(guest) book beginnings on Friday: The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis, from Pops

Posted on May 13, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

Pops has a book beginning he felt moved to share.

Here’s Wade Davis’s The Wayfinders (2009). Both the first sentence and first paragraph (only two sentences!) strike me as exceptional, especially for non-fiction. With this, we not only get a glimpse of the author’s subject & writing style, but also the way he works & perceives. Opening this book I had only spare awareness of his theme, but my appetite was already whetted; with this beginning my cup of expectations runneth over!

wayfinders

Wade Davis is an anthropologist & ethnobotanist. This book publishes in entirety a series of 5 lectures he delivered in 2009 in short sequence (1 month) for a prominent regular program on CBC Radio out of Toronto (CBC Massey Lectures.) That is a unique medium today, both as spoken-word and audio-only; I wonder if that had any influence on his dense & evocative style. I would need to read one of his other books to find out!

One of the intense pleasures of travel is the opportunity to live amongst peoples who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that, in the Amazon, Jaguar shaman still journey beyond the Milky Way, that myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, that the Buddhists in Tibet still pursue the breath of the Dharma is to remember the central revelation of anthropology: the idea that the social world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but rather is simply one model of reality, the consequence of one set of intellectual and spiritual choices that our particular cultural lineage made, however successfully, many generations ago.

Well, for what it’s worth, Pops, I enjoyed Davis’s Into the Silence years ago, and credit him with engaging writing, although my memory is dim beyond that, I’m afraid. The concept behind this one does sound interesting to me, too, and the format is an especially intriguing detail. We’ll be looking forward to your review!

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book beginnings on Friday: Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises by Lesley M. M. Blume

Posted on May 6, 2016 by pagesofjulia

book beginnings

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

Guess what brought me to this one. It’s been a while since I read The Sun Also Rises (first discovered in Mrs. Smith’s English class in high school, which began my Hemingway admiration). I wonder if I’ll find time for a reread…

everybody behaves badly

I think these opening lines set the scene nicely – or the atmosphere of Hemingway’s life and fame, if you will.

In March 1934, Vanity Fair ran a mischievous editorial: a page of Ernest Hemingway paper dolls, featuring cutouts of various famous Hemingway personas. On display: Hemingway as a toreador, clinging to a severed bull’s head; Hemingway as a brooding, café-dwelling writer (four wine bottles adorn his table, and a waiter is seen toting three more in his direction); Hemingway as a bloodied war veteran.

I wonder how much that page of paper dolls would be worth now!

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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book beginnings on Friday: Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research by John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts

Posted on February 19, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

sea of cortez

I am feeling good to have finally found time to open a big fat Steinbeck book I have had on my shelves for years (and yes, moved across the country with me). Coauthor Ed Ricketts was, among other things, the model for the character Doc in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. That was my first Steinbeck, and I loved it, and thus that was my introduction to Ricketts. I have heard about their shared work of nonfiction for years, and spent some time myself on the Sea of Cortez, kayaking by day and sleeping on the beaches of Baja by night. So, much to look forward to here.

The very first lines paid off.

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there.

I have been studying creative nonfiction writing for a while now (aside from reading and appreciating it), so this concept really struck me. I knew I could count on Steinbeck. Now when will I find the time for East of Eden?

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book beginnings on Friday: Ripper by Isabel Allende (audio)

Posted on February 5, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

ripper

She is not perfect: I found The Japanese Lover to be, not bad, but less than she is capable of. But I still look forward to reading Isabel Allende.

Ripper begins:

“Mom is still alive, but she’s going to be murdered at midnight on Good Friday,” Amanda Martín told the deputy chief, who didn’t even think to question the girl. She’d already proved she knew more than he and all his colleagues in Homicide put together.

I thought that was a hell of an opening, and the pages that follow are equally engaging. Stick around.

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book beginnings on Friday: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Posted on January 22, 2016 by pagesofjulia

fun home

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

I loved Are You My Mother?, and don’t know why it took me so long to pick up Fun Home, her earlier work and sort of a partner to Mother. She is still hilarious, insightful, and smart.

