Teaser Tuesdays: Without Fail by Lee Child

Posted on October 4, 2011 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!

Yet another Lee Child! Yes! In this one, Reacher is hired to try to assassinate the vice-president of the USA. You know, as a sort of security audit; not for real. But is somebody out there trying the same thing – for real? (My first reaction to this is, the vice-president? Really? Do they get assassinated?) Here’s your teaser:

The guy on the right took his hands out of his pockets. He had the same neuralgic pain in his knuckles, or else a couple more rolls of quarters. Reacher smiled. He liked rolls of quarters. Good old-fashioned technology. And they implied the absence of firearms. Nobody clutches rolls of coins if they’ve got a gun in their pocket.

Yes, I used more sentences than prescribed, but wasn’t it worth it?

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Teaser Tuesdays: Tripwire by Lee Child

Posted on September 27, 2011 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!


Here’s my confession. Those of you who were paying close attention may have caught the *brief* posting of the teaser below a few weeks ago, incorrectly attributed to the book just before this one in the Reacher series, Die Trying. I’m trying again; it’s actually from Tripwire, which I’m adoring. I think it’s a great teaser and it wasn’t up very long on that day so once more…

Here is your teaser from page 432:

An hour later Reacher was drifting down Duval Street, thinking about new banking arrangements, choosing a place to eat an early dinner, and wondering why he had lied to Costello. His first conclusion was that he would cash up and use a roll of bills in his pants pockets.

It was fun that this teaser visited Key West, because Husband and I have just returned from that very island.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Tripwire by Lee Child (audio)

Posted on September 20, 2011 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!

Love my Lee Child on audio, y’all. It was especially fun to find this one starting off in Key West, since we (thought we) were headed there on vacation a few weeks ago. Not that Reacher sticks around in Key West for long, though; this one mostly finds us in New York, so far.

Here’s your teaser:

An hour later Reacher was drifting down Duval Street, thinking about new banking arrangements, choosing a place to eat an early dinner, and wondering why he had lied to Costello. His first conclusion was that he would cash up and use a roll of bills in his pants pocket.

Stop back by and I’ll have a review for you shortly! What are you reading this week?

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Teaser Tuesdays: Die Trying by Lee Child

Posted on September 13, 2011 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!



These days I’m listening to Die Trying on audio. It’s the second of the Reacher series; I’m going back and reading the ones I’ve missed in order, catching up. The new one, The Affair, comes out this month. I will probably keep going in order and thus avoid the early rush to it. So, here’s our teaser from page 432:

Holly had wanted to see the sky. She was standing there under the vastest sky Reacher had ever seen.

EDIT: I had to change my teaser because I had quoted the wrong BOOK! I’m so sorry, friends. Stay tuned for the next in the Reacher series, where the first-posted teaser came from…

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Teaser Tuesdays: The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar

Posted on August 30, 2011 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’m very impressed with this quiet, evocative novel about a Mexican maid working in an affluent white household in Orange County during a time of disturbing upheaval. I have come across several remarkable lines and shall share here – two teasers because I just couldn’t choose.

From page 154:

Brandon and Keenan packed their rolling suitcases and backpacks with extra speed, anticipating another visit to that temple of sugar, and the condominium with the expansive recreation facilities where the elder Torres lived alone in a long-dashed hope that his grand-children might visit him and use the kidney-shaped swimming spool. They packed their bathing suits and Game Boys too, until Araceli told them to leave all toys behind and to bring more underwear instead.

Yes, this next one is longer than the prescribed two sentences. You may stop reading at two if you’re offended.

From page 165:

“What’s it called? Why is it made out of cement? It hasn’t rained, so where does the water come from?”

“Too many questions,” Araceli said.

“Too many?” No one had ever told Brandon such a thing.

“Yes.”

That makes me laugh. You just wait for my review on this one; I think it will be glowing.

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

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Teaser Tuesdays: Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 by Paul Hendrickson

Posted on August 23, 2011 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!

Ohhh you guys, I almost tear up just thinking about this guy. I’m a big fan of Hemingway’s work, and an amateur scholar of his life; he was such a fascinating, complex, difficult, sad man. I adore him and I love to read what he wrote, and what others have written about him. And Hendrickson is doing it for me! This is a great book, aside from my personal obsession with the subject. More to come (I’ve gushed too much already). Now for your teaser, from page 287 of my galley copy.

To me, the mentions suggest that even or especially up in Michigan, even for an exuberant boy who’s not yet seventeen, getting your sleep is crucial, and not only for physical reasons. Without it, darkness is already visible, if just barely.

I like how he evokes the darkness here. As Hendrickson notes (and every Hem scholar knows!), not only Ernest himself would die by suicide, but also his father, two (or maybe three) of his siblings, and his granddaughter.

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

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Teaser Tuesdays: County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital by David A. Ansell

Posted on August 16, 2011 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!

From page 127,

The high-pitched beeping of my pager pierced the still of the early morning air. My heart-rate increased in a Pavlovian response that harkened back to my days as a resident when the beeping often presaged a patient in trouble.

I am not quite through and thus not writing my review yet, but I can say for now: OMG. This book is powerful and outstanding, and rivaling Fire Season for my Best of 2011 honors. This is not just the story of our nation’s health care system and all its woes, nor a story of racism, poverty, politics and injustice – although it is these things, it is first Dr. Ansell’s personal story, and I find it powerful. Stay tuned.

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Teaser Tuesdays: A Bitter Truth by Charles Todd

Posted on August 9, 2011 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!

A Bitter Truth is the third Bess Crawford mystery from mother/son writing team “Charles Todd.” I am finding it a) enjoyable and b) decidedly like Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series. (See them ALL reviewed by me here.) That is – Maisie is a British interwar detective and former nurse; Bess Crawford is a British nurse during WWI who, while on leave, gets involved in a murder mystery of her own. Both women are apt to sympathize with people in trouble, in this case, a young women who shows up on Bess’s doorstep with a big bruise on her cheek.

Your teaser comes from page 223:

She smiled at me in that way that some children have when meeting a stranger, and now I could see what George Hughes had seen, a likeness perhaps not as strong as he had wished to believe it was, but so pronounced that this child and Juliana could have been sisters. I wanted very much to speak to her, to hear her voice, to hold her on my lap and watch the play of emotions on her face.

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

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Teaser Tuesdays: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Posted on August 2, 2011 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 tackling another classic, this time via audiobook in the car. Unabridged, of course! Here is your teaser. Happy Tuesday.

I remember her bringing me up to a truculent and red-faced old gentleman covered all over with orders and ribbons, and hissing into my ear, in a tragic whisper which must have been perfectly audible to everybody in the room, the most astounding details. I simply fled.

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Teaser Tuesdays: The Scroll by Grant R. Jeffrey

Posted on July 26, 2011 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!

Your teaser today comes from page 102.

Amber had always been an early riser. It was a family trait and one nurtured by many seasons spent digging in very hot climes. The best digging was done before the sun had time to scorch the cool from the day.

So Amber is clearly an archeologist, as is our protagonist, David. This one is shaping up interestingly: it’s a thriller involving archeological digs in the Middle East with biblical implications as well as current political ones.

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

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