Books of 2013

(At the beginning of 2013, I decided it might be interesting to create a poem where each line is the first line of each book I read during the course of 2013.)

I am the head cookie bitch and this is my party.

From the moments babies are born,these tiny human beings start communicating with the world around them.

The motto “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” is one lesson you likely learn at a very young age.

I thought it would be easy.

I was still bleeding...my hands shaking.

I want to get one thing straight from the start: I am not a natural-born jock.

I certainly didn't realize how easy it was to calm crying babies when I began my pediatric studies in the 1970s.

You're invited to a marvelous soiree, a wellness revolution to be exact.

School's out fo-evah!

This is where we live.

Prelude to a ballad.

Taking the plunge and quitting your job is a scary step.

When I was a little girl, I lived in an apartment house in New York City, with Mama and Papa and my little brother Harry.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I had absolutely no idea what to expect.

This might as well come out up front, first paragraph.

In the early 1900s,Maria Montessori,practicing physician, and professor of anthropology at the University of Rome,presented a startling idea to the academic world.

Off with their – legs.

Whether your child is an infant or a toddler, performing puppet shows at preschool or using your belly as a trampoline, we know how hard it can be to pry your eyes off your little one.

When the Jews came out of Egypt, that was enough to make us happy.

It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer.

If you haven't been to a mosh pit, you've probably seen one in movies.

By God!

It was a midsummer afternoon on Long Island,and the mosquitoes, like the girls who get dolled up at evening time, would not be seen flitting for hours yet.

I turned 31 on December 29,2009.

I climbed aboard the Little No. 5 as I did every morning on my way to work.

Most people get flowers when they give birth – I got a two pound baby and a failing liver.

When the Fabulous Flying Fandinis moved in the neighbors said they were strange.

The bedroom is strange.

Slow simmered, shredded chicken, vegetable, and three bean soup.

Sloth's house was a terrible mess.

One morning, as the Keeper of the Zoo was about to unlock the gate, he noticed something on the steps.

We were headed for the Verrazano Bridge, caught in traffic.

I have never been what you'd call a crying man.

Crunch.

How do you remember things?

I clasp the flask between my hands even though the warmth of the tea has long since leeched into the frozen air.

It isn't even noon and I've already had sex with fourteen women.

My name is Molly Pink and I'm a yarnaholic, I announce to my crochet group, the Tarzana Hookers , as I put my stash on the table.

Get it together,Abraham.

I'm watching an internet series about pregnancy.

I used to live in a small apartment in Chicago, where the radiator hummed noisily while I drew comics.

The New Orleans businessman,whose grey hair put him in his fifties,was accompanied by his much younger and much taller bodyguard/chauffeur on the night he met the devil in the French Quarter.

Naps take only a few hours of time, but they shape all twenty four hours of your child's day.

When I was in high school all the coolest punk rockers hung out in the shopping mall parking lot across the street from campus.

I had a car but on most days in that fall of 1973 I walked to Joyland from Mrs. Shoplaw's Beachside Accommodations in the town of Heaven's Bay.

In the tower of the nameless necromancer it is always cold.

The day they came to tell me, I was in one of the gardens with Kiernan, trying to decipher a three-hundred-year-old map of the palace grounds.

The subinspector works the last breath out of a waning cigarette and flicks it out the window.

Once your baby is born,you'll find that life takes on a new momentum as you grapple with all the first time experiences that caring for a growing baby involves.

We found the monster on a rocky ledge high above the lake.

His first memory is an execution.

What do you cook?

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my head ever since.

The fault line running through my bones, through my every breath, may be the day of the accident: on June 23,1993, I became paralyzed.

They say women are blessed with the ability to forget the pain of childbirth so they will be able to have more children later on.

It is Sunday in Venice.

Shh, quiet Scout, go to sleep, you'll wake Johnny and Mom.

I am a jackass living in America and living surprisingly well.

On the second day in December in a year when a Georgia peanut farmer was doing business in the White House, one of Colorado's great resort hotels burned to the ground.

You probably have no memory of what your life was like between the ages of twelve and twenty four months.

Twenty years ago...