Friday 56 and Book Beginning: The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black by E.B. Hudspeth || Friday 50/50: Favorite Book That's the Most/Least Quotable

This is a weekly meme hosted by Freda's Voice

These are the rules:

1. Grab a book, any book.

2. Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader.

3. Find any sentence (or a few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you.

4. Post it.

5. Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda's most recent Friday 56 post.

Please join us over at Rose City Reader every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author’s name.

So, this is a book that I bought for purely aesthetic reasons. I haven't fully read it yet, because I had hoped that more of the book had the diagrams for mythological creatures. It's still half the book, but I wanted most of the book to have them. It's an all-around gorgeous book though.

Basically, it's a fake medical journal for fantasy and mythology creatures.

Synopsis

    Philadelphia, the late 1870s. A city of gas lamps, cobblestone streets, and horse-drawn carriages—and home to the controversial surgeon Dr. Spencer Black. The son of a grave robber, young Dr. Black studies at Philadelphia’s esteemed Academy of Medicine, where he develops an unconventional hypothesis: What if the world’s most celebrated mythological beasts—mermaids, minotaurs, and satyrs—were in fact the evolutionary ancestors of humankind? 

      The Resurrectionist offers two extraordinary books in one. The first is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from a childhood spent exhuming corpses through his medical training, his travels with carnivals, and the mysterious disappearance at the end of his life. The second book is Black’s magnum opus: The Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray’s Anatomy for mythological beasts—dragons, centaurs, Pegasus, Cerberus—all rendered in meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations. You need only look at these images to realize they are the work of a madman. The Resurrectionist tells his story

Book Beginning:

1851-1868

Childhood

In my childish imagination, God's wrathful arm was ever-ready and ever-present

 -Spencer Black

Dr. Spencer Black and his older brother, Bernard, were born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1851 and 1841, respectively.

My 56:

No records remain of Goethe's extraordinary collection; most of it was consumed in a 1902 blaze. A few artifacts were recovered, but certainly nothing remarkable.

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50/50 Friday is a new weekly link-up hosted by Carrie @ The Butterfly Reader and Laura @ Blue Eye Books.  Every week they have a new topic featuring two sides of the same coin - you share a book that suits each category and link up on the hosts' blogs.

Least Quotable

(Because literally, nothing happens in this series that I can remember)

Most

1. “Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love.
It did not end well.”

2. “Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic.”

3. “Have you ever asked yourself, do monsters make war, or does war make monsters?”