Saturday, November 17, 2007

The 161 Meme

Jasia, at Creative Gene, has tagged me for the "161 Meme". I am supposed to open up the book I'm currently reading to page 161 and share the 6th sentence on that page with you. And then, tag five more bloggers to do the same...

The book I'm reading now is "I Hear the Train" by Louis Owens, which was purchased at the FGS Conference in August. This is a collection of stories, some based on fact, some fiction. Guess you could call it "faction". Stories of events in his life as a child working in the fields, fighting fires in the wilderness, the journey to find his brother after thirty years of silence, and reflections of his life as a mixed-blood Indian in America.

page 161, 6th sentence of "I Hear the Train":
"I could've gone to junior college right here in Mississippi of course, but Cole McCurtain thought it'd be good for me to see something else, and he'd liked California pretty well, I guess."

The next two lines are better: "The first thing that happened, naturally, was I fell in love and suffered more than I ever thought I could. Cole McCurtain didn't help a bit when I called him to tell him how bad it was, just grinned over the phone. Adela Camacho was as beautiful as a winter sunrise on the river, when all that new light comes down through the black bones of trees and lays gold on the slow water and you don't hear nothing except maybe a lone dog out there deep in the woods and the air is that kid of sweet cold that makes you dizzy."

Being Tagged are:

5 comments:

footnoteMaven said...

Becky:

That sounds like an absolutely fabulous book. Thanks for sharing more than the sixth sentence.

What wonderful descriptive writing.

fM

Terry Thornton said...

Becky, I'll be interested in learning more about your book as it mentions junior colleges in Mississippi. The first state-wide system of junior colleges in the United States was in Mississippi. By the late 1950s when I was ready to start to college, every community had access to a local community college with free transportation daily via the local school bus routes and then a system of buses from the junior college. I rode the bus one semester and then moved onto campus --- but many of my friends continued to ride the bus until they were ready to transfer to senior college.
TERRY THORNTON
Fulton, Mississippi
Home of Itawamba Community College

Lori Thornton said...

I may have to read that book just to see where "right here in Mississippi" is!

Bill West said...

I usually have several books going at once. Unfortunately,the light reading one yielded a one word sentence. But the serious reading book yielded this:

“Arius, that evil man, the founder of that evil sect, lost his entrails in the lavatory and so was hurried off to hell-fire; Saint Hilary, on the other hand, who defended the undivided Trinity and was sent into exile for having done so, was restored to his own country and went at last to heaven.”- The History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours, (Penguin, London, England, 1974).

Janice said...

Thanks for the tag! I've posted a response.

Janice