Falstaff by Robert Nye -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Falstaff by Robert Nye

Thank you for joining me for Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please share the opening sentence (or so) of 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

I was begotten on the giant of Cerne Abbas.

-- from Falstaff by Robert Nye. Interesting first line. The story he goes on to tell is quite funny.

Robert Nye's 1975 novel, Falstaff, is the ficitonal memoir of Shakespeare's beloved comic character. It's rollicking, bawdy historical fiction at its best. The book has been on my TBR shelf for a long time, ever since I read about it in Anthony Burgess's book, 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, a Personal Choice. I've loved many books that I read because they are on Burgess's list and, only a few chapters into this one, I can tell it will be another favorite. 

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 #bookbeginnings hashtag.

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THE FRIDAY 56

The Friday 56 is a natural tie-in with Book Beginnings. The idea is to share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of your featured book. If you are reading an ebook or audiobook, find your teaser from the 56% mark.

Freda at Freda's Voice started and hosted The Friday 56 for a long, long time. She is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. Please visit Anne's blog and link to your Friday 56 post.

MY FRIDAY 56

-- from Falstaff:

Being made page in a great household was supposed to prepare you for entry to court circles later on. I dare say the preparation lay in listening to the conversation of 1's betters, and in learning what to lick and where to crawl.

FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

The most beloved comic figure in English literature decides that history hasn’t done him justice—it’s time for him to tell the whole unbuttoned story, his way. Irascible and still lecherous at eighty-one, Falstaff spins out these outrageously bawdy memoirs as an antidote to legend, and in the process manages to recreate his own. This splendidly written novel is a feast, opening wide the look and feel of another age and bringing Shakespeare’s Falstaff to life in a totally new way. Like Jack Falstaff himself, it’s sprawling, vivid, oversized—big as life. We return in an instant to an England that was ribald, violent, superstitious, coursing with high spirits and a fresh sense of national purpose. We see what history and the Bard of Avon overlooked or avoided: what really happened that celebrated night at the windmill when Falstaff and Justice Shallow heard the chimes at midnight; who really killed Hotspur; how many men fell at the Battle of Agincourt; what actually transpired at the coronation of Henry V ("Harry the Prig"); and just what it was that made the wives of Windsor so very merry.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

 

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Thank you for joining me this week for Book Beginnings on Fridays where participants share the opening sentence (or two) from the book they are reading. You can also share from a book you want to feature, even if you are not reading it at the moment. 

MY BOOK BEGINNING

It was November. Although it was not yet late, the sky was dark when I turned into Laundress Passage.

-- from The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.

Are you reading anything special for Halloween week? I do NOT like scary, so no horror, ghosts, vampires, or gruesome crimes for me. That limits my choices!

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield seems like a good pick. It’s been sitting on my TBR shelf for years, long after it ceased to be super popular. I’m about a quarter of the way into it and it’s perfect for me. It has just the level of eerie atmosphere, suspense, and melodrama that I enjoy. There may be ghosts, but not so far! 

Have you read this one?

YOUR BOOK BEGINNING

Please add the link to your book beginning post in the linky box below. If you participate or share on social media, please use the hashtag #bookbeginnings so other people can find your post.

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THE FRIDAY 56

The Friday 56 asks participants to share a two-sentence teaser from their book of the week. If your book is an ebook or audiobook, pick a teaser from the 56% point. 

Anna at My Head is Full of Books hosts The Friday 56, a natural tie-in with Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please visit My Head is Full of Books to leave the link to your post. 

MY FRIDAY 56

-- from The Thirteenth Tale:

In the shop my father was sitting at the desk with his head in his hands. He heard me come down the stairs and looked up, white-faced.

FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled by her own painful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good. Margaret is mesmerized by the author's tale of gothic strangeness—featuring the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Together, Margaret and Vida confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.

The Luck of the Bodkins by P. G. Wodehouse -- BOOK REVIEW

BOOK REVIEW

The Luck of the Bodkins by P. G. Wodehouse

The Luck of the Bodkins is typical P. G. Wodehouse, which makes it typically delightful. I have a Penguin edition, the kind with my favorite Ionicus covers, but I read this one with my ears. I prefer Wodehouse as audiobooks because the humor works better for me when I hear it than when I see it.

The story takes place on an ocean liner sailing from England to New York. There's a usual Wodehouse crowd of characters, led by Monty Bodkin, a rich young man pretending to have a job in order to win the hand of Gertrude Butterwick, star field hockey player travelling to a tournament in America. Other travelers include Gertrude's stodgy cousin Ambrose Tennyson who gave up his steady job in the British Navy to become a Hollywood screenwriter, and Ambrose's younger brother Reggie Tennyson who wants to work in Hollywood but his family is forcing him to take an office job in Canada. Lottie Blossom, a film ingénue who carries a pet baby alligator in a basket for publicity, and movie mogul Ivor Llewellyn provide the Hollywood connection. The well-intentioned ship's steward Albert Peasemarch is along to stir the pot.

It is a plot similar to most Wodehouse novels. There are farcical misunderstandings, room switches, a musical revue, and the need to steal back a precious item (in this case, a toy Micky Mouse). Romantic parters fall out, reunite, fall out again. Ambrose's job offer to become a film writer comes down to a monstrous misunderstanding. Someone is determined to smuggle a string of pearls through customs, but her accomplice is convinced Monty is a detective on their trail. Everything is topsy turvy, chaos reigns, and all comes good in the end.

