BMTG Daily Dose

Formerly known as the Daily Dose, the Weekly Dose is home to weekly excerpts from a wide variety of important books. These excerpts are near and dear to the hearts of the BMTG membership. Submissions from BMTG members are welcome, as long as the guidelines are followed. Submissions that do not conform to the official guidelines will be rejected without the opportunity to appeal. Excerpts are best when read aloud with a dramatic flair.

2006
May | April | March | February | January

3/31/05: Dead Man’s Walk by Larry McMurtry

“They’re shooting!” he said – another bullet had sliced the water nearby. “You oughtn’t to be sitting up so tall in the saddle – you make too good a target.”
“I guess I’d rather be shot than drownt,” Jimmy Tweed said. “If there’s one thing I’ve never liked it’s getting water up my nose.”

3/30/05: The Sound of Trumpets by John Mortimer

Listening to the phone-ins on the ‘Breakfast Egg’ in his office, Paul Fogarty called Clifford and made sure, for the fifth time, that Slippy Johnson had been safely in his cell at the time of the supermarket assault. And Agnes, warming her hands on a mug of black coffee, rejoiced because Terry had, against all odds, pointed out the route to Utopia.

3/29/05: Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

       “Lor, Pete,” said Mose, triumphantly, “han’t we got a buster of a breakfast!” at the same time catching at a fragment of the chicken.
       Aunt Chloe gave him a sudden box on the ear. “Thar now! crowing over the last breakfast yer poor daddy’s gwine to have to home!”
       “Oh, Chloe!” said Tom gently.
       “Wal, I can’t help it,” saind Aunt Chloe, hiding her face in her apron, “I’s so tossed about, it makes me act ugly.”

3/28/05: Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

The water that day was the deep shade of blue you only seem to see on calm days in October, and sound of the diesels was soothing. Selena untied the kerchief she was wearin over her head and raised her arms and laughed. “Isn’t it beautiful, Mom?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said, “it is. And you used to be beautiful, too, Selena. Why ain’t you anymore?”

3/27/05: The White Peacock by D.H. Lawrence

       “Here,” said Lettie, handing him an apple she had peeled. “You may have an apple, greedy boy.”
       He took it and looked at it. Then a malicious smile twinkled round his eyes, - as he said:
       “If you give me the apple, to whom will you give the peel?”

3/26/05: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

       And then Uncle John seemed to see them for the first time. He chewed slowly. “You take this here,” he said to Tom. “I ain’t hungry.”
       “You ain’t et today,” Tom said.
       “I know, but I got a stomickache. I ain’t hungry.”
       Tom said quietly, “You take that plate inside the tent an’ you eat it.”
       “I ain’t hungry,” John insisted. “I’d still see ‘em inside the tent.”
       Tom turned on the children. “You git,” he said. “Go on now, git.” The bank of eyes left the stew and rested wondering on his face. “Go on now, git. You ain’t doin’ no good. There ain’t enough for you.”

3/25/05: The Color Purple by Alice Walker

       Hitch up the wagon, he say.
       Where us going? say Harpo.
       Hitch up the wagon, he say again.
       Harpo hitch up the wagon. They stand there and talk a few minutes out by the barn. Then Mr. _______ drive off.
       One good thing bout the way he never do any work round the place, us never miss him when he gone.

3/24/05: Candide by Voltaire

"That's admirable," said Candide, "but you must be cured."
"How can I be?" said Pangloss. "I'm penniless, my friend, and nowhere on the face of the globe can you get a blood letting or an enema without paying, or having someone pay for you."

3/23/05: The Web by Jonathan Kellerman

I worked. No medical oddities, no gore, and the only untimely death I found was a young woman with ovarian cancer.
Another two cartons, more routine. Then the name of a drowning victim caught my eye.

3/22/05: A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

The signal event of the summer institute turned out to be the surprise announcement, within a day or two of the start of the meetings, of Milnor’s proof of the existence of exotic spheres. For the mathematicians gathered there, it had the same electrifying effect as the announcement of a solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem by Andrew Wiles of Princeton University four decades later. It stole Nash’s thunder.

3/21/05: Ablaze by Piers Paul Read

That Monday morning, 28 April, a thousand miles to the north, the alarm went off at the Fosmark nuclear power station one hundred kilometers from Stockholm when a worker passed through the dosimetric control at the end of his shift. The levels of radioactive contamination on his clothes greatly exceeded the norm. Fearing that there was a leak from the Swedish reactor, evacuation was ordered of all inessential personnel.”

