Teaser Tuesdays: Offcomer by Jo Baker

Posted on November 11, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

Sorry, I know I already gave you one teaser from this one, but I just couldn’t help myself.

offcomerI loved a lot of things about this book, but one of them was the striking passages about physicality, the physical effects of noticing others’ physical presences throughout. I thought I’d share this one with you.

As she came towards him, the last grains of his ambivalence crumbled away. He suddenly realised, for the first time, that she was, in fact, beautiful. The idea was startling, even terrifying. Even that evening nearly a year ago, when she had taken off her clothes for him to draw her, when she was utterly new and unknown to him, he hadn’t really thought that she was beautiful.

Oh, the terrifying beauty! It’s not what you think, though… I suppose I’ll be mysterious and leave it at that for now.

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

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Teaser Tuesdays: Screenplay by MacDonald Harris

Posted on November 4, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

screenplay

Allow me to introduce you to a strange and dreamy novel originally published in the year of my birth, which recalls somewhat The Great Gatsby, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and (most pointedly) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For your teaser today, please enjoy our narrator-protagonist on his mother:

To me she behaved exactly as she did to the rest of her friends; she was affectionate without sentiment, she confided every intimate thought that came to her without hesitating, she often asked my advice on things, and when I came home at the end of the day she embraced me as she did her other friends, male and female, as was the custom in their set – in the French manner, a quick hug and a touch of the lips on both cheeks.

The oddness is only just beginning, I assure you. Stay tuned; I think it’s a good one.

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

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two-wheeled thoughts & Teaser Tuesdays: Offcomer by Jo Baker

Posted on October 28, 2014 by pagesofjulia

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click for details

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Two-wheeled thoughts is my own.

offcomer
Offcomer is a fine and rather hypnotic first novel – by the author of Longbourne, but before it – only now in its first stateside publication. There’s a lot to it, but I was struck (of course) by these lines.

The bike was cool and damp after a night in the back yard. She wheeled it, ticking like a grasshopper, through the house and out the front door, bumped it down the steps. She pushed her right foot into the toeclip, swung into the saddle. Shuffling the other foot into its clip, she tacked slowly up the hill. The gears clicked into place with the certainty of a problem solved.

I love that it ticks like a grasshopper, and that the gears click like a problem solved. That is as it should be.

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

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synchronicity: Teaser Tuesdays: The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, as rediscovered by Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams

Posted on October 21, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

story

Is it a double-synchronicity if it’s a synchronicity about synchronicity?

Fair warning: I will be raving about this little book when it gets published and I’m allowed to do so. But for now… this is Brooke Williams, in one of his commentaries following a chapter of Jefferies’s 1883 work.

Jefferies was in conversation with me as I was in conversation with Jung. Jung also used “soul” and “psyche” interchangeably. The psyche, I’ve learned, is the complete human mind – conscious as well as unconscious. What intrigues me most is Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious – that part of the psyche every human shares, that evolved as our cells evolved, through natural selection, consisting of “mnemonic deposits accruing from the experience of our ancestors.”

Randomly discovering a book I’d never heard of and reading a passage about psyche and soul – concepts I’d been struggling to understand – was for me a “meaningful coincidence,” Jung’s definition for synchronicity.

Synchronicity is, according to Ira Progroff, “at the frontal edge of life where evolution is occurring.”

In parallel, you know I’ve used the word synchronicity here before. What you don’t know is that I had some trouble selecting the word I wanted to use to communicate the concept: of coincidence, but more than coincidence. Clearly (at least according to the definitions given above) I got it right. Thanks, Pops, for helping me to get it.

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

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Teaser Tuesdays: The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words, edited by Barry Day

Posted on October 14, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

chandler

Yes, it’s true, I just recently did a book beginning; but Chandler is just so quotable (thus this whole book, of course). I couldn’t let this one pass us by.

I write when I can and I don’t write when I can’t, always in the morning or the early part of the day. You get very gaudy ideas at night but they don’t stand up.

That first sentence is unclear: which condition happens always in the morning or the early part of the day? the can, or the can’t? I choose to believe that it is the can; many respected writers (ahem Hemingway) do or did their best work in the mornings. I am certainly a morning person myself. And I like this idea that our nighttime ideas are “gaudy”; I think that’s perfect. I get ideas at night, but they never stand up to sunlit scrutiny. What about you?

