Two Excerpts

A small selection from each of the two books I’m currently reading that made me pause and appreciate the fine-honed craft of the authors … for very different reasons:


The short peace ended. Dusk rolled over the bottoms. The mists reconvened. A final clutch of medics emerged carrying a long pole with a white truce flag that caught the dying light. More than a hundred bodies had been retrieved. But hundreds more remained, and would remain for months, carrion for the ravenous dogs that roamed these fens. Here the dreamless dead would lie, leached to bone by the passing seasons, and waiting, as all the dead would wait, for doomsday’s horn.

- The Day of Battle, page 350, by Rick Atkinson


“Mrs. Greenberg, what I really came for is to find out everything you can tell me about your husband.”

“Then you’d better talk to Dale Snyder. He got here this morning. Want his number?”

“Thanks, I’ve got it. He called me too. You know him well?”

“Very.”

“I’ll also want a chance to talk to Charley, the dolphin anthropologist. But let’s start with you.”

Judy looked unhappy. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Anywhere.”

“Okay. He’s got three testicles.”

“I’ll be damned. That’s fairly rare, isn’t it?”

“And sometimes troublesome, medically, but Larry never had any problems. We used to call it ‘that little extra something about him.’ Is this the kind of thing you’re after?”

- The World of Ptavvs, page 102 of the Del Rey paperback, by Larry Niven