Rose City Reader

Thursday, March 16, 2023

The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Welcome to Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please join me to share the opening sentence (or so) from the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy, even if you are not reading it right now.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Now it is the autumn again; the people are all coming back. The recess of summer is over, when holidays are taken, newspapers shrink, history itself seems momentarily to falter and stop.

-- From The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury. I love campus novels and Malcolm Bradbury wrote some of the best of them, including his first novel, Eating People is Wrong.

The History Man was published in 1972 and is a spot-on period piece describing radical campus life in the late '60s and early '70s. The "history man" of the title is Professor Howard Kirk, a sociologist and dynamo of academic vacuity. He waltzes through history, reflecting every cultural, political, and sexual fad. It is dark satire at its best.

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your book beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the hashtag #bookbeginnings.

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THE FRIDAY 56

Freda at Freda's Voice hosts another teaser event on Fridays. Participants share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of the book they are reading -- or from 56% of the way through the audiobook or ebook. Please visit Freda's Voice for details and to leave a link to your post.

MY FRIDAY 56

From The History Man:

Well, to understand it, as Howard, always a keen explainer, always explains, you need to know a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little social history; admittedly, with Howard, you need to know all this to explain anything. You need to know the time, the place, the milieu, the substructure and the superstructure, the state of and the determinants of consciousness, and the human capacity of consciousness to expand and explode.

It's not a book for the faint hearted, but it is trenchant and very funny.

Friday, March 10, 2023

Rule Britannia by Daphne du Maurier -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Well, this post is certainly late! I had hip replacement surgery last week and thought I had prescheduled a post for this week, but apparently I forgot. Now I really feel like an old lady! Senility and an arthritic hip!

Thank you for waiting for me for this week's Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please join me to share the opening sentence (or so) from the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy, even if you are not reading it right now.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Emma awoke to the sound of planes passing overhead, but she was not fully conscious, and the sound merged with her dream.

-- from Rule Britannia by Daphne du Maurier. I'm reading this as a buddy read on Instagram. A small group of us have been reading one du Maurier book a month since last November and this is our sixth.

Rule Britannia is du Maurier's last novel, published in 1972. It's a wild romp through alternate history, but with an eerily prescient edge. It's set in the 1970s, shortly after the UK withdrew from Europe, which caused economic difficulties. What is billed as a stronger alliance with the United States is quickly revealed to be a takeover of Britain by its former colony. What a page turner!

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your book beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the hashtag #bookbeginnings.

THE FRIDAY 56

From Rule Britannia:

But one can't exactly treat it as phony while the marines occupy the stable-block, there are barricades on the main road and the telephone is cut. The thing you can do is to sit glued to the television and hope something will happen in between the succession of old American and British films.

I'm racing through to the end because this is such a ripping yarn, and I do love a good yarn.

Thursday, March 2, 2023

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Thank you for joining me on Book Beginnings on Fridays to share the opening sentence (or so) from the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy, even if you are not reading it right now.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they've always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let's just say out of it.

-- from Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

The first sentence is terrific. But I went ahead and included the second, just to give more of a flavor for the terrific book. I love it so much!

In Kingsolver's newest book, she sets out to rewrite David Copperfield, but set in modern day Appalachia instead of Victorian England. David Copperfield is my favorite Charles Dickens book, so I caught the thread right away. But I lost it pretty quickly. Maybe I'll pick it up again, but it doesn't matter. The story is so engrossing and the narrator so charming, that it stands on its own.

Have you read this one? I hope it wins the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award, although I have no idea if it is even in the running.

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your book beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the hashtag #bookbeginnings.

THE FRIDAY 56

The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice is a natural tie in with this event and there is a lot of cross over, so many people combine the two. The idea is to post a teaser from page 56 of the book you are reading and share a link to your post. Find details and the Linky for your Friday 56 post on Freda’s Voice.

MY FRIDAY 56

From Demon Copperhead:

Then Stoner came out of the house. For a split second I wondered what he would think of me having a new dad, and then I got it.

Thursday, February 23, 2023

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass.

-- from The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff. That is a terrific opening sentence! One of the best I've read in a long time. It hints at so much story to come and I immediately want to read the rest of the book.

And I almost didn't. I disliked Groff's other book, Fates and Furies, so much that I almost plucked this from my TBR shelf to put in a Little Free Library. But I decided to give it a try as one of my TBR 23 in '23 books and I am glad I did.

I ended up enjoying this rollicking, shaggy story of Templeton and its generations of rowdy townsfolk much more than I expected. It is loosely based on the history of Cooperstown, New York, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and on the stories written by one of the town's forefathers, James Fennimore Cooper.

Have you read either The Monsters of Templeton or Fates and Furies? What did you think?

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your book beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the hashtag #bookbeginnings.

THE FRIDAY 56

From The Monsters of Templeton:

He squeezed his eyes shut. And, thus safe against my mother’s magnificent though untethered bosoms, he explained as calmly as he could that Marmaduke Temple was perhaps the archetypical American, the first self-made man; that he, a Quaker, had slaves was scandal enough; and far worse, that he, a married man, had relations with his slaves – scandalous!

Thursday, February 16, 2023

The Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

MY BOOK BEGINNING

"I'm sorry, Hawthorne. But the answer's no. Our deal is over."

-- from The Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz.

This is the latest -- the fourth -- book in Anthony Horowitz's "Hawthorne & Horowitz" series. I loved the first three and this one is just as much fun. The premise is that Anthony Horowitz is a character in the books, playing himself. Detective Hawthorne, a retired police office brought in to consult on cases, hires Horowitz to write "true crime" books about the murder cases he's working on. I love them!

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your book beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the hashtag #bookbeginnings.

THE FRIDAY 56

"But you've got to see things from my point of view. You can't have a main character who doesn't give anything away, and frankly, being with you, I feel I'm up against a brick wall.”

FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

In New York Times bestselling author Anthony Horowitz’s ingenious fourth literary whodunit following The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, and A Line to Kill, Horowitz becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation—and only one man can prove his innocence: his newly estranged partner in solving crime, Detective Hawthorne.

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