Teaser Tuesdays

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?

Teaser Tuesday

Published on February 17, 2009 by Margaret16 Comments

For this 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. For today’s teaser my selection isn’t random, nor between the specified lines. I picked these sentences because I liked the references to people connected with the Ettrick Valley in the Scottish borders near Selkirk.

My teaser sentences are from page 5 of Alice Munro’s The View From Castle Rock:

In the lower Ettrick Valley was Aikwood, the home of Michael Scott, the philospher and wizard of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who appears in Dante’s Inferno. And if that were not enough, William Wallace, the guerilla hero of the Scots, is said to have hidden from the English, and there is a story of Merlin – Merlin – being hunted down and murdered in the old forest, by Ettrick shepherds.

I’ve just started to read this book in which Alice Munro writes a fictionalised version of her family history, starting with her ancestors’ view from Edinburgh’s Castle Rock in the eighteenth century. It’s really a mix of fact and fiction.

To see more teasers look here.

Tuesday Teaser

Published on February 10, 2009 by Margaret13 Comments

teaser-tuesday Miz B hosts this weekly event. The idea is to pick two sentences between lines 7 and 12 from a random page in the book you’re currently reading without giving away ‘spoilers’.

This week my teaser sentences are from page 169 of White Noise by Don DeLillo:

I thought of telling them about the computer tally, the time-factored death I carried in my chromosomes and blood. Self-pity oozed through my soul.

Published on February 3, 2009March 20, 2018 by Margaret4 Comments

a4d0a-teaser2btuesdaynew Should Be Reading – Miz B – hosts this weekly event. Pick a couple of sentences from the book you’re currently reading (without spoilers, of course) to entice you to read the book.

I’m still reading Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. This week’s teaser sentences are from page 169 (which is exactly where I am in the book). It’s over two sentences but I wanted to quote the whole passage:

I desperately want the insanity we’re living through to end. I desperately want what has begun to finish. In a word, I desperately want this tragedy to be over and for us to try to survive it, that’s all. What’s important is to live: Primum vivere. One day at a time. To survive, to wait, to hope.

Tuesday’s Teaser

Published on January 27, 2009March 20, 2018 by Margaret12 Comments

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by Should be Reading – the idea is to pick two sentences between lines 7 and 12 from any page in the book you’re currently reading without giving away ‘spoilers”.

This week I’ve picked three sentences ( for completeness) from page 49 of Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. People are fleeing from Paris as the Germans advance on the city and food becomes scarce:

Christian charity, the compassion of centuries of civilisation, fell from her like useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and protect her own children. Nothing else mattered any more.