As an #ABCAustralia lover, I was familiar with #EricCampbell's TV reporting. And it was a shock when the news broke in 2003 that he'd been injured and cameraman, Paul Moran, killed in a suicide car bomb attack in Northern Iraq.

The dangers Campbell faced as an award-winning ABC foreign correspondent are underscored by the line on the cover of his 2005 memoir, #Absurdistan (#HarperCollins), "a bumpy ride through some of the world's scariest, weirdest places".

The book is post #137 of my #bookcovers and #firstsentences homage on Instagram and opens with Acknowledgements and a Prologue, set in a hospital after the car bombing. But I chose to quote his first sentences from Chapter 1, Leaving, in my post:

Some people become television journalists to shine light in the darkness, making films to expose injustice and build understanding. More do it just for the money. Many see television as glamorous; a few hope it will make them famous. But to my knowledge, nobody ever became a television reporter to film caravan parks in East Gippsland. It was just how things worked out for me.

Link to post on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bj_PidGlSSK/

Post #136 of my #bookcovers and #firstsentences homage on #Instagram is my secondhand copy of the 1946 #BantamBooks edition of #JohnSteinbeck's #TheGrapesOfWrath.

I read this book during my classics catch-up phase in my late twenties, and it's one of my all-time favourites. However, Steinbeck seemed more sympathetic to the plight of the drought and debt-stricken Oakies forced from their lands than the Native Americans dispossessed before them. And I found his ending confusing!

But hey, it's still a classic, has a great cover, and a fine scene-setting opening paragraph:

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.

Link to the post on #Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bj6X5KNlkS8/

I posted The Voice to Parliament Handbook by Thomas Mayo and Kerry O'Brien, cartoons by Cathy Wilcox (Hardie Grant Publishing 2023) to my #bookcovers and #firstsentences homage on Instagram on the weekend.

The 100-page handbook with all the details you need to make an informed decision about the Voice to Parliament Referendum opens with The Uluru Statement from the Heart. And it was the first paragraph from this that I quoted in my post.

However, it was tempting to skip to the first sentence of Chapter 1 (over the "What the Voice means to me" sections by Mayo and O'Brien):

There is no mystery about the concept of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

PS. The handbook is in great demand, the order I placed with an online bookstore couldn't be fulfilled, and I had to visit two bookshops (and one twice!) to get my copy. In the meantime, I ordered a Kindle version, which is handy for bedtime reading.

#Indigenous #VoiceToParliament #Referendum #VoteYes #VoteYesAustralia

Link to homage post on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CtDIZ2QPp0Q/

I posted Talking To My Country by #StanGrant (#HarperCollinsPublishers) on my #bookcovers and #firstsentences homage series on #Instagram today.

The book has been sitting in my TBR pile on my #Kindle for far too long. But Grant's announcement that he was stepping away from #ABCAustralia to help mend his mental health has spurred me to read it. And now I wish I'd done so earlier, especially after Grant's emotional message to his abusers on #QandA last night!

Because the opening paragraph in his 2016 book could have been written yesterday:

These are the things I want to say to you. These things I have held inside or even worse run from. It is not easy, what I have to say, and it should not be easy. These are things that tear at who we are. These are the things that kill, that spread disease and madness. These are the things that drive people to suicide, that put us in prisons and steal our sight.

RT @Carmunist: "The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards"
-- Urusla K Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

#firstsentences #openinglines #writingcommunity #writerslife #amwriting

Post #133 of my #bookcovers and #firstsentences homage on Instagram (and I have treble-checked this after my recent stuff up!) is Unnatural Selection - Why the Geeks Will Inherit the Earth by #MarkRoeder (#ABCBooks). Published in 2013, some may say the book is sadly prophetic. And I'd have to agree with all the "kitchen sink" rubbish going on at the Twitter "town square".

As for the #Winklevoss twins mentioned in the book's introduction, I don't feel sorry for them losing #Facebook to the #Zuckerberg geek - they've made billions from cryptocurrency since then:

There is a scene at the beginning of the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network where a Harvard student declares, "I'm six feet five, 220 [pounds] and there's two of me!" Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are a formidable pair - the products of a wealthy family; members of the US Olympic rowing team; and endowed with the chiselled Nordic features of modern-day Vikings. They are the sort of people not to mess with. By the end of the film, however, it is Mark Zuckerberg who has soundly defeated the Winklevosses by retaining full control of Facebook, which becomes a runaway global success and transforms the way that over a billion people communicate and relate to each other.

