help me, please...

It's been quite a while since I've participated in Dewey's Read-a-Thon. For reasons and emotions too complicated and personal to go into, I just had to walk away for a while. But it feels right somehow to give this another go. Dewey is regularly in my thoughts, and I'm so grateful that there are so many things that bring her to mind. She has been in my thoughts an extraordinary amount over the last couple of months...it may sound funny, but she's been helping me get through some tough times. No, I don't believe in ghosts or in an afterlife; it's nothing like that. It's just a particular conversation we had, and at the time, neither of us could have known how much that conversation would eventually come to comfort and help me. Anyway, I didn't really intend to go into any of that...but at the same time, I'm not going to apologize for missing my dear friend.

The point of this post is that I apparently haven't changed my old ways. :P I started putting together my reading pool today. And it kept growing and growing and growing and growing...I have no restraint! So yep, just like in the old days, I'm going to beg you to help me weed it down to a less ridiculous size.

I'm going to post the first sentence from each of the books. And, if you're willing, you're going to vote for the ones that catch your interest. Feel free to vote for as many as you'd like. And believe me, I totally understand if you don't feel like reading this whole list, so feel free to just skim and give me the numbers of any that pop out at you as intriguing. (On Friday, I'll post a picture of the pile that makes the cut, and I'll post the list again with the books they came from.)

#1. It was past midnight when I got home Halloween night.

#2. Hardly resembling a man anymore, the thing on the bed jerked and thrashed like a nocturnal creature dragged into the light of day.

#3. Miss Eileen Laracy shuffled up the higher road in search of lilacs to lay atop her white chenille bedspread.

#4. The old witch saw that she had gone too far.

#5. Delores never met a Healer she didn't like until the night they took her away.

#6. First thing I did was, I stole a body.

#7. "By the Month or by the Night" read the sign over the entrance to the trailer park.

#8. Grandmother won't tolerate occultism, even of the nose-twitching sort made so adorable by Samantha Stevens, so I'm not allowed to watch Bewitched.

#9. The forecourt of the Chinese Theater smelled of rain-wet stone and car-exhaust, but a faint aroma like pears and cumin seemed to cling to his shirt-collar as he stepped around the clustered tourists, who all appeared to be blinking up at the copper towers above the forecourt wall or smiling into cameras as they knelt to press their hands into the puddled hand-prints in the cement paving blocks.

#10. I slept at the feet of Boot and Sack.

#11. Something has happened.

#12. She'd been taken it was said.

#13. Our forests are dark places, secretive, yet well-trodden.

#14. Once upon a time, fairy tales were awesome.

#15. The creature drove its body again and again into the glass, unable to understand why the air had suddenly become impossible to move through, desperately searching for some way out.

#16. Miss Jean Neal met her maker in the early morning mist of Thanksgiving Sunday.

#17. I was going to have to kill a whole lot of people.

#18. When Dante Cazabon used his shoulder to open the double doors of the kitchen, he was concentrating on the mountain of soup bowls he carried on a tray in front of him.

#19. I spot her as soon as I get off the elevator on the fourth floor.

#20. When the Potato Girl was murdered, the killer cut out her heart.

#21. It was a tidy brownstone on Ninth Street near my home, one that I had passed many times without noticing.

#22. The lake in my dreams is always frozen.

#23. It was the autumn of 1981 and I'd been asked by my paper the Leinster News to do an article on folklore and changing ways in Ireland, a chance I jumped at, availing myself of the opportunity to return home to Slievenageeha, which I hadn't been to visit in years.

#24. I was born dead.

#25. I'm looking at Jacques-Louis David's 1793 oil painting, The Death of Marat, printed in an art book.

#26. A razor blade gave me freedom from the Dorms.

#27. In January I had a proposal due to my boss, Leon Fields, on a new project.

#28. The four men tracked him down before dawn.

#29. In the small breakfast parlour of Oulton, a pretty girl, Miss Alice Maybell, with her furs and wrappers about her, and a journey of forty miles before her--not by rail--to Wyvern, had stood up to hug and kiss her old aunt, and bid her goodbye.

#30. The story that follows is one I never intended to commit to paper.

#31. Thomas dreamed he walked a familiar forest, following a timeworn path of the Tuscaroras.

#32. The morning I got it on was nice; a nice May morning.

#33. Jude had a private collection.

#34. This was supposed to be a writers' retreat.

#35. A Midwestern town.

#36. I never bought into our island's superstitions about Indian summers being cursed.

#37. The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom.

#38. The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

#39. It is easy to pinpoint the minute when my friend Branwell began his silence.

#40. Whenever I meet a man, I catch myself wondering what our child would look like if we were to make a baby.

#41. The following manuscript comes from a remarkable collection of documents termed "the Mary papers."

#42. It was November.

#43. My mother used to tell me about the ocean.

#44. I find Will facedown in the woods near Barton Creek.

#45. It's only half an hour since someone--Robyn I think--said we should write everything down, and it's only twenty-nine minutes since I got chosen, and for those twenty-nine minutes I've had everyone crowded around me gazing at the blank page and yelling ideas and advice.

#46. My sweater was new, stinging red and ugly.

#47. I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ.

#48. The story was told to me by my old tutor, Theo Parmitter, as we sat beside the fire in his college rooms one bitterly cold January night.

#49. This is what I remembered.

#50. A whimpering echoed underground.

#51. If you were gorgeous and running out of money, what would you do?

#52. "Gemma, tell your story again," Shana begged, putting her arms around her grandmother and breathing in that special smell of talcum and lemon that seemed to belong only to her.

#53. In a quiet, small corner of the dreaming...

#54. Patrick's house was a ghost.

#55. "Bloody shambles this last six years."

#56. After a year of hunting, I finally caught up with Sarah.

#57. As the bus entered the prefectural capital of Takamatsu, garden suburbs transformed into city streets of multicolored neon, headlights of oncoming cars, and the checkered lights of office buildings.

#58. 'Doctor Clare Beale, Pharmacology, 5:15PM Sunday.'

#59. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

#60. It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling.

#61. It was as black in the closet as old blood.

#62. When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had traveled across a desert of living sand.

#63. "What's for breakfast?"

#64. Greater Chongqing, the United Federation of China.

#65. Once upon a time--for that is how all stories should begin--there was a boy who lost his mother.

#66. I had always thought that a person born blind and given sight later on in life through the miracles of modern medicine would feel reborn.

#67. Storm Eden was forbidden to put a foot outside the high walls that surrounded the park at Eden End.

#68. Venice, California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad.

#69. How lucky were they?

#70. We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.

#71. I found him in the garage on a Saturday afternoon.

#72. Pitch blackness had settled much earlier than usual over this, the last afternoon of the year.

#73. In the beginning there were thirty-six of them, thirty-six droplets of life so tiny that Eduardo could see them only under a microscope.

#74. Teenage girls are powerful creatures.

#75. When I was really young, if there was one thing I wanted in the world, it was to be invisible.

#76. I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped.

#77. The sheets are dirty.

#78. Before she became the Girl from Nowhere--the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who live a thousand years--she was just a little girl in Iowa named Amy.

#79. "Hey, Al. Come look at this one."

#80. In 1909, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran an article titled "If Bugs Were the Size of Men."

Thank you!!!