Friday Book Hooks #4

Posted on January 16, 2026 by WordsAndPeace

The Friday Book Hooks #4
Meme inspired by Adele Bound in Books
#bookhooks
#firstlineFriday
#bookbeginnings
#Friday56

📚 📚 📚

A vintage scifi for my Book Hooks #4:

Alpha Centauri or Die,
by Leigh Brackett
scifi
1963
121 pages

FIRST LINE FRIDAY:

There were no more men in space.

BOOK BEGINNINGS:

There were no more men in space. The dark ships strode the ways between the worlds, lightless, silent, needing no human mind to guide them. The R-ships, carrying the freight and the passengers, keeping order, keeping the law, taking the Pax Terrae to the limits of the Solar System and guarding there the boundary which was not now ever to be crossed.

FRIDAY 56:

He knew where to land. The spot had been chosen from what they had seen of the data brought back by the RSS-1. To a robot ship, bitterly enough, belonged the honor of the first interstellar flight, and the only consolation Kirby had for that was that the R-ship had paid with its life for that piece of insolence. The information brought back from the reconnaissance flight had been kept secret, of course, but secrets have a way of getting out,when enough people are determined to know them, and on one clip of smuggled microfilm a place had been shown that looked well-nigh perfect for a colony. The knowledge that there was a habitable world in the system of Alpha Centauri had sparked this whole odyssey of the Lucy B. Davenport. Without that certainty she would have remained in her hidden cave in the Martian sea bottom until her own red rust was indistinguishable from the red sand.

MY VERDICT:
The book points to what we mean by intelligence, and what we should be ready to confront if we do price freedom. The freedom to be humans and not parts of a machine.

Click on the cover to read my full review

Have YOU read
or are YOU planning to read it?
Please leave the link to your own post,
if you did a similar one.

Friday Book Hooks #3

Posted on December 12, 2025 by WordsAndPeace

The Friday Book Hooks #2
Meme inspired by Adele Bound in Books
#bookhooks
#firstlineFriday
#bookbeginnings
#Friday56

📚 📚 📚

A classic play for my Book Hooks #3:

A Streetcar Named Desire,
by Tennessee Williams
Play
1947
128 pages

FIRST LINE FRIDAY:

STANLEY [bellowing]:
Hey, there! Stella, Baby!
[Stella comes out on the first floor landing, a gentle young woman, about twenty-five, and of a background obviously quite different from her husband’s.]
STELLA [mildly]:
Don’t holler at me like that. Hi, Mitch. (beginning of the dialog)

BOOK BEGINNINGS:

The exterior of a two-story corner building on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields and runs between the L&N traces and the river. The section is poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm. The houses are mostly white frame, weathered grey, with rickety outside stairs and galleries and quaintly ornamented gables. This building contains two flats, upstairs and down. Faded white stairs ascend to the entrances of both.
(beginning of scene 1)

FRIDAY 56:

STELLA:
I said, Is Mitch through with her?

[Blanche’s voice is lifted again, serenely as a bell. She sings “But it wouldn’t be make believe if you believed in me.”]

STANLEY:
No, I don’t think he’s necessarily through with her—just wised up!

STELLA:
Stanley, she thought Mitch was—going to—going to marry her. I was hoping so, too.

STANLEY:
Well, he’s not going to marry her. Maybe he was, but he’s not going to jump in a tank with a school of sharks—now! [He rises] Blanche! Oh, Blanche! Can I please get in my bathroom? [There is a pause.]

BLANCHE:
Yes, indeed, sir! Can you wait one second while I dry?

STANLEY:
Having waited one hour I guess one second ought to pass in a hurry.

STELLA:
And she hasn’t got her job? Well, what will she do!

STANLEY:
She’s not stayin’ here after Tuesday. You know that, don’t you? Just to make sure I bought her ticket myself. A bus-ticket!

STELLA:
In the first place, Blanche wouldn’t go on a bus.

STANLEY:
She’ll go on a bus and like it.

STELLA:
No, she won’t, no, she won’t, Stanley!

STANLEY:
She’ll go! Period. P.S. She’ll go Tuesday!

STELLA [slowly]:
What’ll—she—do? What on earth will she—do!

STANLEY:
Her future is mapped out for her.

MY VERDICT:
Vivid characters and mounting tension: a play that you can’t forget.

Click on the cover to read my full review

Have YOU read
or are YOU planning to read it?
Please leave the link to your own post,
if you did a similar one.

Friday Book Hooks #2

Posted on December 5, 2025 by WordsAndPeace

The Friday Book Hooks #2
Meme inspired by Adele Bound in Books
#bookhooks
#firstlineFriday
#bookbeginnings
#Friday56

📚 📚 📚

A beautiful nonfiction for my Book Hooks #2:

The Secret Life of the Owl,
by John Lewis-Stempel
Nonfiction / Birds / Nature
2017
88 pages

FIRST LINE FRIDAY:

The Tawny Owl in Three Acre Wood sometimes glides over my head has he takes an evening circuit. (The animals, like us, have their rituals.) (from the Prologue)

BOOK BEGINNINGS:

Howl.
The word owl goes back to the ule of Anglo-Saxon times, and has equivalents across Europe (French hibou, German Eule, Dutch uil, Latin ulula), all of them derived from some root-word used by the Ancients to denote and imitate the cry of the wolf. Like the howling wolf, the howling owl is a creature of the night, thus of magic. (From the introduction)

FRIDAY 56:

About the long-eared owl.
While widely distributed across Britain, breeding density is concentrated on conifer plantations, though some competition with tawnies over broad-leaved habitat does occur.
An advantage the long-eared owl has over Old Brown is its relaxed attitude to accommodation. While the long-eared owl’s standard dwelling is a sequestered crow or magpie’s nest, the bird will nest on the ground when other sites are in short supply.

MY VERDICT:
Everything you didn’t know about owls: their science, and their place in art and symbolism. Fascinating.

Click on the cover to read my full review,
which includes a picture taken in France, and some of my handpainted rocks

Have YOU read
or are YOU planning to read it?
Please leave the link to your own post,
if you did a similar one.