Book of the Day Archive

This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 130,000 years. The question motivating the books is: why did history unfold differently on different continents?

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Nya is going to the pond to fetch water for her family, there and back, twice.

Until he was four years old James Henry Trotter had had a happy life.

At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. Inman’s eyes and the long wound at his neck drew them, and the sound of their wings and the touch of their feet were soon more potent than a yardful of roosters in rousing a man to wake.

It was Mrs. May who first told me about them.

Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood. If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom and dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.

They took my father three days ago, a week before my tenth birthday. No one knows where he is. Or if they do know, they are not telling me.

The room is bright and alive at 8:45 a.m.‹ I can almost ignore Middle Borough High School’s zombie fluorescent lighting.

Ba-room, ba-room, ba-room, baripity, baripity, baripity, baripity. ‹Good. His dad had the pickup going. He could get up now. Jess slid out of the bed and into his overalls.

In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.

Jim Webb’s luck was running muddy when Bass Reeves rode into town. Webb had stayed one jump ahead of the lawman for two years. He wasn’t about to be caught now.

I shouldn’t have come to this party. I’m not even sure I belong at this party. That’s not on some bougie shit, either. There are just some places where it’s not enough to be me. Either version of me.

Eleven-year-old Virgil Salinas already regretted the rest of middle school, and he’d only just finished sixth grade. He imagined all those years stretching ahead of him like a long line of hurdles, each of them getting taller, thicker, and heavier, and him standing in front of them on his weak and skinny legs.

When the deacons at our Bible Belt church cued up a horror flick aimed at dramatizing Hell according to the apocalyptic book of Revelation, I figured I better get right with God, and soon.

Today I moved to a twelve acre rock covered with cement, topped with bird turd and surrounded by water.

My name is LaVaughn and I am 15. When a little kid draws a picture it is all a big face and some arms stuck on. That’s their life. Well then, you get older and you are a whole mess of things, new thoughts, sorry feelings, big plans, enormous doubts, going along hoping and getting disappointed, over and over again. Nno wonder I don’t recognize my little crayon picture.

It begins, as most things begin, with a song.

Miyax pushed back the hood of her sealskin parka and looked at the Arctic sun. It was a yellow disc in a lime green sky, the colors of six o’clock in the evening and the time when the wolves awoke.

They didn’t say anything about this in the books, I thought, as the snow blew in through the gaping doorway and settled on my naked back. I lay face down on the cobbled floor in a pool of nameless muck, my arm deep inside the straining cow, my feet scrabbling for a toe hold between the stones.

“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

I am born on a Tuesday at University Hospital, Columbus, Ohio, USA‹, a country caught between Black and White.

We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby.

Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle, and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic Darkness, had found a yellow metal.

It was a dark and stormy night.

My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes and I came back with a dog.

Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes.

The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.