The Friday 10: Ten page tens
You want random? Oh, I’ll give you random! For this week’s Friday 10, I went to my bedroom bookshelf, grabbed 10 random books off of the shelves and turned to page 10 of each. Here’s what I found:
1. The whale fluked, raising its tail high in the air, and there, instead of the distinct pattern of black-and-white markings by which all humpbacks were identified, were—spelled out in foot-high black letters across the white—the words BITE ME!”
(Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore — page 10)
2. When Ollie was eight months pregnant in 1873, she dreamed that she was safe in bed with Fred’s arms wrapped tightly around her. “When I got awake and found you were really not there, I could hardly believe it, you do not know how disappointed I was,” she wrote from her father’s house in Buffalo.
(Katharine Hepburn by Barbara Leaming — page 10)
3. “Just because I fall into a corpselike coma from time to time is no reason for your Grim Reaper fellow to grab me up without making proper tests. It was slipshod, I tell you.”
(Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming by Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley — page 10)
4. Like an increasing number of niminy-piminy Europeans, Americans bracket drinking with gambling and whoring, as deeds to be done in the dark. For myself, I have no shame and don’t have to steal off to Tuscany or the Caribbean to be able to drink guiltlessly in the sunlight. This casts me as a freak in a lunch-time world where the fires of anything vinous are extinguished by spritzing sprays of mineral water and the blaze of anything hearty is drizzled in balsamic or damped down with blanketing weeds of radicchio, lollo rosso, and rocket. Christ, we live in arse-paralysingly drear times.
(The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry — page 10)
5. “Maybe. Maybe I do. But I don’t say it literally.”
“What?” she looked baffled.
“Not literally,” he said.
“There you go again,” she said, “with those college words.”
(Larry’s Party by Carol Shields — page 10)
6. Before she could answer, a man I knew from the smoking lounge approached along the promenade, coming from the direction of the bow of the ship. He had gone out of the lounge some time earlier.
“Look here,” he said, and he showed me his drink. It was full of chipped ice. “It’s from the forward well deck,” he said. “It’s all over the place.”
I felt the woman ease around my shoulder and look into the glass. The man was clearly drunk and shouldn’t have been running about causing alarm.
“From the iceberg,” he said.
I heard her exhale sharply.
“I never take ice in my scotch and soda,” I said.
(Tabloid Dreams by Robert Olen Butler — page 10)
7. Harry — This is a Pocket Sneakoscope. If there’s someone untrustworthy around, it’s supposed to light up and spin. Bill says it’s rubbish sold for wizard tourists and isn’t reliable because it kept lighting up at dinner last night. But he didn’t realize Fred and George had put beetles in his soup.Bye — Ron
(Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling — page 10)
8. “Drugs?” suggested the first policeman.
“More like dirty books,” said the other. “If he’s armed, it’s my turn.”
“It’s always your turn,” grumbled his companion.
The first policeman shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, all right then,” he said. “But I get to drive back to the station.”
(Expecting Someone Taller by Tom Holt — page 10)
9. “I guess it’s a freak of some kind then,” said Larry. And he also said: “Well, Jeesis, what’s that thing driving the last wagon?”
The man looked and said: “Why, it’s just a feller with some goat horns on his head. Another fake, I reckon.
(The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney — page 10)
10. One of the things that being engaged does to you, you must remember, is to fill you to the gills with a sort of knightly chivalry. So Freddie tells me. You go about the place like a Boy Scout, pouncing out on passers-by and doing acts of kindness to them. Three times that day Freddie had chased seedy-looking birds up side streets and forced cash on them. He had patted four small boys on the head and asked them if they meant to be President some day. He had beamed benevolently on the citizenry till his cheeks ached. And he was still full of the milk of human kindness and longing to assist some less fortunate fellow-traveler along the road of Life, when he saw this girl in front of him, staggering under the weight of the suitcase.
(Tales from the Drones Club by P.G. Wodehouse — page 10) ]