Because this is a graphic memoir, I’ll have to do this beginning a little differently. Here is an image of the whole first page.

fun home start

That reference to Icarus was when I knew (not that I doubted) that we were going in a good direction. I can’t wait to spend some more time with Bechdel and her wacky family and amazing mind.

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book beginnings on Friday: The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer

Posted on January 15, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

It felt like a great and happy luxury to take time out of my professional reading to read this book just for me. (Actually it is referenced as a standard by a book I was hired to read, and you will see that one come up later. But I already had this one on my desk. So it counts.) I was struck immediately by the opening lines: how perfect.

tender bar

We went there for everything we needed. We went there when we were thirsty, of course, and when hungry, and when dead tired. We went there when happy, to celebrate, and when sad, to sulk. We went there after weddings and funerals, for something to settle our nerves, and always for a shot of courage just before. We went there when we didn’t know what we needed, hoping someone might tell us. We went there when looking for love, or sex, or trouble, or for someone who had gone missing, because sooner or later everyone turned up there. Most of all we went there when we needed to be found.

There is, of course, a certain special bar that I think of, where I have gone when happy and when sad. Miss y’all.

Just a few paragraphs later, another piece of profundity:

While I fear that we’re drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we’re defined by what embraces us.

I think this will be a good one, friends.

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book beginnings on Friday: The Rarest Bird in the World: The Search for the Nechisar Nightjar by Vernon R. L. Head

Posted on January 8, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

Today, a fanciful and wondering story of birdwatching in our strange world. It begins:
rarest bird

Eyes are for searching, and sometimes the search is for eyes in the night. I blinked, turning my cheeks to the dusty mud. Shapes slid before me, slicing like the shadows from a tent, stealing bits of shine.

It was an elemental evening in Ethiopia.

Among other things, I have enjoyed encountering places in this book – like Galveston Island State Park (where I have played since I was a baby, and where a dear friend works as park interpreter today), and Haleakala, a mountain in Hawaii that I have ridden a bicycle down (but not up). Stay tuned…

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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book beginnings on Friday: Things That Are by Amy Leach

Posted on November 20, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

I am fairly certain that it was Hali Felt, author of the outstanding Soundings, that recommended this book. I’ve had it on my shelf for years, and am so glad now that I have finally gotten around to reading it.

THINGS THAT ARE by Amy Leach.Things That Are is already sort of blowing my mind, and feels right up my alley: fanciful, dreamy, but also very rooted in the real world; whimsically lovely writing. I’ve only just begun, so stay tuned for the review: we’ll see if it sticks. But for now, wow. It begins with a chapter called Donkey Derby:

Usually all we have to do when we go a-conquering is build a boat, find a benefactress, recruit a ribald crew, and wear radiant glinting helmets. With these four easy steps my kind has conquered far-away lands, and seas and moons and molecules.

And I have the impression she will mine all those fields, that is, far-away lands, seas, moons and molecules (and maybe some of the implications of going a-conquering, too). Let us hope.

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book beginnings on Friday: Body Toxic by Susanne Antonetta

Posted on October 30, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

This memoir by a local author and professor at my local university comes highly recommended, and at a glance the subject looks fascinating, too. (Sometimes – I might even say often – excellent writing carries a subject I’m not consumed with; but better to have both.)body toxic A brief blurb reads, “For readers of Refuge, A Civil Action and Silent Spring, comes a harrowing story of a family, a body, and a place: an immigrant family in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, a hauntingly beautiful, hauntingly compromised landscape.” Who is not intrigued? And those titles cited for comparison: wow!

It begins:

In nineteen question-mark question-mark my silent grandfather came to the United States.

He left the hot chatty island of Barbados and because he existed in silence no one knows when he came.

Simple, but a lot has already been communicated; and I love the “hot chatty island.” I am optimistic.

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book beginnings on Friday: The Magician by E. J. Stauffer

Posted on October 16, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

magician

This weekend’s reading is a shortish thriller starring a retired assassin.

Ben Knight could have been any man in his early thirties, of average height and weight and with no outstanding features. If you were to meet him, you would most likely be unable to describe him an hour later. As he walked to the bar, he casually ran over a scenario in his mind that seemed promising at first but was not very practical.

There are a few recognizable patterns here: the nondescript and forgettable man, who then walks into a bar… but there is promise within those standards. Stay tuned.

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