Teaser Tuesday: The Valley of the Dolls

"Love is companionship, having friends in common, the same interests.  Sex is the connotation you are placing on love, and let me tell you, young lady, that if and when it does exist, it dies very quickly after marriage -- or as soon as the girl learns what it's all about."

-- Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann.

Ha! 

You see the set up -- the stuffy New England mom is teaching her college-aged daughter the ways of the world. Of course, the daughter is going to head off to New York City and see if she can't prove her mom wrong.

 

I am reading this for the Birth Year Reading Challenge hosted by the Hotchpot Cafe. I've always secretly wanted to.

 

 

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

 

Teaser Tuesday: Small Island

"A black man was running from four whites while several more black men chased them.  The ground tremored under their big boots."


--  Small Island by Andrea Levy.

I am back to reading Small Island, after having been distracted by Up in the Old Hotel for a couple of weeks. This one was slow for me to get into, but now that I am in, I don't want to leave. Great book!

This teaser is from a pivotal scene in which the hero, Gilbert Joseph, a British RAF volunteer from Jamaica stationed in England during WWII, finds himself in the middle of a Jim Crow-style standoff with American GIs in a movie theater, trying to watch Gone With the Wind.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: Lunatic Express

"Suddenly the power came on, the dim lights in the hall and my couchette revealing a world of dirt.  My mattress was so stained it looked like a bullet riddled soldier had died on it."

--What is good about Lunatic Express: Discovering the World . . . via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes by Carl Hoffman: vivid descriptions of traveling in the developing world, like this scene on a train in Africa.

"It was a cheap hotel -- thirty dollars -- but it seemed the most luxurious experience I could ever imagine. Yet a part of me wondered, imagining Ly in a noisy, cluttered home amid too many brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts, who was happier."

-- What is not so good about Lunatic Express: self pitying musings that make a mockery of the difficult conditions in which the people he meets actually live, like this one about an adult professional he met on that same train in Africa. Which one of them is "happier"? Give me a break. That's not a particularly relevant inquiry. 

I just finished this book to review for the Internet Review of Books. Overall, I liked it quite a lot, despite lingering a bit much on his mid-life crisis.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: Up in the Old Hotel

From a list of reasons why 93-year-old Mr. Flood is "irreconcilable" to death:

"Third, he is a diet theorist -- he calls himself a seafoodetarian -- and feels obliged  to reach a spectacular age in order to prove his theory.  He is convinced that the eating of meat and vegetables shortens life and he maintains that the only sensible food for man, particularly for a man who wants to hit a hundred and fifteen, is fish."

-- From "Old Mr. Flood" in Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell.

I was so pleased that my copy of Up in the Old Hotel turned up in the lost-and-found at the gym that I have set aside Small Island and gone back to Mitchell's essays and short stories about New York.

This teaser is from one of three three stories about the fictional Mr. Flood, a composite character of Mitchell's invention based on the curmudgeons who liked to hang around the Fulton Fish Market.  Like the essays in the book, the Mr. Flood stories are rich, colorful accounts of New York life in the 1930s and '40s -- mostly centered around the Fulton Market and the people involved in the fishing trade.

This is now one of my all-time favorite books. I wish I had read it years and years ago so I could be re-reading it now.



Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: Small Island

"The English woman was still looking at me when I entered the hallway. Perusing me in a fashion as if I was not there to see her stares."

--  Small Island by Andrea Levy.


Although I started Small Island last week, I have only read a few pages because I got sucked back into Up in the Old Hotel.

But, since I left Up in the Old Hotel in the locker room at the gym (I've lost track of how many times I have done this -- I need to tattoo a reminder on the back of my hand), I have turned to Small Island for my teaser. From the first chapter, when Hortense first arrives in London.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: Up in the Old Hotel

"A bossy, yellow-haired blonde named Mazie P. Gordon is a celebrity on the Bowery. In the nickel-a-drink saloons and in the all night restaurants which specialize in pig snouts and cabbage at a dime a platter, she is known by her first name."

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell.

Mitchell's portrait of Mazie -- who owned a low-rent movie theater and ran the ticket window day in and day out for decades -- is one of many absorbing stories about the colorful characters he studied while working as a reporter for the New Yorker from the 1930s through the 1960s.

