First Lines of Milan Kundera's "Slowness"

 "We suddenly had an urge to spend the evening and night in a château. Many of them in France have become hotels: a square of greenery lost in a stretch of ugliness without greenery; a little plot of walks, trees, birds amid a vast network of highways. I am driving, and in the rearview mirror I notice a car behind me. The small left light is blinking, and the whole car emits waves of impatience. The driver is watching for the chance to pass me; he is watching for the moment the way a hawk watches for a sparrow." 

- Slowness, by Milan Kundera

First Lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Hummingbird Salamander"

 "Assume I'm dead by the time you read this. Assume you're being told all of this by a flicker, a wisp, a thing you can't quite get out of your head now that you've found me. And in the beginning, it's you, not me, being handed an envelope with a key inside... on a street, in a city, on a winter day so cold that breathing hurts and your lungs creak."

- Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff Vandermeer

Despite a slow start, this book works its way up to an alluring fever pitch of paranoia that keeps you turning pages way past when you should be going to sleep. More of a thriller than his Southern Reach trilogy. I'll be reading another Vandermeer shortly; perhaps Borne?

Related Posts:

• First Lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Authority"
• First Lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Annihilation"

First Lines of Peter Wohlleben's "The Hidden Life of Trees"

 "Years ago, I stumbled across a patch of strange-looking mossy stones in one of the preserves of old beech trees that grows in the forest I manage. Casting my mind back, I realized I had passed by them many times before without paying them any heed. But that day, I stopped and bent down to take a good look. The stones were an unusual shape: they were gently curved with hollowed-out areas." 
- Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees

A wonderful little book filled with close observations about the trees all around us. Trees turn out to be so much more complex than we usually think, and Wohlleben paints an alluring picture of their life at a MUCH slower pace than we are used to perceiving. I found this book insightful and enabled me to see new aspects about the trees around me - for example, the splits in the bark of young trees that are growing too fast because they were planted away from the forest. Good stuff.

First Lines of Oksana Zabuzhko's "The Museum of Abandoned Secrets"

"And then come the photos: black and white, faded into a caramel-brown sepia, some printed on that old dense paper with the bossed dappling and white scalloped edges like the lace collars of school uniforms, all from the pre-Kodak era—the era of the Cold War and nationally manufactured photography supplies (really, nationally manufactured everything)—and yet, the women in the pictures are adorned with the towering mousses of chignons, those stupid constructions of dead and, more often than not, someone else’s (ugh) hair."

- The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, by Oksana Zabuzhko, translated by Nina Shevchuk-Murray.

What an intriguing, sprawling, frustrating, and rewarding book. I'm about half-way through its 718 pages, having read that in fits and starts. Zabuzhko's style includes long sentences, which i'm normally okay with, but the sheer amount of clauses and parenthetical asides make them hard to follow. Luckily, that's one of the themes of the book - that life is messy and "... is an enormous, bottomless suitcase, stuffed with precisely such indeterminate bits and pieces..." so I'm looking at it as more of an impressionistic painting where the details of the plot or dialogue don't matter so much as the overall impact. Curious to know how this one plays out.