Greatest moments in your reading history [SPOILERS]

The passage from a book that gives me the most chills is the end of Homeland by R.A. Salvatore:

"Good-bye, Zak!" he cried, his voice rising in final defiance. "My father. Take heart, as do I, that when we meet again, in a life after this, it will surely not be in the hellfire our kin are doomed to endure!"

When I started reading the book I checked out of the library, The Catcher in the Rye, and discovered it wasn't about baseball.

You were looking for The Catcher in the Wry.

Aw geez...

The last sentence of Kavalier & Clay.

The description of "Kane Street" in K&C.

When Ender realizes what he's done in "Ender's Game."

Pretty much all of "Speaker for the Dead".

The telekinetic showdown/monologues in Ellison's "Mephisto in Onyx."

More later...

The many times Veovis gets pissed off and the final confrontation between Aitrus and A'Gaeris in Myst: The Book of Ti'Anna (I love them Myst Books).

The Quicksilver satellite destroying the Pentagon in Quicksilver (I read it pre-911).

Dave Elliot and Ransom fighting in the cafeteria in Vertical Run.

The end of A Farewell to Arms.

When the evil knight in Timeline turns out to be the insane time-traveler (I don't feel like looking it up).

When the raptors tear up the gas station in The Lost World.

The next-to-last scene in The 13th Valley when Alpha company choppers out, leaving Doc, Egan, and L-T behind.

The last sentence of Lonesome Dove.

The last sentence of Eight Million Ways to Die.

The Wedding in The Return of the King.

Good topic, Poxy.

The first time I read Childhood's End

Childhood's End, definitely.
Ender's Game, definitely.
Angel Heart.
Almost everything by Dan Simmons.

Print is dead.

In 4th grade reading Stanley Kiesel's "The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids." I hadn't read "The Phantom Tollbooth" yet, usually a child's first introduction to satire and irony, so I was unaware that the english language could be such an amusement park.

These would have been the first to pop to mind. As well as:

Mamba Jack dropping the Southern Simpleton act and saying "Oh. Oh you thing of evil. What have you done?" in Vertical Run.

The last line in Drawing of the Three.

The final battle in BLACK HOUSE.

The Sunlight Gardener Home For Wayward Boys in TALISMAN.

TAK!

There are too many more, many of them in this topic, on this thread, dated a year or two ago. But finally...the simple sentence that confirmed that, damn all odds, the eyes of no gods upon me, I was going to be a writer:

"Sure I know what love is. A boy loves his dog."

FUCK anybody who says, "Print is dead."

Not to me.

Uhh... dude. It's a movie quote.

Yes. I know. So is, "If you can't appreciate the written word, you can't appreciate life."

Seems I touched a nerve with my inocuous little movie quote. If you realized that it was a movie quote, then why such a harsh reaction? Try not to take things so seriously.

Besides we have new things to do besides read.

"That's right. When I was your age, television was called books!"

And that mindset is exactly what's wrong with most of the country.

It's sad.

nuh uh

No shit, that was the first book I ever read aloud in entirety. I just remembered that, and thus my greatest moment.

Most of my greatest moments have been non-fiction.

The fiction ones:

The final scene of the Hyperion Cantos.

When Kurt Vonnegut finally reveals the dimensions of his penis in Breakfast of Champions.

God, I couldn't begin...

Hypocrite!

Wha?!? Moi?

Post reader!

One that stands out for me is the ending of "King Chando's Ride" by Paul Edwin Zimmer. I forget the names of the charactors (I read the book in 1982) but basically there were two swordsman, the master and the student. The master charactor is described as being about 65 years old and arthritic, his daily workout of his forms takes longer and he basically feels like shit but has committed to protect his grand-niece/godchild. Now the student kicks serious ass on everyone he comes up against. He's young and has the hots for this woman that the master is protecting and feels that he and not the old man should be her protector. Well the story proceeds and the time has come to confront the old man a la Darth Vador and Obi Wan's confrontation. The student proceeds to attack the old man and in less than a minute the student finds himself breathing his last. The old mad dispatches him as if he were a child. It was amazing.

What do you think you're doing right now, schmuck?

*GASP*

READING THIS!

Hahahaha! So true! For me, it's ...

When the boy runs off with Joy Hulga's leg in Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People" and the final stand off in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." The appearance in the dark of the serial killer in the otherwise boring Gerald's Game. The few days it took me to read and then reread Hyperion. The end of Henry James's "Washington Square." The end of Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The first half of Snow Crash. Bawling my eyes out after reading Richard Yates's short story "Out Wif' the Old, In Wif' the New." Reading the entirety of It in a two-day no-sleep, non-stop marathon. Discovering Chuck Palahniuk and then reading all of his books in like a week and a half. Picking up the first issue of "Preacher." The line from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, "My lost city, wrapped cool in its mystery and promise." The utterly unique but totally familiar feel of To Kill a Mockingbird and Something Wicked This Way Comes. The final third of Greg Bear's Queen of Angels. I should probably stop now but there are so many...

-Roy Cohn's use of a beautiful Emerson quote to illustrate his feelings about Joe McCarthy in his 1968 biography/explanation/rationalization of his former boss.

-In Harlan Ellison's "All the Lies That Are My Life" when the narrator finds out the publishings of the deceased writer has been left to him to mind.

-In Hunter Thompson's "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" when Thompson has a long conversation with Nixon in the backseat of a car.

-When Malcolm X describes his eye-opening trip to Mecca in "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," one of my favorite books that I read all the time. The first time I read it, I couldn't put it down.

-K being killed at the end of Kafka's "The Trial."

-The Narrator being shot at the end of Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon."

-Lena's death in Conrad's "Victory."

-Jude begging Sue to take him back towards the end of Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" and maniacal (albeit wholly Victorian) rebuff.

-Throughout Naguib Mahfouz's "Respected Sir" where the protagonist constantly, constantly, constantly lives his day, moment by moment, with a very close relationship to his God and trying to figure out how the various actions that happen in his day are related to God's plan.

And so many more. I could do this all fucking morning.

When William Holden walks into The Moviegoer.

The opening paragraph to Delillo's Great Jones Street. Kurt Cobain tears.

Fernando Pessoa writes: "To be a poet is not my ambition, it's my way of being alone."

Falling in love with the bastard narrator of High Fidelity.

Breyten Breytenbach's absolute balls in writing The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist.

Jernigan.

Jose Saramago's Blindness narrator changed everything I thought about writing.

The image of Truman Capote's scavenger alley cats in In Cold Blood.

The surprises of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy.

"Mother died today."

Shit, this could go on for a long time.

when the first sharks appear in The Old Man and the Sea. amazing language use there...

The final words of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

all of of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

Gandalf confronting the Balrog in Fellowship of the Ring, Eowyn vs. Witchking in RotK.

when the vampire kid is at the window in Salem's Lot.

the ending of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

pretty much all of Portnoy's Complaint.

To anyone who thinks television is a suitable substitute for literature (yes, I'm talking to you, Jherek), read Farenheit 451. It's truly scary how close you are to that.