Teaser Tuesday – Solar by Ian McEwan

Posted on November 2, 2010 by Margaret

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

I started to read Solar by Ian McEwan on Saturday. I’ve borrowed it from the library and on Saturday I discovered I couldn’t renew it because someone had reserved it. It’s due back tomorrow and I really wanted to read it. So I stopped reading Gone to Earth and Agatha Christie’s Autobiography (my current books) to concentrate solely on Solar.

I think it’s a strange juxtaposition of the story of a scientist, Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize winning physicist whose fifth marriage has failed, set against a scientific background. I love it when McEwan writes sentences such as this on page 8:

Then her absence hung in the summer dusk like garden bonfire smoke, an erotic charge of invisible particulates that caused him to remain in position for many pointless minutes. He was not actually mad, he kept telling himself, but he thought he was getting a taste, a bitter sip.

And I also am full of admiration for his detailed description of Beard sitting opposite a stranger in a train, both eating salt and vinegar crisps from the same packet:

Inevitably the second crisp was less piquant, less surprising, less penetrating than the first and it was precisely this shortfall, this sensual disappointment, that prompted the need, familiar to drug addicts, to increase the dose. He would eat two crisps at once. (page 123)

But he loses me somewhat with sentences like this:

Without the ‘entexting’ tools the scientists used – the single-photon luminometer, the flow cytometer, immunofluorescence, and so on – the gene could not be said to exist. (page 131)

As I haven’t finished this book yet it’s too soon to decide what I think of it, but so far I’m liking it, despite those words I have only a vague idea about their meanings. Parts of it actually made me laugh out loud, at the morbid humour, but I wonder if it could have done without the science and stood just as well as a story about an ageing, womanising, narcissistic, overweight and food-obsessed man.

Teaser Tuesdays – Gone To Earth

Posted on October 26, 2010 by Margaret

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

I’m currently reading Gone To Earth by Mary Webb. It’s an old book, originally published in 1917. My copy, a sturdy hardback, belonged to my mother and was published in 1935 and has an introduction by John Buchan (who was Lord Tweedsmuir, politician and author – his most famous book being The Thirty Nine Steps, a spy thriller). His introduction is masterly. He describes what he likes about the book, sets the scene, and discusses Mary Webb’s style of writing:

The style as in all Mary Webb’s books, is impregnated with poetry, rising sometimes to the tenuous delicacy of music, but never sinking to ‘poetic prose’. There are moments when it seems to me superheated, when her passion for metaphor makes the writing too high-pitched and strained. But no one of our day has a greater power of evoking natural magic. (page 9)

And here is a passage from the opening chapter of the book:

Between the larch boles and under the thickets of honeysuckle and blackberry came a tawny silent form, wearing with the calm dignity of woodland creatures a beauty of eye and limb, a brilliance of tint, that few women could have worn without self-conciousness. Clear-eyed, lithe, it stood for a moment in the full sunlight – a year-old fox, round headed and velvet-footed. Then it slid into the shadows. (page 11)

Gone To Earth is still in print, in a paperback edition published by Virago Press Ltd in 1992, with a longer introduction by Erika Duncan, including biographical details of Mary Webb’s tragic life.

Teaser Tuesday – The Rain Before It Falls

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Margaret

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

For today’s teaser I’ve chose this from The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe. I recently borrowed this book from the library and have only read the opening page just to see if it appealed. It does. It begins with Gill and Stephen, her husband outside raking leaves and shovelling them onto a bonfire when the telephone rang. Gill ran inside to answer it and then went back into the garden:

Stephen turned as he heard her approach. He saw bad news in her eyes, and his thoughts flew, at once, to their daughters: to the imagined dangers of central London, to bombs, to once-routine tube and bus journeys suddenly turned into wagers with life and death. (page 1)

Now, I just have to read more …

Teaser Tuesday – The Sunday Philosophy Club

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Margaret

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

For today’s teaser I’ve chosen the opening sentences of Alexander McCall Smith’s The Sunday Philosophy Club, which is the first in his series of Isabel Dalhousie novels. Isabel is a philosopher and the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics; and also an amateur sleuth. She is a great favourite of mine.

Isabel Dalhousie saw the young man fall from the edge of the upper circle, from the gods. His flight was so sudden and short, and it was less than a second that she saw him, hair tousled, upside down, his shirt and jacket up around his chest so that his midriff was exposed. And then striking the edge of the grand circle, he disappeared headfirst towards the stalls below. (page 1)

Was it an accident or was he pushed?

Teaser Tuesday – The Tent, the Bucket and Me

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Margaret

I’m reading Emma Kennedy’s The Tent, the Bucket and Me. As the subtitle explains this is about her ‘Family’s Disastrous Attempts to go Camping in the 70s‘, and that is not an understatement. I wish that I had the same powers of recall as Emma does to remember what I thought, felt and said at the age of 3. Emma is of course, writing comedy. It reminds me of those TV programmes that make you think ‘this just wouldn’t happen in real life’. I’m not saying that what she writes about didn’t happen, but I do suspect it’s been embellished somewhat.

Emma Kennedy would be great on Rob Brydon’s programme Would I Lie to You? All the events she describes would be ideal for the programme because no-one would believe they were true from the way she describes them. Passages in this book both make me laugh out loud and groan at the stupidity that led up to them. Just imagine you’re three, you’re drenched in wee (from a bucket full of the stuff that had tipped over when you tried to sit on it) and your parents told you to run naked round the car in a howling gale to wash off the wee! And that was Emma’s introduction to the joys of life under canvas.

