First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros

"First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros" is a weekly meme hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea. for this meme, we share the opening paragraph of the books we decided to read based on the opening paragraph(s). This week I'm going to share the opening paragraphs of "The Graveyard Book" by Neil Gaiman. I'll share it just because I liked. Here I should also confess that I was going to read this book even if I hated the intro. Why? Because of Neil Gaima, of course.

THE GRAVEYARD BOOK
CHAPTER ONE
HOW NOBODY CAME TO THE GRAVEYARD


There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.

The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.

The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.

First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros

"First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros" is a weekly meme hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea. for this meme, we share the opening paragraph of the books we decided to read based on the opening paragraph(s). This week I'm going to share opening paragraphs of "Big Fish" by Daniel Wallace. As usual, I'm reading the Turkish version but I'll share the English version with you. By the way, I liked the second paragraph more than the first one.

The Day He Was Born

He was born during the driest summer in forty years. The sun baked the fine red Alabama clay to a grainy dust, and there was no water for miles. Food was scarce, too. No corn or tomatoes or even squash that summer, all of it withered beneath the hazy white sky. Everything died, seemed like: chickens first, then cats, then pigs, and then dogs. Went into the stew, though, the lot, bones and all.

One man went crazy, ate rocks, died. Took ten men to carry him to his grave, he was so heavy. Ten more to dig it, it was so dry. 

First Chapter, First Paragraph Tuesday Intros

Here I am back again in Bibliophile by the Sea's weekly meme "First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros". This week I'm sharing with you a part of "The Prague Cemetery" by Italian author Umberto Eco. Actually, this book caught my attention just because of its name. Prague is a city I liked so much that even its cemetery caught my attention :) After I checked the first page (not the cover writing but the first page), I decided to buy the book. I guess my decision is a bit biased as I love, love, love Paris no matter what.

Well, I'm reading the Turkish translation (I wish my Italian was good enough to read the original copy) but I'm gonna share with you the English translation by Richard Dixon.

1. A Passerby on that Gray Morning

A passerby on that gray morning in March 1897, crossing, at his own risk and peril, place Maubert, or the Maub, as it was known in criminal circles (formerly a center of university life in the Middle Ages, when students flocked there from the Faculty of Arts in Vicus Stramineus, or Rue du Fouarre, and later a place of execution for apostles of free thought such as Etienne Dolet), would have found himself in one of the few spots in Paris spared from Baron Haussmann's devastations, amid a tangle of malodorous alleys, sliced in two by the course of Biévre, which still emerged here, flowing out from the bowels of the metropolis, where it had long been confined, before emptying feverish, gasping and verminous into the nearby Seine. From place Maubert, already scarred by Boulevard Saint-Germain, a web of narrow lanes still branched off,  such as Rue Maitre-Albert, Rue Saint-Séverin, Rue Galande, Rue de la Bucherie, Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, as far as Rue de la Huchette, littered with filthy hotels generally run by Auvergnat hoteliers of legendary cupidity, who demanded one franc for the first night and forty centimes thereafter (plus twenty sous if you wanted a sheet).

Top Ten Books I’d Like to See Made Into a Movie

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week they choose a new top ten list. This week's list is about "Top Ten Books I’d Like to See Made Into a Movie". Here is my list:

1. Neverwhere: This urban fantasy book of Neil Gaiman is one of my all time favorite books. It was actually made into a mini series by BBC in 1996. Still, I think it deserves a movie. I have read that a script has already been written for a movie version but IMDB lists it as "in-development".

2. The Book Thief: After I read half of this book, I started thinking about what a great movie it would be. It would be a pretty good challenge to personalize the character "Death" and it would be a sad movie. 

3. The Cellist of Sarajevo: This one would also be a sad war movie but Galloway was pretty successful in describing the main characters so the director would need to concentrate on the setting.

4. The Eye of the World: It is the first book of "The Wheel of Time" series by Robert Jordan. In 2008 Universal Pictures had optioned the rights to produce feature film adaptations of the books of this serie. Nothing has come out since then. We are still waiting.

5. Half of a Yellow Sun: This is one of the few books I read last year and really loved. I guess the movie version would be again a bit sad and also informative about the history of Nigeria. (By the way I have listed only half of the books till now and 3 of the books turned out to be about wars. I like war movies so I'm a bit biased when choosing the books).

6. The Dream of the Celt: The Turkish translation of this book has come out way before the English translation. It is the first book I read from Mario Vargas Llosa and I really enjoyed reading it. This historical movie adaptation would be about the life of first Anglo-Irish diplomat, then, Irish nationalist of Sir Roger Casement. It'd again be a pretty informative movie, this time about the history of Ireland.

7. Summer and the City: Sex and the City will always remain as one of my all time favorite TV series (I have seen the whole series twice). I also liked the movie versions of Sex and the City. I think it'd also be nice to watch the story of 17-year-old Carrie Bradshaw and how she came to the City.

8. The Elephant's Journey: This book is one of the last books of the great Portuguese author José Saragago. It is actually about the journey of an elephant from Lisbon to Vienna. It was a fun read for me so I think the movie version would also be fun for everyone else.

9. The Iron King: Although I still haven't read the other books of The Iron Fey series, I did enjoy all of the settings described by Julie Kagawa so much that I think the first book deserves a movie.

10. Ambrosia Laneti: This is a sci-fi book by a Turkish author. It is the author's first book and I liked it. It is not easy to find well-written sci-fi books by Turkish authors. It is not easy to find well-directed movies by Turkish directors. I think this one would turn out to be a good movie if it is picked by the correct director.

First Chapter, First Paragraph Tuesday Intros

This weekly meme is hosted by one of my all time favourite bloggers Bibliophile by the Sea. Whenever I go to a bookstore, I almost always read one or two pages before buying a book so I really liked this meme.

I had picked up the book I’m currently reading on my kindle just because of its first page so here it is: The Swarm by Frank Schätzing:

Huanchaco, Peruvian Coast
Juan Narciso Ucañan went to his fate that Wednesday, and no one even noticed.
A few weeks later the circumstances surrounding his sudden disappearance sent shockwaves around the globe, but Ucañan’s name was never mentioned. He was one of many. Too many. What he’d experienced in the early hours of that morning had been going on elsewhere all over the world. The parallels were striking – once you knew what had happened, and only Ucañan did. Maybe the fisherman, with his simple way of seeing things, had even sensed the more complex connections, but in the absence of his evidence, the mystery went unsolved. Neither he nor the Pacific Ocean on the Huanchaco Coast in the North of Peru gave anything away. Like the fish he caught in his lifetime, Juan Narciso Ucañan stayed silent. When he next showed up, he was just a statistic. No one had time to wonder about his whereabouts: events had entered a new and graver phase.

Now I wonder if anyone else feels like reading this chunkster (Turkish version is around 800 pages) after reading what I shared above.

Happy reading to all…