Friday 56 and Book Beginnings: The Passion of Cleopatra (Ramses the Damned #2) by Anne & Christopher Rice || Friday 50/50:Place You Buy the Most/Least Books

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 RoseCityReader 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.

Synopsis:

Ramses the Great, former pharaoh of Egypt, is reawakened by the elixir of life in Edwardian England. Now immortal with his bride-to-be, he is swept up in a fierce and deadly battle of wills and psyches against the once-great Queen Cleopatra. Ramses has reawakened Cleopatra with the same perilous elixir whose unworldly force brings the dead back to life. But as these ancient rulers defy one another in their quest to understand the powers of the strange elixir, they are haunted by a mysterious presence even older and more powerful than they, a figure drawn forth from the mists of history who possesses spectacular magical potions and tonics eight millennia old. This is a figure who ruled over an ancient kingdom stretching from the once-fertile earth of the Sahara to the far corners of the world, a queen with a supreme knowledge of the deepest origins of the elixir of life. She may be the only one who can make known to Ramses and Cleopatra the key to their immortality—and the secrets of the miraculous, unknowable, endless expanse of the universe.

Book Beginning:

  Proem:
It was a tale told by the newspapers in 1914 -- of a spectacular find by a British Egyptologist in an isolated tomb outside of Cairo-- a royal mummy of Egypt's greatest monarch and, beside his painted sarcophagus, a vast collection of ancient poisons and a journal in Latin, written in the time of Cleopatra, comprising of some thirteen scrolls.

My 56:

 "Does it matter Elliott?" Juliet asked. "I pray to the god who listens, the god who knows, the god who may want a prayer from me. Perhaps the god who created the elixir. I don't know. Don't you ever pray anymore, Elliott?"

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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.

Place You Buy the Most/Least Books

Most:
   Online, no reason other than it's just more convenient. I don't even have to put on pants to go book shopping.

Least:

   "Hole in the wall" bookshops. There aren't really that many I've come across where the books aren't half ruined, and there aren't that many near where I live.