Teaser Tuesdays

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.

Where Are You? and Teaser Tuesdays – Doctored Evidence by Donna Leon

Published on May 26, 2009 by Margaret17 Comments

I’m in Venice where an old woman has been found brutally murdered in her flat. The prime suspect is her Romanian maid, who has fled the scene. Commissario Brunetti decides unofficially to take on the case himself.

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

For Teaser Tuesday quote two or three sentences from the book you’re currently reading – without giving away any spoilers. This weekly event is hosted by Mizb.

I’ve just begun reading Doctored Evidence by Donna Leon. This quote is from the opening paragraph on page 1:

She was an old cow and he hated her. Because he was a doctor and she his patient, he felt guilty about hating her, but not so guilty as to make him hate her any the less. Nasty, greedy, ill-tempered, forever complaining about her health and the few people who still had the stomach for her company, Maria Grazia Battestini was a woman about whom nothing good could be said, not even by the most generous of souls.

Published on May 19, 2009 by Margaret7 Comments

Should Be Reading – Miz B – hosts this weekly event – quoting a couple of sentences from our current read (without spoilers, of course) to entice you to read the book.

I’n currently reading three books – all non-fiction: a biography of Jane Austen, a popular history of Britain 1900 -1952 and a political history of Britain in the 1970s. I couldn’t decide which one to choose – so here are quotes from all three.

First Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin:

Jane Austen was a tough and unsentimental child, drawn to rude, anarchic imaginings and black jokes. She found a good source for this ferocious style of humour in the talk she heard, and sometimes joined in, among her parents’ pupils, bursting out of childhood into young manhood. (page 33)

Then After the Victorians: the World Our Parents Knew by A N Wilson:

One of the scientists who worked on the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Leo Szilard, said that the idea of nuclear chain reaction first came to him when reading Wells’s The World Set Free (1914), in which atom bombs falling on world cities during the 1950s kill millions of people. These things were not possible when Wells wrote about them. We know that the twentieth century would see them happen. (page 67)

And finally When the Lights Went Out: Britian in the Seventies by Andy Beckett:

Declinism was an established British state of mind, but during the mid-seventies it truly began to pervade the national consciousness. It filled doomy books aimed at the general reader. It became a melodramatic staple for newspapers, magazines and television programmes. (page 181)

Two of those programmes were the comedy series Fawlty Towers and The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin – both about middle-aged men “trapped in a decrepit England and filled with rage or dreams of escape”. Interestingly, we’re now watching a new Reggie Perrin (Martin Clunes); is it a sign of the times?

Teaser Tuesdays – Pride and Prejudice

Published on May 12, 2009October 28, 2018 by Margaret18 Comments

After writing so many times that I want to re-read Pride and Prejudice I decided it was time to do so, And as other people have also said the same, or indeed, said that they have never read it, I thought it appropriate that today’s teaser should be from Pride and Prejudice. Here is Mr Darcy thinking about Elizabeth’s eyes:

Mr Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they had next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes.

pride-prejudice

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Mizb – the idea is to quote two or three sentences from a book you’re currently reading to entice other people to read it, without giving away any spoilers. I am spoilt for choice reading Pride and Prejudice, so here are another couple of sentences. This is a snippet of conversation between Mr and Mrs Bennet:

“When a woman has five grown-up daughters, she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty.”

“In such cases a woman has not often much beauty to think of.”