The power of saying good night each night to Lena is great. On the first night that Lena was gone, Vaclav said good night to her, put the good night out into the scary, lonely darkness, and meant each word in a very specific way. Good night. Good night. He wanted her to have a good night. Not a scary night. Not a dangerous night. Not a cold or lonely or nightmare-filled night. He filled the words with all his love and care and worry for Lena and launched them out to her, and like homing pigeons, he trusted them to find her, and he felt, that night, that his words would keep Lena safe, that if he thought about her and cared about her and showed this to the universe, then bad things would not happen to her. Vaclav was not asking an omnipotent god to grant him a wish. He was stirring in himself his own very true emotions, his pure feelings, and pushing them, birthing them into the universe, giving flight to a powerful energy that he trusted would do what as a child he was powerless to do.

-From Vaclav and Lena by Haley Tanner, pages 144-145

_____

Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

Today’s Teaser Tuesday is just one line. The best first line of a novel that I’ve read in a while.

Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I’m going to try to tell you everything I know.

-From The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, page 1

_____

Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

For the people who were shovelling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball — better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest — laughing heartily if it went right, and not less heartily if it went wrong.

-From A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

_____

Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

When children are lonely, they invent imaginary friends to talk to. Adults such as myself invent imaginary television shows to keep the howling dogs of alienation at bay. Nobody is lonely in a sitcom. The characters show up at bars, diners, or sporting events, and everyone they know is already there. I often think that all I have ever wanted in life is a group of people to stand with on a soundstage, in front of a Christmas tree, while we chant in unison, “Happy holidays from NBC.”

-from Everything is Going to be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour by Rachel Shukert, page 130

_____

Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

Three years have passed since he could accurately describe himself as a visitor to the staffroom, but the surreality of being here, amidst these figures of terror or hilarity from his youth – these imagos, these caricatures, now ambling around him, saying good morning, making tea, acting as if they were normal people – still descends on him from time to time. For a long time he found himself expecting them to give him homework, and being surprised, unpleasantly, when instead they would tell him about their lives. But every day it feels more ordinary, which he finds more unpleasant still.

-from Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, page 60

_____

Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

She began walking again, south towards The Mound. ‘Live each day as if it’s your last,’ that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you.

-from One Day by David Nicholls, page 433

_____

Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

Nobody knows how many whales were killed during the great age of whaling, but one estimate suggests that about 300,000 were slaughtered in the four decades or so to 1870. That may not seem an especially vast number, but then whale numbers were not vast to begin with. In any case, the hunting was enough to drive many species to the edge of extinction. As whale numbers dwindled, whaling voyages grew longer and longer – up to four years became common and five years not unknown – and whalers were driven to search the loneliest corners of the most distant seas. All this translated into greatly increased costs. By the 1850s a gallon of whale oil sold for $2.50 – half an average worker’s weekly wage – yet still the remorseless hunt continued. Many species of whale – possibly all – would have vanished for ever but for a sequence of unlikely events that began in Nova Scotia in 1846 when a man named Abraham Gesner invented what for some time would be the most valuable product on earth.

-From At Home by Bill Bryson, page 129

_____

Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

What kind of woman has a saffron quilt on her bed? Wears a white linen dressing gown? Keeps beside her bed a stack of gardening books? Stores all her clothes in a shabby antique wardrobe, with a mirror built into its door? Who is she when she is in this room, alone and unobserved, and in what way does that differ from the person she is when she is in a restaurant with friends or in rehearsal or engaging with members of the public? Who, in short, is Molly Fox?

From Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden, pages 8-9

_____

Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

To figure out how best to prevent motion sickness, you first need to figure out how best to bring it on. Aerospace research has excelled at the latter, if not the former, and perhaps nowhere more triumphantly than at the U.S. Naval Aerospace Medical Institute in Pensacola, Florida: the birthplace of the human disorientation device. In a 1962 NASA-funded study, twenty cadets agreed to be harnessed to a chair mounted on its side on a horizontal pole. Thus affixed, the men were rotated, rotisserie style, at up to thirty revolutions per minute. As a reference point, a chicken on a motorized spit typically turns at five revolutions per minute. Only eight of the twenty made it to the end of the experiment.

From Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach, page 108

_____

Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)