My friend Bob from the fabulous Art Scatter blog left this comment about Mitchell and this wonderful book:

This book is just great, great personal journalism, and it brings back the flavor of a New York that will never be again. Mitchell was a staff writer for The New Yorker who spent the last 20 years or so of his life going to the office faithfully every day -- the routine became a legend at the magazine -- but, after an extraordinarily prolific career, never wrote another word. He'd simply written himself out.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: Angler Management

I was raised by a PhD research scientist, and I can tell you firsthand that he viewed liberal arts majors as ethereal slacker stoners with no real understanding of how the world works, let alone how to turn on a Bunsen burner or create penicillin in a petri dish (when I was a child, my dad once gave me some penicillin that he personally created -- I can't even make a Manhattan without consulting the Internet). One way that we've figured out how to make ourselves feel, well, more scientific, is to inject science into art -- specifically, the art of fly fishing.

-- Angler Management: The Day I Died While Fly Fishing and Other Essays by Jack Ohman.

This is the perfect book to get for any fisherman dad for Father's Day! I may get it for my dad, even though he hasn't fished since he bought me a Popeil Pocket Fisherman for my eighth birthday and helped me catch bluegill using hot dogs for bait.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: The Count of Monte Cristo

Morrel took the purse, and started as he did so, for a vague remembrance reminded him that it once belonged to himself. At one end was the receipted bill for the 287,000 francs, and at the other was a diamond as large as a hazelnut, with these words on a small slip of parchment: Julie's Dowry.

-- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas

A diamond the size of a hazelnut! That is fantastic.

I cannot believe that I am only now reading this book. I got the audiobook from the library -- all 35 discs of it -- and never want to stop listening to it. So far, the hero has only repayed his friends. He is about to start seeking revenge against his enemies.

This is like the story from which all adventure stories came from. It has everything in it. 


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: Clown Girl

"One-Night Stan's ice-cream truck, the neighborhood drug mobile, still played nearby. Drugs, ice-cream, balloon toys and prayer -- these are the things you sell when there's nothing else left."

--  Clown Girl by Monica Drake (published by Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts)

 

As of right now, this one could go either way for me. I may love it, or I may curse the day it came into my house. I'll know in another 180 pages. 

 

 

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: Indian Summer

"The Reardons were too important to be snobbish; they entertained people they liked or wanted to help or found amusing or felt sorry for or wanted something specific from or through force of habit.  They knew that where they lived in the Connecticut Valley was Siberia socially, and they preferred it that way."

-- Indian Summer by John Knowles.

This is the first book I read for the Hotchpot Cafe's Birth Year Reading Challenge. It is a very interesting book because none of the characters are a particular type. I can't remember reading a book where each character is so unique -- to each other and to characters in other books -- and difficult to figure out.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday Two-fer

I am reading wine books these days and have teasers from two of them:

The pale French morning sun blundered through the airport windows. In spite of my fatigue from the fretting and the jet lag, I was overcome by the prickly excitement one gets from being in another country with its different smells, foreign McDonald's menus, and drugstore products that somehow are more effective than the ones at home.

Corked by Kathryn Borel.

I laughed when I read this because the women in my family spend a lot of our travel time buying foreign drugstore products, convinced that the face mask will be more cleansing, the cuticle cream more healing, and the lip balm more moisturizing.

A perfect pinot should be lean on entry, expand in the middle of your palate, be smooth and clean as you swallow, and then linger a little when it is gone. If it lingers too much, if it's big and fat and fruity in your mouth, then it's not freshening your palate.

The Grail: A Year Ambling & Shambling Through an Oregon Vinyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in the Whole Wild World by Brian Doyle, quoting Jesse Lange, the winemaker at Lange Vineyard and Winery.

This book is actually about wine, unlike Corked, which is really about the relationship between the author and her father.I am learning a lot from this one, but it also makes me want to drink wine with lunch.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: The Red Tent

"Then Inna told Bilhah to take Rachel's place so she could catch the baby; perhaps the birth blood would rouse Rachel's womb to fill again, too. And so Rachel washed in the river of life."

-- The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.

Ack! It's passages like this -- and there are lots of them -- that make me squirm like a pre-pubescent girl in junior high health class. Apparently I am not mature enough or enough in touch with my womanhood to enjoy this book.

I find that if I skim over all the parts about childbirth and menstruation, the story is very interesting. But a lot of the book is about childbirth and menstruation. It's hard to avoid. That's what the whole "Red Tent" thing is all about -- where the women go to breed and bleed.

And I thought the Old Testiment itself was gruesome.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: The Farmer's Daughter

"The therapist was terribly skinny and B.D. had the fantasy of fattening her up to a proper size. There was the old joke of getting bone splinters while screwing a skinny girl."

--From "Brown Dog Redux," the second of three novellas in The Farmer's Daughter by Jim Harrison.

