Teaser Tuesday 26/7 | War Time Reads…

Tags

annie barrows, Cambridge, chicklit, historical fiction, kazuo ishiguro, Kensington, literature, mary ann shaffer, never let me go, Reading, Shropshire, teaser tuesday, the guernsey literary and potato peel pie society, war

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!

Now I’ve taken some time out from novel-writing, I’m happy to be back doing Teaser Tuesdays again. This week I have noticed my reading to be a bit ‘themed’. On one hand I have the charming “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows and on the other “When We Were Orphans” by the master of understatement, Kazuo Ishiguro. Both are set around WW2, but cover vastly different perspectives.  They both came highly recommended, and rightly so.

“It was the summer of 1923, the summer I came down from Cambridge, when despite my aunt’s wishes that I return to Shropshire, I decided my future lay in the capital and took up a small flat at Number 14b Bedford Gardens in Kensington. I remember it now as the most wonderful of summers.”  – Page 3

 
“I’m going to run through the wild-flower meadow outside my door and up to the cliff as fast as I can. Then I’m going to lie down and look at the sky, which is shimmering like a pearl this afternoon, and breathe in the warm scent of grass and pretend that Markham V. Reynolds doesn’t exist.” – Page 143

Related articles

• Teaser Tuesday #4 (fuonlyknew.wordpress.com)
• Teaser Tuesday #3 (fuonlyknew.wordpress.com)
• Teaser Tuesdays (Dec.18) (apaperbacklife.wordpress.com)
• Teaser Tuesdays (Dec.18) (shouldbereading.wordpress.com)
• Teaser Tuesday #6 (myromancelandia.wordpress.com)
• Teaser Tuesday: Rapunzel Untangled by Cindy C Bennett (iamareadernotawriter.blogspot.com)

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Teaser Tuesday | Borgian Gothic Meets Godwinian Enlightenment

Tags

carlos ruiz zafon, enlightenment period, Jorge Luis Borges, latin american, mary hays, mary wollstoncraft, meme, teaser tuesday, william godwin

 

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 have teasers from two books this week, one from the acclaimed ‘The Angel’s Game’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon and the other from Mary Hays ‘Memoirs of Emma Courtney’.  Some of you may know Zafon from his most popular novel ‘The Shadow of the Wind’, an excellent detective story involving the labyinthine world of books and the dark secrets of those who write them. Well, I’m glad to report that ‘The Angel’s Game’ takes place in the same setting with pretty much the same premise and includes the famous Sempere and Sons bookshop and the Borgian Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Reading it was like revisiting dear old friends. Here’s a small taster of the gothic goodness on page 75:  

“In the last rays of daylight falling on the city his eyes glowed like embers. I saw him disappear through the door to the staircase. Only then did I realise that during the entire conversation I had not once seen him blink.”

 

‘Memoirs of Emma Courtney’ on the other hand is a short but well-written epistolary novel. What drew me to it wasn’t the story per se, but Mary Hays relationship with the Enlightenment circle, especially William Godwin and Mary Wollstoncraft. Being a lady who never married, but felt married to her craft, I felt compelled to read something by her. This slim volume shows that she was heavily influenced by Godwinian theories, as ‘Memoirs’ looks at the position of women during the 1800’s and the frustrations caused by social confinements. It reads a little like Austen, tempered with feminist overtones of Wollstoncraft. On page 17, we discover how poor Emma Courtney’s idyllic life ends, as her adoptive father dies leaving her in the care of dubious relatives who are strangers to her. 

“This period, which I had anticipated with rapture, was soon clouded over by the graudual decay, and premature death, of my revered and excellent guardian. He sustained a painful and tedious sickness with unshaken fortitude;- with more, with chearfulness.”

Teaser Tuesday | ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch’ by Solzhenitsyn

Tags

aleksandr solzhenitsyn, meme, teaser tuesday

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!

Last week it was Fleming, this week I have Solzhenitsyn. ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ is a brief but startingly glimpse of daily survival in a Soviet Gulag. The striking thing about this novel is how Solzhenitsyn finds ways to describe the bitter cold the prisoners had to face during their back-breaking labour. This teaser comes from page 65:

“Two buckets of water were carried in, but they had frozen on the way. Pavlo decided that there was no sense in doing it like this. Quicker to melt snow. They stood the buckets on the stove.”

What attracted me to the book was the fact that Solzhenitsyn actually spent time in a Gulagin 1945 after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter. In the book, Ivan has already done eight of his ten year sentence, but in reality Solzhenitsyn spent a total of eight years, followed by internal exile. I never cease to be amazed by what people will endure for freedom of speech.

Teaser Tuesday | ‘Octopussy and The Living Daylights’ by Ian Fleming

Tags

ian fleming, meme, teaser tuesday

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!

