Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

 

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

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

It was a cold grey day in late November. The weather had changed overnight, when a backing wind brought a granite sky and a mizzling rain with it, and although it was now only a little after two o’clock in the afternoon the pallor of a winter evening seemed to have closed upon the hills, cloaking them in mist.

-- from Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier. I offer the opening two sentences because the first sentence, on its own, is pretty boring. But that second sentence really sets a scene!

Jamaica Inn is one of my favorite books and probably my favorite du Maurier books (although there are many runners-up). It's such a wild tale of smugglers and wreckers on the Cornish coast.

I'm not reading it right now, having read it last year with my Du Maurier Deep Dive group on Instagram. But I was organizing my bookshelves and this fabulous cover caught my eye. 

Are you a fan of du Maurier? Do you have a 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 Jamaica Inn:

This was at any rate Mary's hope, and meanwhile she must make the best of the grim six months that lay ahead, and, if possible, she was determined to have the better of her uncle in the long run, and expose him and his confederates to the law. She would have shrugged her shoulders at smuggling alone, though the flagrant dishonesty of the trade disgusted her, but all she had seen so far went to prove that Joss Merlyn and his friends were not content with this only; they were desperate men, afraid of nothing and no one, and did not stop at murder.

FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

On a bitter November evening, young Mary Yellan journeys across the rainswept moors to Jamaica Inn in honor of her mother's dying request. When she arrives, the warning of the coachman begins to echo in her memory, for her aunt Patience cowers before hulking Uncle Joss Merlyn. Terrified of the inn's brooding power, Mary gradually finds herself ensnared in the dark schemes being enacted behind its crumbling walls -- and tempted to love a man she dares not trust.

Seven Deadly Sins -- BOOK THOUGHTS

BOOK THOUGHTS

Seven Deadly Sins

There is a "Seven Deadly Sins" challenge that periodically buzzes around Bookstagram. It caught my eye the other day and was just the inspiration I needed to try something creative.

What "sinful" books are hiding on your shelves? Here's my collection: 

PRIDE: a big or challenging book

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. It took me years to get through this poetical doorstop. I struggled with a lot of the poems, especially the earlier ones. But I am proud to have accomplished the task of finally finishing it. 

GREED: a book you own in more than one edition

Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh. I love Waugh, Graham Greene, and Kingsley Amis and have several duplicate editions of their books because I pick them up when I find an unusually nifty edition. Same goes for Agatha Christy, Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, and a few other classic authors. And I confess to owning several copies of Wind in the Willows. 

LUST: a book you bought for its cover

A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict by John Baxter. I didn’t actually buy this myself, but my friend saw the lust in my eyes when I found it and she bought it for me as a surprise.

WRATH: a book you did not enjoy

The Magus by John Fowles. I have enormous tolerance for most books, but this one – NO! I always identify it as my least favorite book. Pompous nitwits running around a stupid island playing games with each other! And all the time spouting humanistic gobblygook about the death of God, or whatever they were prattling on about. I was shocked to find it hiding on my shelf because I thought I gave it away years ago.

GLUTTONY: a book you would reread

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. I’ve only recently started rereading and have so many I’d like to revisit. This one is near the top of my list and was first to hand. My book club read it about ten years ago, on my suggestion, and most people didn't like it. I did and it is a classic Golden Age mystery. I'd like to read it again. 

ENVY: a book you’d want to live in

All in One Basket: Nest Eggs by Deborah Devonshire. Debo was the youngest of the Mitford Sisters and my favorite. Ever since I read her memoir, Wait for Me! I've wanted to be her. I have this one and a couple of other book by or about her to feed my fantasy.

SLOTH: a book that’s been on your TBR shelf forever

The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O’Brien. There are over 2,000 books on my TBR shelves, so I didn’t even try to find the one that’s been there the longest. There are some that have been there since I was in college in the 1980s! This one calls the loudest to me.

NOTES

If you like the idea of this challenge, please play along, on your blog or social media. If you've already done it, please let me know. Either way, please leave a comment with a link to your post so I can find it.

Pocketful of Poseys by Thomas Reed -- BOOK REVIEW

BOOK REVIEW

Pocketful of Poseys by Thomas Reed (Beaufort Books, 2023)

Pocketful of Poseys is a warmhearted family story about a brother and sister charged with scattering their mother Cinny's ashes. The catch is that Cinny wanted her ashes mixed with the ashes of her husband, their father, and scattered in five different places around the world. She also left the money to finance the trip.

Grace and Brian, 40-something twins, head off with spouses and children on a round-the-world adventure, only opening their mother's instruction letters as they go. Through the letters and the travel they inspire, brother and sister learn the secrets of their parents' marriage, explore their own pasts, and forge stronger bonds with their own families.