That is such a perfect Harrison teaser because of the combination of Midwestern-style lust and mind wandering. His characters are generally strong-willed, rural, and stuck inside their own heads.

"Brown Dog Redux" is the fourth of Harrison's Brown Dog novellas, each published as one part of a three-novella set.

This volume also includes "The Farmer's Daughter," about an intelligent young woman growing up under unusual circumstances in Wyoming, and "The Games of Night," which apparently has something to do with a werewolf, although probably in a metaphoric, rather than para-normal fiction, sort of way.

Jim Harrison is one of my favorite authors. I've read all his prose books, most more than once. My zeal is less fervent now, and the books no longer gobsmack (a very Harrison word) me like they used to, either because I'm getting older or Harrison is, I don't know. But I still read anything new he publishes and can honestly say that his work has shaped my worldview.



Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: L'Affaire

"Thinking of D. H. Lawrence gave her courage, for people were always having impulsive sexual encounters in Lawrence.  It was easier to think of doing so outside London, though she had done some fairly crazy things there, too, though never with an absolute stranger and mostly when she was a teenager and sort of miserable."

-- L'Affaire by Diane Johnson

That is such a perfect Diane Johnson passage -- a mix of titillation and erudition, with a little wry commentary ("sort of miserable") on the imagined turmoils of well-to-do women thrown in.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday Two-fer

"I rewrapped the wound, using the last of the gauze . . . . and that was when I looked up to see the iguana hissing in my face.

"I knocked the safety off the gun, cocked the hammer, and pulled the trigger."

-- A Small Fortune by Audrey Braun. Yes, she killed the giant, poisonous iguana. I just hope I would have the wherewithall to do the same if I were escaping through the jungle with a bullet wound. 

This is a great book. It is a lot of fun and exciting enough to keep me thinking of it until I can get back to it.

"He was surprised to read 'Bornholmer Strasse' on a sign on the Western side.  He had never considered that, on a city map, the connecting routes might continue uninterrupted, that the names might simply go on as before the Wall was built."

-- "The Road to Bornholm" by Durs Grunbein in The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain, published by Words Without Borders Anthologies.

This book is full of powerful stories and essays about post-communist life in the former Soviet Bloc. But the most powerful are those, like this one, describing the actual fall of the Berlin Wall. 

When this book gets too dense, I take a break with A Small Fortune.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: Leaving Brooklyn

"Had these women, hair carved by beauticians, bodies encased in God knows what steely underclothes, ever felt what I felt? . . . If they had, how could they be sitting here calmly playing mah jongg"

Leaving Brooklyn by Lynn Sharon Schwartz (nominated for the PEN/Faulkner; new introduction by Ursula Hegi; super cool Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts edition).

I love that carved hair image!


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: Ex Libris

"It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf.  On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner."

-- Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman.

What's on your Odd Shelf?

Here is a sampling from mine:

Urgent 2nd Class: Creating Curious Collage, Dubious Documents, and Other Art from Ephemera by Nick Bantock



Creative Correspondence by Judy Jacobs



Collage Lost and Found: Creating Unique Projects With Vintage Ephemera by Giuseppina Cirincione




Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: Cold Comfort Farm

"Had she not enough to do at Cold Comfort without there being a genius named Mybug staying a mile away from the farm who would probably fall in love with her? For she knew from experience that intellectuals and geniuses seldom fell for females of their own kidney, who had gone all queer about the shoes and coiffure, but concentrated upon reserved but normal and properly dressed persons like herself . . ."

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.

There are so many good teasers I could have picked. My copy is positively bristling with book darts.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: City Limits

"That's what I crave: meaningful places.  No one like a convert -- poor li'l L.A. boy, I'm a big fan, an aficionado, of this Portland thing because it offers me an alternative to the dilute life of the endless suburbs."

City Limits: Walking Portland's Boundary by David Oates (published by the Oregon State University Press).

Although this book is about Portland's "Urban Growth Boundary," it would be interesting for anyone who contemplates what makes a city "livable" and how they think about their own life in relation to their city.  I don't agree with everything Oates writes, but his book is thought-provoking.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Teaser Tuesday: The Well and the Mine

"Jack had gotten me thinking about why we didn't ever see fairies in the woods.  I figured something ate them."

-- The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips (Discover Award winner; introduction by Fannie Flagg; published by the super cool Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts).

This is an excellent book. It's a great story, rips right along, includes all the life-lessons of a Hallmark made-for-tv movie, but has none of the schmaltz.  Unless it falls off dramatically in the last third, this has all the makings of a new classic -- perfect for a high school English class.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.