3/20/05: The Celtic Riddle by Lyn Hamilton

       “Denny,” I said softly, then more loudly. “Denny!”
       He looked slightly baffled for a moment. “Lara,” he said finally. “It’s you.”
       “I brought you a bottle of whiskey, Denny,” I said. “And I need to hear some of your stories.”
       “Which one would you like?” he asked, looking pleased.

3/19/05: The Marshall of Vengeance by Luke Short

“Listen,” Poke said patiently. “Do you know how Apaches fight? They travel with nothing but muskets, ball and powder, a handful of jerky, a geestring and a remuda. When they wear a horse down, they cut his throat and shift to another horse. Travelin’ at this rate, stoppin’ for grub and sleep, you’ll hit their camp just when they want you to – in about three days. They’ll have every buck in the country, from fifteen to fifty, waitin’ for us. It’ll be another massacre.”

3/18/05: This Game’s the BEST! by George Karl

Amazingly, Shawn, at age twenty-seven, really has just two real challenges left. First he needs to win a championship, then he needs to leave his mark for Hall of Fame voters. That’s extremely unusual for someone his age. If we win a championship, Shawn would have to be considered by basketball people as one of the best power forwards ever to play the game.

3/17/05: The Lost Bird by Margaret Coel

“Where were they?”
“Hiding out at cousin’s ranch. Scared of Sonny Red Wolf. I took them to the fed’s office this afternoon to make sure they got there. The girl gave a statement about seeing Sonny’s white truck on Thunder Lane about the time of the priest’s murder.”

3/16/05: Treasure by Clive Cussler

       The President put a hand on Sandecker’s back and steered him up the steps toward the cottage door. “Come in and have some breakfast. Dale Nichols, Julius Schiller and Senator Pitt are already attacking the eggs and smoked ham.”
       “Assembled the brain trust, I see,” Sandecker said with a cagey smile.
       “We spent half the night discussing the political impact of your discovery.”

3/15/05: Goodbye, Mickey Mouse by Len Deighton

“No, sir, not just paydays. I could handle those. It’s almost every Friday and Saturday night. Last weekend the MPs had to assign extra men to help them. Major Tarrant says there were forty or fifty men brawling in the street outside the Crown pub. Even allowing for the Major’s inclination to see any kind of high spirits as a preview of the end of the world, it still sounds like a roughhouse.”

3/14/05: Reagan’s America by Garry Wills

Reagan worked on top of the building to whose wall the heavenly Buddhist shrine was affixed, and went down through the school every afternoon and evening to eat with students and faculty in their basement cafeteria. The studios from which Reagan broadcast his first shows bore, like everything else about the place, the unmistakable B.J. touch.

3/13/05: The Army of the Potomac: Glory Road by Bruce Catton

Unable to live by anything more inspiring, the army was living by its paper work, and when the paper work was done wrong, which naturally happened every day, military life being what it is, men died.

3/12/05: The Army of the Potomac: Mr. Lincoln’s Army by Bruce Catton

The result was that the IX Corps in this battle had two commanders – and no commander at all. McClellan gave his orders to Burnside, and Burnside majestically passed them on to Cox, and neither man was quite responsible for operations. Once the action began there was likely to be a mix-up of the first magnitude.

3/11/05: The Thin Red Line by James Jones

       The stocky Dale with his perpetually hunched shoulders and powerful long arms marched himself stolidly, directly in front of the sitting Witt and stood himself there lumpishly to have his say. He had his rifle in his hands.
       “I got something I want to tell you, Witt,” he growled.
       Witt’s mind, such as it was at the moment, was far, far away. “Yeah?” he said somnambulently. “What’s that?”
       “You shouldn’t ought to talk to me like you did,” Dale growled authoritatively, “and I don’t want you to do it any more. That’s an order.”

3/10/05: Alger Hiss: The True Story by John Chabot Smith

When Hiss came out of jail, the day after Thanksgiving in 1954, there was a brief period of exaltation. But he had changed and so had Priscilla, and the exaltation didn’t last.

3/9/05: Blind Ambition by John Dean

       As Moore walked back to my office with me for a postmortem, I was thinking that the current draft placed me very close to perjury, and this awareness didn’t help my mood. Moore tried to cheer me up.
       “John, you’re meeting an awful lot with the President these days, aren’t you?” he said.
       “Yeah, I am.”
       “Well, you know, this is pretty historic stuff. You’re in there with the President himself. Have you ever thought about taking notes on those meetings? You might be glad someday.”
       I looked at him coldly. “Dick, frankly I wouldn’t even want to write down what’s going on in there right now.”