This week the spotlight is on an Ian Fleming classics, ‘Octopussy and The Living Daylights’. I’m not a big fan on espionage thrillers, but since this clocks in at about just over 100 pages I thought I’d give it a try. And it’s turning out to be quite good. Here’s a tidbit from pg. 007 (and no, I didn’t pick the page number on purpose. It was totally random!)

“Part of Major Smythe’s mind took in all these brilliantly coloured little ‘people’, but today he had a job to do and while he greeted them in unspoken words – ‘Morning, Beau Gregory’ to the dark-blue demoiselle sprinkled with bright-blue spots, the ‘jewel’ fish that exactly resembles the starlit fashioning of a bottle of Worth’s ‘Vol de Nuit’; ‘Sorry. Not today sweetheart,’ to a fluttering butterfly fish with false black ‘eyes’ on it’s tail and, ‘You’re too fat anyway, Blue Boy’,’ to an indigo parrot fish that must have weighed a good ten pounds – his eyes were searching for only one of his ‘people’ – his only enemy on the reef, the only one he killed on sight, a scorpion fish.”

This is taken from ‘Octopussy’; just one of the short stories in this collection. I love how Fleming evokes the colours and brings the tropical paradise to life. At a time where the Bond films (to my opinion) aren’t living up to expectations, it might be well worth a visit to the original stories that made it what it is.

Teaser Tuesday | ‘White Oleander’ by Janet Fitch

Tags

janet fitch, teaser tuesday, white oleander

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!

Yay! I’m back (again), and have an excellent book to do a teaser from. I found it really hard coming up with my two sentences because EVERY SENTENCE in this book absolutely aches with beauty. So here is my latest read ‘White Oleander’ by Janet Fitch, pg. 1:

“The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shrivelling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves.”

Reading this is absolute heaven. I don’t want it to ever finish, which is why I’m taking it very slowly. It’s full of magical wordsmithery. Very highly recommended. I think this might be the first book of 2011 to get the five stars from me.

Teaser Tuesday (7/12) | ‘Midnight’s Children’ by Salman Rushdie

Tags

meme, salman rushdie, teaser tuesday

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!

Greetings book addicts. After a bit of a hiatus I’m back posting my Teaser Tuesday posts. This week my chosen text is ‘Midnight’s Children’ by Salman Rushdie; the read-along challenge I have been participating in. This monster of a book looks scary, but is great fun once you get into the groove of things. ‘Midnight’s Children’ has many twists and turns. Saleem’s imperfect narrative is also full of many colourful characters that come alive on the pages. If you loved ‘The God of Small Things’ by Arundhati Roy, then you’ll like this one too. My teaser sentences are from page 145:

“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.” 

In brief, the story is about a young man, Saleem Sinai; whose birth, life and death are inextricably connected to the history of India. He calls himself ‘yoked to history’, as he discovers that he is one of the 1001 ‘midnight’s children’ who were born at the stroke of midnight; the very moment of India’s Independence from British rule. His parent’s realise he is a special child, but they live in ignorance of who he actually is, and the extraordinary powers he inherited due to the circumstances of his birth.

The teaser is short and sweet, but it kind of sums up the whole book. If you ever get a chance to read it, you’ll know why.   

Titillating Texts For Teaser Tuesday | Robert Rankin’s ‘Retromancer’ and the Roguish Mr. Rune!

Tags

meme, Robert Rankin, teaser tuesday

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!

The quote for today’s Teaser Tuesday is from Robert Rankin’s ‘Retromancer’. Called the “Frank Zappa of the SF/ Fantasy World” by the Fortean Times, this is a highly entertaining, off-the-wall account of complex time-travel, absurd magical encounters and medieval derring-do. Rankin’s prose is a gorgeous mash-up of quintessential English humour and pop culture references. If you are a fan of Monty Python, then I urge you to read this book IMMEDIATELY. It’s so much fun! Anyway, enough of my waxed lyricisms (is that a word? If it is, good. If not then from hereon let it be known that it is my copyrighted word). Here’s the teaser:

“I am a member of the Church of Banjeloleology. I know the local paper scorns and condemns our credos, but we are good people, Mr Rune, who mean no harm to others. All we ask for is the freedom to worship in the church of our choice. And the council agreed that as long as we eschew the practices of human sacrifice and drinking the blood of children, then we should be left to our own devices and desires.”

“Quite so,” said Hugo Rune. “Do you dance around in your bare scuddies at all?”

“Most of the time,” said Mr Hartnel. “Particularly on Thursday nights at nine at the Good Shepard Hall in South Ealing Road.”

“Many lady members?” Hugo Rune enquired.

“They outnumber gentlemen two to one.”

“I’ll tag Thursday night in my diary, then.”

The teaser is a bit long, but I wanted you to get the full effect of the narrative. Here’s hoping you put it on your TBR lists. You won’t regret it!

Teaser Tuesday | Androgyny Is Not An Option: ‘The Passion of New Eve’

Tags

angela carter, dystopian, meme, science fiction, teaser tuesday

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!

