Category: Tuesday Intros

Every Tuesday Vicki at I'd Rather Be At the Beach hosts First Chapter, First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros, where we share the first paragraph or two of a book we are reading or thinking about reading soon. Mine comes from Side Life by Steve Toutonghi. The man was defying traffic, striding slowly down the center of the merge lane that Vin and the line of cars behind him were waiting to use. The man was big and lean in a black T-shirt and black denim jeans, a long dark mane flaring like a sadhu's, a full beard softening his heavy jaw; and he looked preposterously confident, as if he were separate from the world and impervious, as if he were parting illusion. One lane over, cars flew by, their wakes gently tugging his long hair while he walked within two feet of Vin's new Tesla S and didn't even tilt his head to acknowledge the driver of the machine. Eyes forward, fixed on...

Every Tuesday Vicki at I'd Rather Be At the Beach hosts First Chapter, First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros, where we share the first paragraph or two of a book we are reading or thinking about reading soon. Mine comes from The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan. It's still free for Kindle til the end of the day as part of Amazon Crossing's World Book Day celebration. The House sits on the outskirts of town. The neighborhood is called the Comb. The long buildings of the projects here are arranged in jagged rows, with empty cement squares between them—the intended  playgrounds for the young Combers. The teeth of the comb are white. They stare with many eyes and they all look just the same. In places where they haven't sprouted yet, there are the fenced vacant lots. The piles of debris from the houses already knocked down, nesting grounds for rats and stray dogs, are much more appealing to the young Combers than the...

Every Tuesday Vicki at I'd Rather Be At the Beach hosts First Chapter, First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros, where we share the first paragraph or two of a book we are reading or thinking about reading soon. Mine comes from Picked Off by Linda Lovely. I shrank into a tight crouch and crept along the fence line. The gate sat twenty-five yards away. It felt like a mile. My nerves jangled. Who could blame me? Yesterday's assault would have scared the beans out of a bowl of chili. Mist shrouded the hilly field in the skimpy pre-dawn light. A dark silhouette moved. He was awake, alert. Could I reach the gate before he noticed?...

Every Tuesday Vicki at I'd Rather Be At the Beach hosts First Chapter, First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros, where we share the first paragraph or two of a book we are reading or thinking about reading soon. Mine comes from Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places by Rebecca Rego Barry. In 1952, Vincent Starrett posed a question in the Saturday Evening Post: "Have You a Tamerlane in Your Attic?" Starrett, a Chicago newspaperman, author, and die-hard book collector, was referring to Edgar Allan Poe's first book of poetry, a slender, self-published volume bound in paper wrappers called Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). The title page credited only "A Bostonian" as its creator; Poe's name was known only to the printer, Calvin F. S. Thomas. Reviewers and readers, however few there were, failed to immediately realize its merit, and the copies—some estimate fifty, others two hundred—were scattered to the four winds. After Poe published a second volume and his literary...