First Paragraph Tuesdays

On Tuesdays, I usually participate in the meme by Diane at Bibliophile by the sea.

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the first paragraph of her current read. Anyone can join in. Go to Diane's website for the image and share the first paragraph of the current book you are reading.

Last week, I added the meme for Teaser Tuesdays.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I love learning about new books as I read everyone else's responses too.
This Tuesday though, I'm not opening a new book.
My friend Howard gave me his manuscript to read about a month ago and I gave him mine. I've only read the first few pages of Howard's book and I'm feeling pretty guilty about it. After all, he trusted me to read and give him an honest opinion. He put hours and days and months and years into this manuscript and I laid it aside, grabbing books that are sure things.
I'm no better than the guy who decides he'll text his girl back later, after the football game, after the drinking with the guys, basically, when he has nothing better to do.
And that's not what a friend would do. So I'm making Howard's book a priority, before any of those other books calling to me from my shelf.
Here's a teaser from Howard's book titled A Deliberate Exercise of Love.

As I listened to Burton, I could picture Erin at her old house because of the way Burton described her. The scream elicited by this discovery of whatever it was must have torn the soft membranes of Erin's throat as she slipped into some kind of dark, prehistoric confusion. All logic, all memories, were gone, vanished with the rest of civilization. She probably looked around with large eyes upon an unfamiliar world and screamed a scream that cut through the atmosphere of other dimensions. Maybe she fell, crawling along the floor like a sluggish, dying anmial, or maybe she saw the sunlit face of someone dear to her in one last yellow burst of memory. She must have felt her bones turn black and watched the wood of the furniture and the blankets on the couch swirl around has as she collapsed.

Who knows, maybe someday, Howard's book will be a choice on my bookshelf too.
Can't wait to see what everyone else is reading.