It’s impossible to describe the humor of P. G. Woodhouse. People either love it, like me, or it leaves them cold, like my husband. Lots of laughs come from using ordinary words in unexpected situations, so just repeating the words to someone doesn’t make them laugh unless they can understand the entire context. Mostly the word play is just silly but jumps out at you when you don't expect it. For example, after several instances of the pet alligator nipping people, Ambrose (or Reggie, I don't remember) asks Lottie Blossom if her alligator is safe. She answers, "Why, is someone trying to hurt him?" I barked with laughter, but that kind of thing is not for everyone. 

Sometimes, of course, the lines are just funny, like the opening sentence:

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

I think my husband is just wrong.

Are you a Wodehouse fan? What’s your favorite?

If We Still Lived Where I was Born by Maria Giura -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

If We Still Lived Where I was Born by Maria Giura

Thank you for joining me for Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please share the opening sentence (or so) of 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

we'd be in the apartment above the pastry shoppe
where downstairs my father made cannoli and eclairs and rum baba

and my mother made trays of butter cookies and rang up customers
and balanced the books.

-- from the first, title poem in If We Still Lived Where I was Born by Maria Giura.

Maria Giura's new book of poetry, If We Still Lived Where I was Born, launches on November 4. Maria was kind enough to send me a review copy and I am greatly enjoying these engaging poems. 

I first "met" Maria in 2019 when she published Celibate, a memoir about falling in love with a Catholic priest. Read my review of Celibate here and my 2019 interview with Maria here. 

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 #bookbeginnings hashtag.

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This preview will disappear when the widget is displayed on your site.
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THE FRIDAY 56

The Friday 56 is a natural tie-in with Book Beginnings. The idea is to share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of your featured book. If you are reading an ebook or audiobook, find your teaser from the 56% mark.

Freda at Freda's Voice started and hosted The Friday 56 for a long, long time. She is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. Please visit Anne's blog and link to your Friday 56 post.

MY FRIDAY 56

-- from "In Praise of Silence" in If We Still Lived Where I was Born:

It used to terrify me
especially on three-day weekends.
Afraid God would speak,
that I would hear,
I'd drown Him out with plans, activity,
motion.

FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

In Maria Giura's If We Still Lived Where I was Born, the narrator unlocks the meaning she's made of her childhood and heritage, spirituality and lost loves and draws the reader in to retrieve their own. The collection begins in the apartment above her parents' Brooklyn pastry shoppe where she imagines them still fighting, still making us, still together, then shifts to adulthood where she learns to stay still long enough to listen for the story, and then returns to childhood where her mother and aunts teach their kids to spread out their blankets and live. Moving between New York and Italy, between family and "stranger," these poems show longing and vulnerability, but also the thrill of being young and part of something larger than oneself, of making peace, and pursuing the path you were meant to. They brim with the people and places that have taught her the most and ring with pathos and celebration, from her immigrant father waiting for her on the corner . . . bread in his hand to the sister who pulled the music out of her, helped her make her own song. Beginning with a journey to a literal birth place and extending outward to many figurative places of self-discovery, this collection explores what lasts when all else passes away.

Spin No. 42 -- CLASSICS CLUB

 

CLASSICS CLUB SPIN

Spin Number 42

UPDATE: Spin Pick = No. 17!

I'm working on my second Classics Club list, with 28 of my 50 picks still to read by the end of 2028. Although I love the Classics Club, I usually miss the CC Spins they host every so often! I'm glad I caught this one in time to participate because it always inpires me to work on my CC list.

The Classics Club is an online "Community of Classics Lovers" started in 2012 to “unite those of us who like to blog about classic literature, as well as to inspire people to make the classics an integral part of life.” To join, you create your own list of 50 "classics" (loosely defined) and read them in five years. Details are on the Classics Club website.

UPDATE: No. 17 was the spin pick, which means I'll be reading The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. Great! Chekhov plays have been on my TBR shelves forever. I needed a push to finally read them. 

Every now and again, the Classics Club organizes a CC Spin. The idea is to pick books from your CC list, on a certain date the organizers pick a random number (October 19 for this one), and you read that books by a specific date (in this case, December 21).

You can find more details here, but these are the basics:

• Pick twenty books from your Classics Club list that you still want to read.
• Post that list, numbered 1-20, on your blog before Sunday, 20th October.
• Classics Club will randomly pick a number and announce it on their website on October 20.
• Read that book by the 18th of December and share your review (if you write one) on the Classics Club website. 

My CC Spin #42 list:

1. The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens, Booker Prize
   
2. The Secret City by Hugh Walpole, James Tait Black
   
3. Without My Cloak by Kate O'Brien, James Tait Black
4. England, Their England by A. G. Macdonell, James Tait Black
5. Eustace and Hilda by L. P. Hartley, James Tait Black
6. The Devil's Advocate by Morris West, James Tait Black
7. Langrishe, Go Down by Aidan Higgins, James Tait Black
8. Jerusalem the Golden by Margaret Drabble, James Tait Black
9. Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen, James Tait Black
10. The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch, James Tait Black
11. The Field of Vision by Wright Morris, National Book Award
    
12. Them by Joyce Carol Oates, National Book Award
13. Laughing Boy by Oliver Lafarge, Pulitzer Prize
    
14. The Store by T. S. Stribling, Pulitzer Prize
15. The Aerodrome by Rex Warner, Burgess Top 99
16. The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes, Burgess Top 99
17. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, The College Board
    
18. The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, Easton Press Greatest
    
19. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, Easton Press Greatest
20. The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, Easton Press Greatest 

You can tell from this list -- and my Classic Club II list in general -- that I picked my CC books because they are on the prize winners and must read lists I'm working on. The Classics Club helps me buckle down on the lists I'd like to finish.