Page 99: Stiff and Spook

Right now I'm in the process of reading Mary Roach's third research novel Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. I love love love her writing style and how she presents information. Love. So I thought I would Page 99 her two previous books Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about! Review for Bonk should be up soon!

Stiff

"Oh, yes," he answers. "I mean, I would never use this kind of stitch." He has begun stitching more widely spaced, comparatively crude loops, rather than tight, hidden stitches used on the living.
I rephrase the question: Does it feel odd to perform surgery on someone who isn't alive?
His answer is surprising. "The patient was alive." I suppose surgeons are used to thinking about patients- particularly ones they've never met- as no more than what they see of them: open plots of organs. And as far as that goes, I guess you could say H was alive. Because of the cloths covering all but her opened torso, the young man never saw her face, didn't know if she was male or female.
While the resident sews, a nurse picks stray danglies of skin and fat off the operating table with a pair of tongs and drops them inside the body cavity, as though H were a handy wastebasket. The nurse explains that this is done intentionally: "Anything not donated stays with her." The jigsaw puzzle put back in its box.
The incision is complete, and a nurse washes H off and covers her with a blanket for the trip to the morgue. Out of habit or respect, he chooses a fresh one. The transplant coordinator, Von, and the nurse lift H onto a gurney. Von wheels H into an elevator and down a hallway to the morgue. The workers are behind a set of swinging doors, in a back room. "Can we leave this here?" Von shouts. H has become a "this." We are instructed to wheel the gurney into the cooler, where it joins five others. H appears no different from the corpses already here.*

*Unless H's family is planning a naked open-casket service, no one at her funeral will be able to tell she's had organs removed. Only with tissue harvesting, which often includes leg and arm bones, does the body take on a slightly altered profile, and in this case PVC piping or dowels are inserted to normalize the form and make life easier for mortuary staff and others who need to move the otherwise somewhat noodle-ized body.

Spook

Mason published a three-part article, including discography, on the topic of seance recording sessions. While the early efforts were merely recorded documents of the sittings- one particularly vigorous medium held forth sufficeintly long to fill nine twelve-inch double-sided 78s- very soon the mediums took to singing while in trance, in the persona and voice of the spirit guide. Not surprisingly, given the preponderance of female mediums, the spirit guides (most of them male) tended to be tenors. It was an odd coupling: the high, sweet tones of handles like Power or Hotep. Perhaps this explains the appearance, in 1930, of an Italian spirit guide. Sabbatini, the Italian tenor, began turning up at the seances of prominent Cape Town medium Mrs. T. H. Butters. Mason quotes a description of a Sabbatini performance in a 1931 issue of The Two Worlds, the newspaper of the Spiritualists' National Union: "While the sitters by singing Italian songs in a ringing tenor voice, and so powerful were the manifestaitons that in March this year the friends of Mrs. Butters decided to make a gramophone record of the voice." The recording quality was diminished somewhat by Mrs. Butters's tendency to stray from the microphone and move about the room "making operatic gestures," but was otherwise deemed to be of excellent quality.
This obsure musical genre reached its peak on April 3, 1939, when London's Balham Psychic Research Society held a seance inside the studios of the Decca Freocrd Company. Presaging

So what do you think, about Stiff, Spook, Mary Roach? Go ahead, judge by their pages 99!

Page 99 Test: Let the Right One In

A little over a year ago, I fell in love with Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist. IN LOVE. I let my roommate borrow it earlier this week, and she devoured this almost five hundred page book in four evenings. When she handed it back to me yesterday, I made the mistake of reading the first few pages... and went to bed on page 132. So I guess I'm stuck rereading, and a review will be posted! But for now, a page 99 test...

