Teaser Tuesday 24.4.2013

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 Lista if they like your teasers!

My teaser this week is from page 18 of Astray by Emma Donoghue:

"If the Society's condemned you to transportation for smashing a few walls and shocking a few members' wives, why, then -let's up stakes and be off to pastures new, I say. you're not twenty-one yet, and I'm not fifty."

Teaser Tuesday 2.4.2013

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 Lista if they like your teasers!

I'm reading a wonderful steampunk novel A Conspiracy of Alchemists by Liesel Schwarz.
The book starts with one of the best opening lines ever:

This was the place where people came to give their souls to fairies.

I was totally sold when I read that.:)

My teaser is from p. 177. A bookish one this time. ;)

'Here, allow me.' In two steps, March climbed on to the ladder next to her. She felt the lenght of his big body stretch up against hers as he reached up past her to grip the book. They stood like that, coddled by vellum and wood panels, alone in a universe of books.

Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day everyone! May your day be full of love, friendship and happiness!

I'm at the moment too busy with dance related stuff to blog or to even read much, but will be back posting -and reading like grazy :)- next week.

Teaser Tuesday 5.2.2013

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 Lista if they like your teasers!

My teaser this week is from p. 65 of Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay.

"Crispin was, that day - early winter in Jad's holy city of Sarantium - happy to be alive and not anxious to be burned for heresy. The irony was that he hadn't yet realized or acknowledged his own happiness."

What are you reading today?

Girl Reading by Katie Ward

I have known about Katie Ward's first novel Girl Reading ever since it was published back in 2011, but somehow it took me this long to finally read it. I started reading Girl Reading very soon after Sailing to Sarantium and had some difficulties to adapt my reading mood accordingly, especially as Sailing to Sarantium left me in the middle of the story that will continue in the latter book of The Sarantine Mosaic duology. However, my difficulties had nothing to do with Ward's writing or the stories as such, only in that Girl Reading is a very different book from Sailing to Sarantium.

After I really got into the story, or rather stories, I started to enjoy the book very much. The timespan on Girl Reading is very ambitious from the 14th century to late 21st! But it works, it works very well.

The book consists of seven seemingly separate stories, but somewhere in every story there is a picture being made of a woman reading, whether it is a painting or a photograph. All the way until the last story I kept wondering why on earth is this book marketed as a novel, when it so clearly was a collection of short stories! Well, all I will say without spoiling the reading experience for anyone who have not read the book yet is that I was totally wrong. :) Girl Reading is most certainly a novel, but it is not until the last story that the reader will understand why! Very cleverly constructed book, I must say!

Ward's writing is beautiful. She has her own way of writing dialogue without separating it from the rest of the text with quotation or other punctuation marks which felt a bit odd in the beginning, but which I actually started to like a lot, when I got further into the book.

My favorite parts of Girl Reading were stories, or chapters, called Angelica Kauffmann. Portrait of a Lady, 1775 and Featherstone of Piccadilly. Carte de Visite, 1864. I was especially impressed in the way Ward in Featherstone of Piccadilly wrote the part (and skip the rest of this paragraph, if you don't want to know any details of the story), where a family brought their little girl to be photographed and only a couple of pages later we learn that the pictures were taken post-mortem. The parents had wanted some photographs as a memento of their dead child.

I've been so lucky with my reads this far this year that it's starting to feel a bit scary! But what can I do, Girl Reading was a very enjoyable read. I might even want to read it again at some point. Now that I know how the stories are connected it would be interesting to read them again.

Katie Ward has a website, if you want to read more about her and her writing.
Photo by Jo Rodger.

Teaser Tuesday 29.1.2013

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 Lista if they like your teasers!

My teaser this week is from p. 20 of Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman:

"When I came home from school there were police outside the flats. There were two police cars and hell of cops all looking in the bushes and bins like they lost something special."

I'm reading Pigeon English for my English Reading Circle's February meeting and the book is completely different from what I thought it would be like! It will be interesting to see what the members of the reading circle will say about it.

What are you reading today?

Library Loot 26.1.2013

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

 

I was not going to write a Library Loot post this week, as I tried really hard not to borrow anything, or almost anything, from the library. I already have more than enough library books at the moment and am afraid I will not have the time to read them all. Well, my plan not to borrow anything worked pretty well until Friday afternoon.:) On Friday at work I spent some time moving books from the so called circulating collection to our collection and there happened to be a number of English language travel books there that made great additions to our travel book section. Only they seemed so interesting that I could not help myself and borrowed a few. :) So, here I am writing about my library loot after all.

Books I got from the library this week:

Ash, Niema: Touching Tibet. A Journey into This Forbidden Kingdom
Ash was one of the first to enter Tibet when its borders were opened to Westeners in 1986. In this personal account she tells about her travels and the people, culture and traditions of Tibet. The foreword is by The Dalai Lama.

Bennett, Joe: A Land of Two Halves. An Accidental Tour of New Zealand
Joe Bennett went to New Zealand to work there for a year and ended up staying. After 15 years he decided to find out what it was about New Zealand that made him stay and embarks on a roundtrip of his adopted country. I would love to visit New Zealand (and Australia) some day and this book promises to be a funny, witty and cool account of that country quite in the opposite side of the world from mine.

Cooper, Candie: Necklaceology. How to Make Chokers, Lariats, Ropes & More
Lovely book wíth detailed instructions I'm sure even the not so experienced jewellery makers are able to follow. The book includes 40 necklace projects made from very varied materials: beads, stones, felt, ribbons etc.

Duffy, Carol Ann: The Bees
A wonderful book of poetry by the British Poet Laureate. I already read this and now have one new poem to add to my all time favorites: Bees, the very first poem in this collection!

Mole, John: It's All Greek to Me!
This is the story of one Englishman's love affair with Greece and how the Mole family's dream to live in a Greek village made them purchase "a tumbledown ruin on a hillside with no water, no electricity, no roof, no floor, no doors, no windows and twenty years of goat dung".

Shipman, Pat: To the Heart of the Nile
This is the extraordinary story of Florence Baker née Szász, who was born in 1845 in Hungary, ended up on a refugee camp in the Ottoman Empire after the Hungarian revolution, was sold to be raised in a harem, escaped, married Samuel Baker, an eminent English adventurer, and travelled to Egypt and Uganda with her husband.

Free e-books I  downloaded this week:

Gillgannon, Mary: Lady of the Moon
This is the first part of a fantasy trilogy set in the time of Boudica's revolt in Celtic Britain.

Rose, Willow: Beyond
Megan dies at 16 and wakes up on a flying steamship that takes her to a school run by angels. Later she ends up back on Earth and has to decide between her two worlds. I have read hardly any paranormal romances and thought I might try this one.

Rose, Willow: Serenity
Megan's story continues in this second part of the Afterlife series.

Saboe, Jon: The Days of Peleg
"Scifi plot set in Ancient Mesopotamia." How could I resist that!

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'll curl up with Virginia and let myself be caressed with the beauty of her words. ;) (I'm rereading Mrs. Dalloway.)