3/8/05: Willie Mays by Arnold Hano

And we watched Willie Mays. There was a sign in left field that read, “Go, Giants, Go,” and they did not mean it the way the hippies do; they meant it literally. Get out. But there was another sign: “Stay, Willie, Stay.” Let San Francisco have the Giants; New York would keep Mays.

3/7/05: Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle

I had seen many a strange sight since my arrival on Soror. I thought I was so accustomed to the apes and their actions that I could no longer be astonished by them. Yet confronted with the singularity and proportions of the scene before my eyes, I was seized with giddiness and once again asked myself if I was not dreaming.

3/6/05: War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk

The thundering concussion tore at Pug Henry’s ears. He was thrown to his knees. He sprang up, staggering. The whole ship was shuddering like a train off its track, and worse than that, worse than the fire shooting up on the port side, was the sudden list. Ten degrees or more, he groggily estimated – in seconds. What holes those torpedoes must have blown!

3/5/05: To Renew America by Newt Gingrich

The next wave of investment will be in satellite uplinks that allow the transmission of so much data that it is almost the same thing as being there. Surgeons may one day be able to operate by remote control. American doctors and hospitals will be called upon to operate on people in India. We will be able to sell our expertise in every corner of the world.

3/4/05: Steinbrenner! by Dick Schaap

Polk decided to take one more crack at Steinbrenner. He flew to Cleveland and met Steinbrenner for lunch, armed with Rose Mary’s baby and with Kalmbach’s cooperation. “George acknowledged a hundred-thousand dollar contribution this time,” Polk said, “insisted it was personal money and offered me a job down the line in the Yankees’ front office because he could use a good man like me. Maybe if he had offered me first base, I would have seriously considered it, but he didn’t. He told me some more woes about family illness – his wife this time, rather than his son – and said how much a story would hurt her.”

3/3/05: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

       “What did you order?” I ask.
       “I had the poached oysters, the lotte and the walnut tart.”
       “I hear the lotte is good there,” I murmur, lost in thought.
       “The client had the boudin blanc, the roasted chicken and the cheesecake,” he says.
       “Cheesecake?” I say, confused by this plain, alien-sounding list. “What sauce or fruits were on the roasted chicken? What shapes was it cut into?”
       “None, Patrick,” he says, also confused. “It was…roasted.”
       “And the cheesecake, what flavor? Was it heated?” I say. “Ricotta cheesecake? Goat cheese? Were there flowers or cilantro in it?”
       “It was just…regular,” he says, and then, “Patrick, you’re sweating.”
       “What did she have?” I ask, ignoring him. “The client’s bimbo.”
       “Well, she had the country salad, the scallops and the lemon tart,” Luis says.
       “The scallops were grilled? Were they sashimi scallops? In a ceviche of sorts?” I’m asking. “Or were they gratinized?”
       “No, Patrick,” Luis says. “They were…broiled.”
       It’s silent in the boardroom as I contemplate this, thinking it through before asking, finally, “What’s ‘broiled,’ Luis?”
       “I’m not sure,” he says, “I think it involves…a pan.”
       “Wine?” I ask.
       “An ’85 sauvignon blanc,” he says. “Jordan. Two bottles.”
       “Car?” I ask. “Did you rent while in Phoenix?”
       “BMW.” He smiles. “Little black beamer.”
       “Hip,” I murmur, remembering last night, how I lost it completely, in a stall at Nell’s – my mouth foaming, all I could think about were insects, lots of insects, and running at pigeons, foaming at the mouth and running at pigeons. “Phoenix. Janet Leigh was from Phoenix…” I stall, then continue. “She got stabbed in the shower. Disappointing scene.” I pause. “Blood looked fake.”

3/2/05: Prince of the City by Robert Daley

An old man. An old woman. The old woman, screaming, has her hands clasped to her head. The old man, half propped against the stove, gags and collapses.

3/1/05: Elvis Don’t Like Football by Jerry Glanville

I’ve been believing since Detroit, where I first got into the routine of singing “Sunday Morning Sidewalk,” by Kris Kristofferson, every Sunday on my way to the game. I sang my butt off, but we didn’t win a whole lot of games. I blamed my voice, not the song. My singing has emptied a church or two in my time.