It’s Tuesday – Where Are You?

Where Are You?/Teaser Tuesday

Published on June 16, 2009 by Margaret18 Comments

It’s Tuesday, Where Are You? is hosted by an adventure in reading.

Where are you? I’m in Kilmington in Devon, at the Midsummer Fair. The year is 1348. It’s grey and cold, the birds are silent, but the place is full of villagers, people buying and selling, looking for work or for wives or husbands, thieves on the lookout for any purse they can steal, drunkards, gangs of boys rushing about, jugglers, pedlars shouting their wares, minstrels playing on fife and drums, children screaming and laughing in a jostling noisy crowd.

teaser-tuesday

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your ‘teaser’ from €¦ that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

And please avoid spoilers!

Today’s teaser is from page 17 of Company of Liars by Karen Maitland:

The merchant pointed, his hand trembling. ‘Morte bleue, morte bleue’ he yelled, his voice rising hysterically, then summoning up what few wits he still possessed, he screamed, ‘He has the pestilence!’

This is a novel of the plague and medieval intrigue.

Where Are You?/Teaser Tuesday

Published on June 9, 2009 by Margaret13 Comments

It’s Tuesday, Where Are You? is hosted by an adventure in reading.

Today is 5 December 1942 and I’m at Porter’s in a little side street off the Strand in London, with Mr Craven. It’s Thursday evening and we’re sitting under the bust of Mrs Siddon talking quietly, holding hands under the tablecloth.

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

And please avoid spoilers!

My teaser is from page 114 of Good Evening, Mrs Craven: the Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes:

They always enjoyed the joke that the waiter supposed they were married. It went with the respectability of Porter’s that any nice couple who dined together continuously over a long period of time should be thought of as husband and wife. ‘We’re one in the sight of God and Mrs Siddon’s,’ he said, but although she laughed, it wasn’t a joke with her. She liked being called Mrs Craven.

Teaser Tuesday and Where Are You?

Published on June 2, 2009 by Margaret14 Comments

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

Grab your current read.
Let the book fall open to a random page.
Share with us two (2) ‘teaser’ sentences from that page.
You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your ‘teaser’ from €¦ that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
Please avoid spoilers!

My teasers today are from page 29 of Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone:

She was the strangest person they were ever likely to meet. And had they known what her past contained, they would have fled from her or barred their doors against her as against the plague – not to mention her future, now inextricably bound up with theirs.

I’m in Suffolk, at Lowfield Hall, a large 1930-ish house on the outskirts of Stanwich, with the Coverdale family and their new housekeeper Eunice Parchman.

This is a chilling tale full of psychological insights into the mind and motives of a killer.

For more Where Are You? answers, visit Raidergirl3 at An Adventure in Reading.

Tuesday – Where Am I? & Today’s Teaser

Published on March 10, 2009 by Margaret9 Comments

Today I’m in Dante’s Inferno, an invisible spectator following Dante and Virgil as they make their way down into Hell. Charon, the boatman ferries the dead across the river Acheron to the Hall of Death with the dread words “Lay down all hope, you that go in by me” has let us enter from a word of power from Virgil. And so we descend …

(Click the button for more teasers)

My teaser is from pages 30 & 31 of Dante The Descent Into Hell translated byDorothy L Sayers. This in the 2nd Circle of Hell where the souls of the sexually promiscuous are being punished tossed eternally in a howling wind:

The blast of Hell that never rests from whirling

Harries the spirits along the weep of its swath ,

And vexes them, for ever beating and hurling.

When they are borne to the rim of the ruinous path

With cry and wail and shriek they are caught by the gust,

Railing and cursing the power of the Lord’s wrath.

Dante is so overcome with pity that he swoons: “And, as a dead man falling, down I fell.”

William Blake’s painting captures the scene:

blake_dante_hell_v

It’s Tuesday – Where are You?/Teaser Tuesday

Published on March 3, 2009 by Margaret14 Comments

Today I’m in Edinburgh with DI Rebus investigating the disappearance of Philippa Balfour, a university student known as ‘Flip’ to her friends and family. She had arranged to meet friends at a bar on the South Side but hadn’t turned up. Her father is a wealthy banker living in The Falls where a carved wooden doll is found in a coffin shortly after Flip’s disappearance. Flip was involved in an Internet game involving solving cryptic clues – is this connected to her disappearance and who is the Quizmaster? Click the button to find out where other readers are today.

So my teaser this week is from page 280 of The Falls by Ian Rankin.

‘Right, here’s what we’ve got so far. We’ve got Burke and Hare – taking things chronologically – and soon after them we’ve got lots of little coffins found on Arthur’s Seat.’

For more teasers click the button.

It’s Tuesday – Where Are You?/Teaser Tuesday

Published on February 24, 2009 by Margaret11 Comments

tuesdaywhereareyou

Today I’m in Paris in the 1860s with the Impressionists. Paris is overrun with art students wanting to exhibit their paintings in the annual exhibition in the Salon des Beaux Arts. Today it’s 17 May 1863 and everyone is crowded into the exhibition of rejected works called the Salon des Refuses, where people are shocked by the paintings, jeering and hooting with laughter. But the painting that has completely stolen the show is Edouart Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe.

It’s Tuesday – where are you? is hosted by raidergirl3.

Now the teaser (t teaser-tuesday o see more teasers click on the button). The ‘official rules’ are to select a page at random in the book you’re currently reading and pick two sentences between lines 7 and 12. My teaser is a bit longer than two sentences, not random and not from lines 7 – 12. It’s from page 28 of Sue Roe’s The Private Lives of the Impressionists.

Edouard Manet, who had exhibited at the Salon before, was this year exhibiting a monstrosity. Everyone stared in horror at Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, an outrageous depiction of a naked woman, brazen and unashamed, staring straight out at the viewer and seated on a riverbank between two clothed men. Behind her, a second, lightly draped woman, up to her ankles in water, stoops in the distance. This bold display was shocking enough in itself, but what really astounded the public was the modernity of the scene. The men were grouped casually, in modern dress: the painting seemed to be about the present day.

It wasn’t the nudity that was shocking, but the casual style and the fact that the painting looks so real. It was seen as “an obscene, provacative taunt, doubly shocking by virtue of its ordinariness.” The critics complained that Manet appeared to have no sense of harmony, light or shade and thought that the colours were brash and harsh – garish and jarring!

I don’t think so – what do you think?