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

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Teaser Tuesdays: The Jaguar’s Children by John Vaillant

Posted on September 30, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

John Vaillant, nonfiction author, makes his fiction debut with a shockingly beautiful and painful novel called The Jaguar’s Children.

jaguar

At the border town of Altar in the Mexican state of Sonora, a taking-off point for many immigrants who buy the services of coyotes to cross into Arizona…

There are stalls there with things to buy, but there is nothing for the house or the milpa, nothing nice to eat or to wear. Besides expensive water, it is mostly clothes and almost all of them are black or gray – T-shirts, jackets, balaclavas and gloves, even the bags – so you can be invisible in the desert, in the dark, because that is what a migrante needs to be to make it in el Norte.

Stay tuned for a Maximum Shelf to come. I am excited to share this one.

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

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Teaser Tuesdays: The Brewer’s Tale by William Bostwick

Posted on September 23, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

brewers tale

“A history of the world according to beer”! Who’s surprised that I needed to read this?

There is no great shortage of written words regarding beer’s important place in history: that it is part of what brought European settlers to New England; that it helped us preserve grain & feed ourselves, and take in liquid when water was unsafe to drink; that it drove us to establish settled civilizations (& agriculture). But just as I learn something new from every brewery tour I take, even into the dozens, I haven’t yet reached the point of satiation on beer-in-history. Here’s something I hadn’t quite considered in these terms before:

…if beer’s essence can be distilled to one idea, it’s this: beer is made. Our first recorded recipes were for beer because beer was the first thing we made that required a recipe, our first engineered food. Wine, for example, just happens – a grape’s sugars will ferment on their own, without a human touch; even elephants and butterflies seek out rotting fruit. But grain needs a modern hand to coax out its sugars and ferment them into alcohol.

And these lines come from the introduction! (Libraries show up on page 2.) You have my attention…

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

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Teaser Tuesdays: Gretel and the Dark by Eliza Granville

Posted on September 16, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

gretel

This is a delightful blend of dark, gloomy fairy tale, historical fiction, and horror. I don’t want to say anything more about it at this point, but I think I’ve found a real winner.

For now, enjoy these lines, which are a fine example of the emphasis placed on the importance of storytelling.

“When I make up stories I’ll write them down so they won’t disappear or be changed.”

Greet shrugs. “Then they won’t be proper stories, will they?”

Also, who doesn’t love a little girl who thinks this:

When I grow up I shall be a famous author like Carol Lewis or Elle Franken Baum, but the girls in my books will be explorers, they’ll fly planes and fight battles, not play down holes with white rabbits or dance along brick roads with a silly scarecrow and a man made out of metal.

Stay tuned. Gretel and the Dark looks like a star.

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

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Teaser Tuesdays: Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

Posted on September 9, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

tortilla

I am pleased to return to old standbys from time to time. It has been too long since I’ve read any Hemingway. And Steinbeck is another love, one I’ve not explored enough. This audio production of Tortilla Flat, an early novel of his, is going well for me so far. I wanted to share a few lines that I think show what he can do with simple language. Tell me this doesn’t paint a scene – one you’d be happy to inhabit, in fact.

The grace was not quite so sharp to Pilon when he could not tell Big Joe about it, but he sat and watched the treasure place while the sky grayed and the dawn came behind the fog. He saw the pine trees take shape and emerge out of obscurity. The wind died down and the little blue rabbits came out of the brush and hopped about on the pine needles. Pilon was heavy-eyed but happy.

This makes me feel peaceful.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects by Scott Richard Shaw; and Texas State Things

Posted on September 2, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

bugs

Yes, we just teasered this one last week. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. (This is just a segue to talk about the great state of Texas, anyway.)

Several times I have run across the concept, in this book, of a state fossil. For example,

The state fossil of Maine, Pertica quadrifaria (an Early Devonian land plant), provides a nice place to start. This is a rare and distinctive state fossil, compared to others that we’ve discussed so far.

Others discussed so far include the state fossils of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (two different trilobites).

I had never encountered the idea of a state fossil before; how interesting! Of course the first thing I did was go looking for Texas’s state fossil. According to The Paleontology Portal:

Texas does not have a state fossil, but it does have a state dinosaur, as well as a fossil for its state stone (petrified palm wood). Pleurocoelus was a large herbivorous sauropod dinosaur that lived during the Early Cretaceous (~ 140-110 million years ago).

Which just sent me searching further. And what did I learn! We all know about the state flower (Texas bluebonnet), state tree (pecan), state mammal (small) (the armadillo), and state motto (“Friendship”). But who knew we had an official state cooking implement (the Dutch oven)?? or a state tartan (Texas Bluebonnet tartan)?? And a state molecule, no less! I wonder how many other states have a state native pepper as well as a state pepper (other). And on and on. Yes, I used Wikipedia. And I am fascinated.

Thank you, Planet of the Bugs, for this side-venture.

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

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