm, and the Maltbys were ragged.

In a tall wild pear tree a congress of bluejays squawked a cacphonous argument.

"How run-down and slovenly," she thought. "How utterly lovely and slipshod."

Among the branches of the trees a tiny white fragment of mist appeared and delicately floated along just over the treetops. In a moment another translucent shred joined it, and another and another. They sailed along like a half-materialized ghost, growing larger and larger until suddenly they struck a column of warm air and rose into the sky to become little clouds.

The Trumpeter by Eric P. Kelly

I just discovered this 1928 Newberry Award winning book. What a jewel! Well-written and full of information about 15th century Krakow. I loved the following paragraph:

Not until then did he seek comfort and counself from his wife, who had always been his solace at such times; throwing himself down beside her on the wagon seat, he told her the story of his late discoveries, the absence of the king, the death of his kinsman. For a second the woman's heart quailed before the fresh difficulties, but she forgot self at the look in her husband's face. Her quiet reply, "We will wait, for God is in the waiting."

A Corpse in the Koryo by James Church

I find that I love writers who use a lot of anthropomorphism in their writing. Here's a great example:

Small clouds nuzzled outcroppings along the hilltops, baby white puffs that looked like they had needed something solid to lean against during the night. They had overslept and been left behind. As I watched, they grew more transparent with each sunbeam that touched them. No struggle or sound of despair. They just disappeared.