Teaser Tuesdays: Kept in the Dark by Penny Hancock

Posted on August 7, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

Happy Tuesday, kids. I’m happy to share today a teaser from a new-to-the-U.S. thriller (out in the UK last January) called Kept in the Dark. Nice little play on words, there: “kept in the dark” usually means not telling somebody something, but of course there’s a more literal meaning here. I am finding this deliciously creepy! Enjoy.

…there’s a sweetness in saving some things for later. To savour the anticipation. Now Jez is here, in the music room, I have all the time in the world again.

Note the British “ou” spelling of savor – no, spellcheck, I meant it that way. 🙂

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

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Teaser Tuesdays: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

Posted on July 31, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

Friends, the hype was correct. (Okay, maybe it’s quiet, bookish hype, but there is hype, I tell you.) 84, Charing Cross Road is sweet, hilarious, and apt. I love it. It’s a collection of correspondence between writer Helene Hanff, living in New York City and scraping together a living, and an antiquarian bookshop in London, from 1949 until… I’m still reading. I highly recommend it. For example, from Hanff’s letter of August 15, 1959:

I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon/Middle English by a friend who had to take it for her Ph.D. They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. “Which is all very well,” she said bitterly, “but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is ‘How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall.'”

Funny stuff, no? Today’s teaser is in special honor of my mother, who has an advanced degree in linguistics and may have an intelligent response for us. Happy Tuesday!

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Teaser Tuesdays: Bike Snob: Systematically & Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling by BikeSnobNYC

Posted on July 24, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

The Bike Snob has for years written a wildly successful blog of which I am a fan. This is his first book. There has since been a second; I am behind. Here’s your teaser for the day, randomly selected:

Cyclocross is a strange, painful, and addictive form of racing involving dismounting and carrying your bike over obstacles on courses consisting of both dirt and pavement. In a way racing cyclocross is like freebasing cycling, since the races are short but incredibly intense, and they manage to distill pretty much every element of cycling into forty-five minutes. Consequently, like crack in the eighties, it becomes more and more popular in this country every year.

There’s your cyclocross lesson for the day. He gives a good description; it is indeed intense, painful, and addictive! This is also a pretty representative sample of Bike Snob’s irreverent approach. I like it.

What are you reading today?

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Teaser Tuesdays: Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig

Posted on July 17, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

I’ve been a fan of Chuck Wendig’s blog for some time, but just now got around to reading one of his books, Blackbirds. And it was fabulous! Here’s a taste:

Miriam’s been walking for a half-hour, and the thoughts that run through her mind have serious legs. Terrible thoughts jog swift laps.

Is that not a great line? This is actually an example of one of the details of Wendig’s writing that I appreciate: the personification of things like, well, thoughts. It’s evocative. Miriam is just the kind of character I find fascinating, too: cynical, damaged, tough but vulnerable, and of course, well-developed. (As a character. Not in her bosom.)

And what are you reading today?

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Teaser Tuesdays: Prehistory, Personality and Place: Emil W. Haury and the Mogollon Controversy by Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey

Posted on July 10, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

I picked up this slim book on a whim, blind to its contents, but it seems to be going well! Here’s a quick what’s-it-about teaser for you:

The discoverer was Haury, surely the preeminent archaeologist of his day. The controversy was whether the Mogollon culture was a valid, distinctive cultural entity or simply a backwoods variant of the better-known Ancestral Pueblo, or Anasazi, culture.

So far, I like that the authors seem to be telling the story of the controversy (and Haury), without taking part in the debate themselves. This may change, of course.

What are you enjoying on this balmy Tuesday?

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Teaser Tuesdays: Houston Beer by Ronnie Crocker

Posted on July 3, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

What? A book about beer in Houston? I’m sold. Here’s a teaser for you that provides a quick sketch of my hometown:

By 1838, a deputy constable could count forty-seven establishments selling alcoholic drinks in a city of probably fewer than two thousand residents; the first church wasn’t built until two years later. Despite the city’s first Abstinence Society meetings in February 1839 and what has been described as a “wave of temperance” activity three years later, Houstonians never lost their thirst for strong drink.

Yep, that’s us. I’m excited about the subject of this one.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

Posted on June 26, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

I am mightily enjoying this novel about the woman who loved Frank Lloyd Wright even though they were both married to other people. I chose this teaser today because I liked the sentiment. Hope you enjoy…

“Forgive my bluntness, but leaving a boring man for a stimulating one is only interesting for a while. In time, you are back where you started: still wanting. Better to find your own backbone, the strong thing in you.”

Good advice, no?

And what are you reading this week?

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Teaser Tuesdays: Dream Team by Jack McCallum

Posted on June 19, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!


I have a fabulous basketball book to tease you with today. Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever comes out in mid-July. I had trouble choosing a teaser for you because I enjoyed so much of this book! But I picked a (hopefully appropriate) quotation about the skills involved in the game itself.

“You’d be ready to win, and all of a sudden – I’m not making this up – Larry would throw up a shot that would not only knock your ball away from the basket but would also go in itself,” says [Quinn] Buckner [former teammate of Larry Bird]. “The man could play pool and basketball at the same time.”

[Brackets mine.] This quotation describes a shooting game called Knockout, in which everybody gets to shoot at once, if that makes things any clearer. It’s an exciting, funny book about some major personalities. Stay tuned for my review to come.

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

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Teaser Tuesdays: City of Ravens by Boria Sax

Posted on June 12, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!


I am currently reading City of Ravens: London, the Tower and Its Famous Birds. Part history, part deconstruction of myth, part bird study, this is a whimsical and highly readable little book. I have picked you out especially a beer-related teaser for today:

Since the seventeenth century, breweries in England had occasionally kept ravens as mascots out of a belief that ‘Where there are ravens there will be good beer.’ If we interpret this saying a little broadly, as one generally does with proverbs, the ‘good beer’ could mean ‘good fortune.’

This makes me want a raven for our garage brewery.

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

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Teaser Tuesdays: Racing Through the Dark by David Millar

Posted on June 5, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

David Millar is a veteran professional bike racer who has raced in all the biggest events – the Vuelta, the Giro, the Olympics, and the Tour de France where he’s worn the yellow leader’s jersey. This memoir tells the story of his childhood discovery of the sport he loves, his journey upwards through the professional ranks, and his eventual bust for doping – and then his comeback to the sport, as a “clean” racer. It’s an emotional and unfortunately relevant topic for any fan of professional road racing. Here’s a teaser for you.

After winning Denmark, it would have been reasonable for me to think that I didn’t have to go to Italy, that if I worked hard and put my head down and believed in myself, I could win the Vuelta prologue – clean.

Perhaps if I’d had people – somebody – around me whom I could have talked to about it, then that might have been the conclusion I’d have come to and I’d have canceled the trip to Tuscany.

This is an example of the problem Millar describes as a lack of support for those racers trying to stay clean. He stops short of blaming his decision to dope on pressure from the sport or his team; in fact, he receives very little direct pressure. But the culture surrounding him, so nonchalantly accepting of doping, as he portrays it, makes it difficult for him to resist at a certain point, and no one supports his attempt to stay clean. There is definitely a discussion point here about the meaning and power of peer pressure, alongside the ever-looming question of “clean” competition vs. doping in sports and cycling in particular… I will say for now that Millar never struck me as making excuses. Review to come after this book’s US publication date. [Note: this book has been out in the UK for almost a year. US pub is this June.]

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

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