Link to post on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/BjvtNOsFdK3/

RT @Carmunist: "This time there would be no witnesses."
--Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams

#firstsentences #openinglines #writingcommunity #writerslife #amwriting

RT @Carmunist: "If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book."
--A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket

#firstsentences #openinglines #writingcommunity #writerslife #amwriting

RT @Carmunist: "All children, except one, grow up."
--Peter Pan, JM Barrie

#firstsentences #openinglines #writingcommunity #writerslife #amwriting

RT @Carmunist: "When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventyifirst birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton."
--The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkein

#firstsentences #writingcommunity

RT @Carmunist: "I lost an arm on my last trip home."
--Kindred by Octavia Butler

#firstsentences #openinglines #writingcommunity #writerslife #amwriting

RT @Carmunist: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
--Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

#firstsentences #openinglines #writingcommunity #writerslife #amwriting

Fittingly for International Women's Day, post #137 of my #bookcovers and #firstsentences homage on Instagram is Bluebottle by the Australian writer #BelindaCastles (#AllenAndUnwin 2018).

I perused my bookcase this morning and found most of my latter-day (post-2000) fiction titles are by women writers. And this is one of my favourites, as I commented in a review of Bluebottle for Writing NSW:

"Castles has written a beautiful book. Her flowing narrative, well-crafted characters, and underlying dark suspense had me hooked until the last page. ... Some books are page-turners — I found Bluebottle to be more than that. I'd beat my alarm each morning and reach for the book for the joy of a chapter before getting up to start the day."

You can see why the book hooked me from Castle's first sentences:

There was a house on a honeycomb cliff above the Pacific, perched over the beach in air as scrubbed and softened as old linen. A deep scoop of land in front had fallen away and sat in rocky clumps in the water beneath, surfacing at low tide. The house was humble: made of apricot fibro, its roof dull and rusted, the scrub on the escarpment reaching up towards it, ready to pull it down. When storm heads built out to sea, you could imagine it in pieces, splintered slabs jutting from the surf, like those rocks that were once land in the sky.

Bluebottle post on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bpf0o_iFZYj/

A spider caught at Reagan's face as she turned the corner, its invisible strands trailing across her cheeks. Busy rubbing the web from her eyes, she got closer than she otherwise might have. Close enough for the early morning sun to catch the wet inner cavity of the naked, pale-skinned torso on the concrete. ~ Dark Mode by #AshleyKalagianBlunt (#UltimoPress 2023)

#books #bookcovers #firstsentences #homage #writers #writing #fiction #crimefiction #thriller #darkmode #lovebooks #mybooks #mybookcase #tallandtrue #tallandtruebooks on #instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CpWJ9nGv6P2/

RT @Carmunist: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
--George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

#firstsentences #openinglines #writingcommunity #writerslife #amwriting

RT @Carmunist: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

#firstsentences #openinglines #writingcommunity #amwriting

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. ~ #AnnaKarenina by #LeoTolstoy (#AudibleStudios 2016)

#Books #BookCovers #FirstSentences #Homage #TallAndTrueBooks on #Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CoynxePv_E1/

Who doesn't love Winnie-the-Pooh, which is post #135 of my #bookcovers and #firstsentences homage on #Instagram?

Interestingly, I only became acquainted with A.A. Milne's stories as an adult when I bought Winnie-the-Pooh (Methuen 1973) for my wife after seeing Winnie-the-Pooh play in Worthing, England, in 1998. (I think we were the only "unaccompanied" adults in the theatre, and I still have the programme!)

But my wife and I read stories from this book to my son from an early age, and we visited the Pooh Corner in the Hundred Acre Wood (and played Pooh Sticks!) with him when he was five!

As for the book's first sentences — how's this for an introduction:

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.

TallAndTrueBooks post on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/BpYAjflFFHQ/

#books #homage #winniethepooh #aamilne

I read post #127 of my #bookcovers and #firstsentences homage on Instagram (as tallandtruebooks), The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger, during my classics catch-up stage in my mid-twenties. Salinger's tale of teenage angst and alienation and his writing stunned me. Written and set in the early 1950s, the narrative felt so alive and in the present.

I re-read this secondhand copy of "Catcher" in my late forties with trepidation. Would the more mature me find Holden Caulfield's escapades childish and dated? No, I enjoyed his monologue as much on the second read as I did the first time!

I've reached my sixties, and since I last read the book, I've parented a son through his teenage years. And I wonder what I'd think of Holden's self-centred monologue today?

One thing's for sure, I still love Salinger's first sentence:

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.

#books #bookcovers #firstsentences #homage #thecatcherintherye #jdsalinger

Post #126 of my #bookcovers and #firstsentences homage on Instagram (as tallandtruebooks), The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence, is one of the most treasured books in my bookcase.

Lawrence's memoir recounts the part he played in organising and fighting with the Bedouin forces against the Ottoman Turks from 1916 to 1918, the politics of the time, and the British betrayal of the Arabs. And it was the basis for Peter O'Toole's 1962 classic, Lawrence of Arabia.

The book was "privately printed" by Lawrence in 1926 (having rewritten it from memory after losing his original manuscript at Reading train station) and first published for "general circulation" in July 1935. My copy is a beautifully bound and printed (on parchment-like paper) eighth impression by Jonathan Cape from December 1936.

And inside the front cover is an inscription in neat handwriting to its first recipient: "To Dr Mckenzie, A small token but showing a great appreciation. From all at Wales Coast, April 1937."