I found the story easy to engage with and I cared for the characters. I enjoy stories abut families learning to accept and forgive, especially when livened up with a little humor, like this one is.

I though the pacing was a little uneven. There ae two big digressions early on, one providing Cinny's backstory, the other Brian's. I found both distracting because they abruptly pulled me out of the narrative. Then I anticipated the same sort of digression for Grace and the other characters, and I got distracted waiting for those to pop up, which they never did. This lack of similar treatment for the other characters made the first backstory digressions stand out as clunky info-dumps. I particularly missed more information about their father. There are a couple of hints that his death might have been more sinister than a winter car crash, but we get no answers. Again, compared to the almost exhaustive detail we learn about Cinny's past, this disparate treatment stood out.

Still, I really liked the book. Thomas Reed's writing style is smooth and lively, a real pleasure to read. Highly recommended.


FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

Grace Tingley and Brian Posey are forty-something twins whose lives have gone in very different directions. Grace, now a private school teacher in coastal Connecticut, was a PhD candidate at Yale when an unexpected pregnancy threw her plans into a tailspin. Brian, an adventure travel executive in Seattle, barely scraped through an obscure New England college and recently married Ella, after three years in an intimate relationship with a charismatic man from Jamaica.

When their widowed mother Cinny, a charter member of Woodstock Nation, is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, Grace and Brian are there for her last days in hospice care. This is where Cinny reveals her staggering plan for the siblings: They’re to sprinkle her ashes, mixed with their father’s, at a series of exotic locations around the globe—some remote, some challengingly public, all known and loved by the Poseys.

NOTE

I got a review copy of Pocketful of Poseys through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program. My copy was free, in exchange for my honest review. 

 

Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh

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

When Guy Crouchback's grandparents, Gervase and Hermione, came to Italy on their honeymoon, French troops manned the defenses of Rome, the Sovereign Pontiff drove out in an open carriage and Cardinals took their exercise side-saddle on the Pincian Hill.

-- Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh. I like long opening sentences like this, even when they set the mood, not the actual scene. This is a book about Guy's experience in the British Army during WWII, not the story of his grandparents. So we quickly move from a brief family history to Guy's story. Still, the first sentence pulled me into the story.

Men at Arms is the first book in Waugh's WWII "Sword of Honour" trilogy (Sword of Honor for those of us who use American spelling). It is followed by Officers and Gentlemen and The End of the Battle (Unconditional Surrender in it's canonical, UK title).  I'm reading the trilogy with a group of Waugh fans on Instagram. We are working our way through all his books. The trilogy is also on my Classics Club II list.

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 Men at Arms:

The three probationary Halberdiers stood back for the ladies to pass and followed them through the garden-gate with adolescent misgivings and there before them unmistakably, separated from them only by the plate-glass of the drawing-room window, stood Lieutenant-Colonel, shortly to be gazetted Brigadier, Ritchie-Hook glaring out at them balefully with a single, terrible eye. It was black as the brows above it, this eye, black as the patch which hung on the other side of the lean skew nose.

FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

"An eminently readable comedy of modern war" (New York Times), Men at Arms is the first novel in Evelyn Waugh's brilliant Sword of Honor trilogy.

Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade that seriously blots his Halberdier copybook.

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

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

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.

-- Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. Wow, that's some opening sentence! It sure got my attention. 

Graham Greene is one of my very favorite authors. He left a legacy of 26 novels (including two early ones that he “repudiated” and haven’t been in print since), several volumes of short stories, poetry, plays, screenplays, autobiographies, travel books, essays, criticism, two biographies, general nonfiction, and even children’s books.

I haven’t come close to reading, or even collecting, all of Greene’s books. I would like to read at least all his (existing) fiction. So far, I’ve read 11 of his novels and short story collections and one book of travel writing. 

One of my favorite Greene quotes is:

One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read . . .


― from Travels with My Aunt

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.

Mister Linky's Magical Widgets -- Thumb-Linky widget will appear right here!
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 Brighton Rock:

She didn't even know the name of a drink. In Nelson Place from which she had emerged like a mole into the daylight of Snow's restaurant and the Palace Pier, she had never known a boy with enough money to offer her a drink.

FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

Graham Greene's chilling exposé of violence and gang warfare in the pre-war underworld is a classic of its kind. Pinkie, a teenage gangster on the rise, is devoid of compassion or human feeling, despising weakness of both the spirit and the flesh. Responsible for the razor slashes that killed mob boss Kite and also for the death of Hale, a reporter who threatened the livelihood of the mob, Pinkie is the embodiment of calculated evil. As a Catholic, however, Pinkie is convinced that his retribution does not lie in human hands. He is therefore not prepared for Ida Arnold, Hale's avenging angel.