The quote for today’s Teaser Tuesday comes from Angela Carter’s ‘The Passion of New Eve’. At first it didn’t really notice it, but the title might be a play on ‘The Passion of the Christ’. I get the feeling I’ll be coming across a lot of biblical references on creation and the fall. 

The book itself is set in the near future between London and America. With dystopian landscapes galore, it really is a feast for the senses. This is the story of one man’s (Evelyn) journey through feminine sexuality. Without giving too much away, it’s an extraordinary story about sex-change, feminine revenge and weird woman cult’s. It’s a fantasy/ science-fiction/ psychological thriller type of book, which explores the mythologies built-up around gender roles. Even though I’m still at the beginning, I’m already hooked.

“I would go to the desert, to the waste heart of that vast country, the desert on which they turned their backs for fear it would remind them of emptiness – the desert, the arid zone, there to find, chimera of chimeras, there, in the ocean of sand, among bleached rocks of the untenanted part of the world, I thought I might find that most elusive of chimeras, myself.

And so, in the end, I did, although this self was a perfect stranger to me.”

Carter’s work is highly feminist and political in it’s approach to gender roles. When Evelyn is captured by a cult  and surgically changed into a woman (Eve), he begins to experience the inequalities facing the fairer sex. This is a very dark tale of transgression, but incredibly fascinating at the same time. I agree when they say that Angela Carter is the best woman writer of her time. ‘The Passion of New Eve’ is a rare post-feminist gem that should be read by all dystopian lovers.

Teaser Tuesday | Hubert Selby Jr.’s Ode To A Heart of Darkness…

Tags

hubert selby jr, meme, teaser tuesday

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!

Today’s teaser is from a book I’ve had on my shelf for many weeks even though I’ve been dying to read it. Hailed as one of America’s best authors, Hubert Selby Jr. is not that widely read anymore. ‘The Room’, was described by the Times Literary Supplement as his best book and even Selby was astonished by the glowing reviews. Not even his more popular works ‘Requiem For A Dream’ (a major motion picture dealing with the perils of drugs) and ‘Last Exit To Brooklyn’ gathered as much attention as ‘The Room’. But the reviews disappeared just as quickly as they came, and the book itself disappeared from favour.

It appears that this still stands today, as it took me quite a while to locate a copy from my library. It’s a difficult text, and not for the faint-hearted. Selby isn’t one to mince his words. In fact, I had trouble finding two sentences that DIDN’T include expletives.  This segment describes children playing cowboys and indians in the streets.

“Hiding behind the tree or bush and using the rifle you slipped from the saddle holster as you slipped from your horse and shooting at your pursuer and missing an occasional shot and the bullet kachanging off a rock and the other rider slides from his horse and returns the fire  and soon everyone is crawling, running, hiding, shooting.

And everyday, before the game started everyone yelled Im a bad guy – Im a good guy, and, somehow, in a matter of seconds there were two sides and they were running, riding and shooting.”

So there it is. I wish I could put up something that was more juicy, but I don’t want to offend people. Suffice it to say that if you enjoyed the likes of ‘American Psycho’ and ‘A Clockwork Orange’ then you’ll definitely like this. Selby pushes the boundaries of language in many ways, without destroying the fabric of the story. Recommended for the brave!

Note: I reproduced the text as it is, because Selby had a very particular way of writing. He wasn’t keen on sticking to grammar, so any mistakes are totally intentional.

NOTE: Just realised, he’s writing in second person narrative. That’s very rare!

Teaser Tuesday | In Which Le Guin Assumes the Mantle of Sybil of Cumae…

Tags

meme, teaser tuesday, ursula le guin

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!

Another Tuesday, another teaser. This time it comes from my current read ‘Lavinia’ by Ursule K. Le Guin.

“…the life he gave me in his poem, is so dull, except for the one moment when my hair catches fire – so colourless, except when my maiden cheeks blush like ivory stained with crimson dye – so conventional, I can’t bear it any longer. If I must go on existing century after century, then once at least I must break out and speak.”

I had a bit of difficulty choosing my teaser this time, because Le Guin writes so beautifully! Every page holds a treasure. I really want to highlight the perspective of this novel and how Le Guin asks real, deeply intuitive questions about the spirit of poetry and how it can immortalise a moment of time, like a fly caught in amber, yet confine the players of those legends to very narrow, limited lives.

The afterlife gained by people such as Lavinia, Aeneas and the Helen of Troy is highlighted by Le Guin as one that may not be so glamorous or desirable. ‘Lavinia’ is a novel where Le Guin tries to tap into the obscure legend of a daughter of Italy and re-write her history the way she may have wanted, thus correcting Vergil’s oversight in the ‘Aeneid’.

Ok, history lesson aside, this is a great book and one I’m enjoying thoroughly! Can’t put it down. I highly recommend it.