There was a single wooden chair in the kitchen, nothing more. Oskar pulled it up to the sink, stood on it, and peeed into the drain while he had water running out of the tap. When he was done he put the chair back. It looked strange in the otherwise empty kitchen. Like something in a museum.
What does she keep it for?
He looked around. Above the fridge there was a row of cabinets you could only reach by standing on the chair. He pulled it over and steadied himself by putting a hand on the refrigerator door handle. His stomach rumbled. He was hungry.
Without thinking more about it, he opened the fridge in order to see what there was. Not much. An open carton of milk, half a packet of bread. Butter and cheese. Oskar put his hand out for the milk.
But...Eli...
He stood there with the carton of milk in his hand, blinked. This didn't add up. Did she eat real food as well? Yes. She must. He took the milk carton out of the fridge and put it on the counter. In the kitchen cabinet about the counter there was almost nothing. Two plates, two glasses. He took a glass and poured milk into it.
And then it hit him. With the cold milk glass in his hand it finally hit him, with full force.
She drinks blood.
Yesterday evening, in his tangle of sleepiness and sense of detachment from the world, in the dark, everything had somehow felt possible. But now in the kitchen, where no blankets hung in the window and the blinds let in a weak morning light, with a glass of milk in his hand it seemed so... beyond anything he could comprehend.
Like: If you have milk and bread in your fridge you must be a human being.
He took a mouthful of milk and immediately spit it out. It was sour. He smelled the rest that was in the glass. Yes, definitely bad. He poured it out into the sink, rinsed the glass out, and then drank some water in order to get the taste out of his mouth. Looked at the date on the carton.
USE BY 28 OCTOBER.
The milk was ten days too old. Oskar had a realization.
The old guy's milk.
The refrigerator door was still open. The old guy's food.

So, what do you think? Go ahead, judge by it's page 99!

Pg 99 Test: Hyperion

For the past month, my boyfriend has shoved Hyperion in front of my face trying to get me to read it. It's not that I don't like scifi, but I got plenty of other books to read. But I've given in. About 60 pages in, and it's quite good. And he's already pushed the sequel into my hands.

Let's take a look at Hyperion, page 99:

see him." Hoyt struggled upright and clawed at his own cheeks. His eyes were wide, the ultramorph obviously forgetten despite the pain. "About three kilometers into the flame forest... big tesla... eighty, a hundred meters tall, at least. Quiet then, but still a lot... a lot of charge in the air. Ash everywhere.
"The Bikura wouldn't... wouldn't go too close. Just knelt their goddamened bald heads bowed. But I... went close... had to. Dear God... Oh, Christ, it was him. Dure. What was left of him.
"He'd used a ladder to get three... maybe four meters... up on the bole of the tree. Built a sort of platform. For his feet. Broken the arrestor rods off... little more than spikes... then sharpened them. Must've used a rock to drive the long one through his feet into the bestos platform and tree.
"His left arm... he's pounded the stake between the radius and ulna... missed veins... just like the goddamned Romans. Very secure as long as his skeleton was intact. Other hand... right right hand... palm down. He'd driven the spike first. Sharpened both ends. Then... impaled his right hand. Somehow bent the spike over. Hook.
"Ladder'd fallen... long ago... but it was bestos. Hadn't burned. Used it to climb up to him. Everything'd burned away years ago.. clothes, skin, top layers of flesh... but the bestos pouch was still around his neck.
"The alloy still conducted current even when... I could see it... feel it... surging through what was left of the body.
"It still looked like Paul Dure. Important. I told Monsignor. No skin. Flesh raw or boiled away. Nerves and things visible... like gray and yellow roots. Christ, the smell. But it still looked like Paul Dure!
"I understood then. Understood it all. Somehow... even before reading the journals. Understood he'd been hanging there... oh, dear God.. seven years. Living. Dying. The Cruciform... forcing him to live again. Electricity... surging through him every second of those... those seven years. Flames. Hunger. Pain. Death. But somehow the godamned... cruciform... leeching substances from the tree maybe, the air, what was left... rebuilding

And that's all. You want more? Read the book! I'm glad the page stopped where it did, it was giving away information I don't want to know just yet. So what do you think about Hyperion? Go, ahead, judge by it's page 99!