There are more than enough toilet incidents, but these are not the only disasters that befall Emma and her teacher parents Tony and Brenda. Having put up a frame tent in a howling gale in a field on the side of a cliff they abandon the tent and break into an empty caravan on the campsite, only to find that it went from bad to worse. The caravan was ‘ a stinking hole’, the back window blew out and, fighting against the wind the front end of the caravan came off its bricks. They managed to jump out just as:

The caravan groaned; a deep crunch shattered out from its underbelly. With one terrifying yaw, the rear cracked up to the verical, tipped over and then rolled end over end, crashing down the field, metallic smashes punching through the howling wind. Then with one sliding finale, the caravan fell off the edge of the cliff.

‘We’re in hell!’ wailed Mam, as she watched it go. ‘Hell!’ (page 37)

They’d been in the eye of a force-ten gale, without realising it. Nothing daunted they carry on camping (holidays, that is) for the next 9 years.

Teaser Tuesday – Seeking Whom He May Devour

Posted on August 31, 2010 by Margaret

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

Today’s teaser is from Seeking Whom he May Devour by Fred Vargas:

‘You’re really weird,’ he said. ‘You see no evil anywhere. I’m afraid you’re blind.’ (page 125)

Seeking Whom He May Devour is an intriguing book as Vargas describes the various episodes where sheep are found in the French mountains with their throats torn out. Then a woman is found killed in the same way. People are convinced it’s the work of a werewolf except for Johnstone, a Canadian staying in France to film wolves, a man of few words who doesn’t believe in werewolves.

It is not a fast-paced book, but has a feel of fable and legend about it, telling a tale of death, attitudes to life and death and a pilgrimage of sorts as the murderer is tracked down.

Teaser Tuesday – 4.50 from Paddington

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Margaret

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

This week one of the books I’m reading is 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie, in which a woman is killed on a train and then her body can’t be found. Miss Marple gets involved. As she is by now a frail old lady told by her doctor to take things easy she enlists the help of Lucy Eyelesbarrow in finding out what actually happened. This works out very well, mainly because of Lucy’s thoroughness and Miss Marple’s powers of deduction. This is how she thinks about it:

Of course, I am somewhat handicapped by not actually being on the spot. It is so helpful, I always feel, when people remind you of other people – because types are alike everywhere and that is such a valuable guide.

…

One is inclined to guess – and guessing would be very wrong when it is a question of anything as serious as murder. All one can do is to observe the people concerned – or who might have been concerned – and see of whom they remind you. (page 121)

Teaser Tuesday: The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Margaret

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

This week I’ve been reading The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery. It’s a slim book, packed with richness – sumptuous, and full to over-flowing with words and images. It is verbose, florid and sensational – meaning that is celebrates all the sensations experienced relating to food.

Here is a description of one of my favourite foods:

… crimson in its taut silken finery, undulating with the occasional more tender hollow, with a cheerfulness about it like a plumpish woman in her party dress hoping to compensate for the inconvenience of her extra pounds by means of a disarming chubbiness that evokes an irresistible desire to bite into her flesh.

… my teeth tore into the flesh to splatter the tongue with the rich, warm and bountiful juice, whose essential generosity is masked by the chill of a refrigerator, or the affront of vinegar, or the false nobility of oil.

The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one’s mouth that brings with it every pleasure. The resistance of the skin – slightly taut, just enough; the luscious yield of the tissues, their seed-filled liqueur oozing to the corners of one’s lips, and that one wipes away without any fear of staining one’s fingers, this plump little globe, unleashing a flood of nature inside us: a tomato, an adventure. (from pages 44-5)

Teaser Tuesday

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Margaret

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

After feasting on Ian Rankin’s Rebus books, I’ve gone back to reading Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett. After reading Wolf Hall I’m in the mood for more about Thomas More, and this time the spotlight is on his family and in particular his adopted daughter Meg and her involvement with John Clement, the former family tutor and later President of the Royal College of Physicians and Hans Holbein, the German portrait painter.

Here is Hans Holbein’s reaction on meeting Meg:

She stopped a bit breathless, and looked provocatively at him. Hans Holbein had never seen a woman looking provocative in this completely unflirtatious way, any more than he’d ever come across a woman who had read the Imitation of Christ. She was challenging his mind instead of his body. But Erasmus had told him about More’s family school. This must be what happened to women when you taught them Latin and Greek and the skills of argument. (page 97)

Tuesday Teasers

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Margaret

I’ve come to a halt. I’ve finished the books I’ve been reading and can’t make my mind up what to read next. I have books out on loan from the library and plenty of books of my own that I want to read sometime. The problem is, which one should I read next?

So I thought I’d try a few teasers out on myself, taken from the opening chapters of books closest to hand.

The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré, in which George Smiley has become chief of the battered British Secret Service at a time when the betrayals of a Soviet double agent have riddled the spy network.

Afterwards, in the dusty little corners where London’s secret servants drink together, there was argument about where the Dolphin case history should really begin. One crowd, led by a blimpish fellow in charge of microphone transcription, went so far as to claim that the fitting date was sixty years ago when ‘that arch-cad Bill Haydon’ was born into the world under a treacherous star. Haydon’s very name struck a chill into them. (page 15)

The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan about Gwenni Morgan, who is inquisitive and bookish. She can fly in her sleep and loves playing detective.

Like every other night, I sped from the sea to drift along the road that winds its way down beyond the Baptism Pool and the Reservoir high into the hills behind the town. As I passed above the Pool I saw a man floating in it with his arms outstretched and the moon drowning in his eyes. (page 4)

The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie in which Poirot investigates a complicated crime when the Blue Train steams into Nice and a murder is discovered.

It was close on midnight when a man crossed the Place de la Concorde. In spite of the handsome fur coat which garbed his meagre form, there was something essentially weak and paltry about him.

A little man with the face like a rat. (page 1)

Hector and the Search for Happiness by François Lelord about a young psychiatrist finding out whether there is such a thing as the secret of true happiness.