Monday, May 09, 2011
Great sentences
Esquire Magazine's list of "seventy greatest sentences" -- much to amuse, but unaccountably missing the awesome first line from James Crumley's hard-boiled classic The Last Good Kiss
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
There are a lot of sentences like that in Crumley's work, which I quite recommend to those of you who like tough-guy mysteries.
4 Comments:
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Mon May 09, 12:20:00 PM:
Neal Stephenson, as well, especially in the Baroque Cycle.
By Georg Felis, at
Mon May 09, 01:14:00 PM:
Does it say something positive about myself that I read through all of the Esquire "greatest sentences" and found only one or two that had any kind of deeper meaning? And those two did not make me want to run out and grab their books, even from the Public Library.
Lois McMaster Bujold is my favorite author.
By Gary Rosen, at
Tue May 10, 03:37:00 AM:
I believe it *does* say something positive about you, George. I was not at all impressed by the list. First there was a cheapshot by Gore Vidal aimed at Bill Buckley, who was a decent and honorable man in sharp contrast to the repellent Vidal. Then there was the appalling moral equivalence drawn by Tom Carson between Steven Spielberg to Leni Reifenstahl. One does not have to be a Spielberg fan - I am not - to be disgusted. And even if Carson had been making a point that was not morally bankrupt his "bon mot" would be only modestly amusing for a high school newspaper.
By Gary Rosen, at
Tue May 10, 03:39:00 AM:
Meant "drawn between Steven Spielberg and Leni Reifenstahl"
