Teaser Tuesday (24 April)

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly book-related event in which we share tidbits from our current reads. Or..a bit more. Play along at Should Be Reading.

"These are the tales of the land we call Lloegyr, which means the Lost Lands, the country that was once ours but which our enemies now call England. These are the tales of Arthur, the Warlord, the King that Never Was, the Enemy of God, and, may the living Christ and the Bishop Sansum forgive me, the best man I ever knew. How I wept for Arthur."

p. 1, The Winter King, Bernard Cornwell

Hoping that nostalgic childhood memories of a brand will lead to a lifetime of purchases, companies now plan "cradle-to-grave" advertising strategies. They have come to believe what Ray Kroc and Walt Disney realized a long time ago -- a person's "brand loyalty" may begin as early as the age of two. Indeed, market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name. 

p. 43, Fast Food Nation. Eric Schlosser

What happened to "Cosmic Corkscrew" after that I don't really know. I abandoned it and never submitted it anywhere else. I didn't actually tear it up and throw it away; it simply languished in the desk drawer until eventually I lost track of it. In any case, it no longer exists.  This seems to be one of the main sources of discomfort among archivists -- they seem to think the first story I ever wrote for publication, however bad it might have been, was an important document. All I can say, fellows, is that I'm sorry but there was no way of my telling in 1938 that my first try might have historic interest someday. I may be a monster of vanity and arrogance, but I'm  not that much of a monster of vanity and arrogance.

p. 7, The Early Asimov.  Asimov himself, naturally.

Er konnte nicht wissen, dass in eben disem Moment überall im Land geheime Versammlungen stattfanden, Gläser erhoben wurden and gedämpfte Stimmen sagten: >>Auf Harry Potter -- den Jungen, der Lebt!<<

p. 23, Harry Potter und Der Stein der Weisen, Joanne K. Rowling.
I finally got 'round to buying a copy of the  German translation of The Philosopher's Stone. It's beyond me at the moment, but I shall consider reading it a challenge to take on. You can probably guess what this sentence means just by the last bit in quotations. Also note that the German translation includes Rowling's first name.

Both television and sprawl are connected to what ails our country, but Americans do not live in their TVs. They do, however, reside in sprawl. Sprawl is the foundation of our society. Television is not. The wasteland of sprawl is what created the anonymity of modern American life. Television keeps us entertained in our surburban isolation, but sprawl is the reason we are isolated in the first place. Sprawl is the reason we float anonymously through life, forced to endure the culture of incivility and breeding ground for violence that America has become.

p. 90, It's a Sprawl World After All: the Human Cost of Unplanned Growth,  Douglas E. Morris