Category: Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesday – Seeking Whom He May Devour

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

Today’s teaser is from Seeking Whom he May Devour by Fred Vargas:

‘You’re really weird,’ he said. ‘You see no evil anywhere. I’m afraid you’re blind.’ (page 125)

Seeking Whom He May Devour is an intriguing book as Vargas describes the various episodes where sheep are found in the French mountains with their throats torn out. Then a woman is found killed in the same way. People are convinced it’s the work of a werewolf except for Johnstone, a Canadian staying in France to film wolves, a man of few words who doesn’t believe in werewolves.

It  is not a fast-paced book, but has a feel of fable and legend about it, telling a tale of death, attitudes to life and death and a pilgrimage of sorts as the murderer is tracked down.

Teaser Tuesday – 4.50 from Paddington

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of 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!


This week one of the books I’m reading is 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie, in which a woman is killed on a train and then her body can’t be found. Miss Marple gets involved. As she is by now a frail old lady told by her doctor to take things easy she enlists the help of Lucy Eyelesbarrow in finding out what actually happened. This works out very well, mainly because of Lucy’s thoroughness and Miss Marple’s powers of deduction.  This is how she thinks about it:

Of course, I am somewhat handicapped by not actually being on the spot. It is so helpful, I always feel, when people remind you of other people – because types are alike everywhere and that is such a valuable guide.

…

One is inclined to guess – and guessing would be very wrong when it is a question of anything as serious as murder. All one can do is to observe the people concerned – or who might have been concerned – and see of whom  they remind you. (page 121)

Teaser Tuesday: The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of 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!

This week I’ve been reading The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery. It’s a slim book, packed with richness – sumptuous, and full to over-flowing with words and images. It is verbose, florid and sensational – meaning that is celebrates all the sensations experienced relating to food.

Here is a description of one of my favourite foods:

… crimson in its taut silken finery, undulating with the occasional more tender hollow, with a cheerfulness about it like a plumpish woman in her party dress hoping to compensate for the inconvenience of her extra pounds by means of a disarming chubbiness that evokes an irresistible desire to bite into her flesh.

… my teeth tore into the flesh to splatter the tongue with the rich, warm and bountiful juice, whose essential generosity is masked by the chill of a refrigerator, or the affront of vinegar, or the false nobility of oil.

The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one’s mouth that brings with it every pleasure. The resistance of the skin – slightly taut, just enough; the luscious yield of the tissues, their seed-filled liqueur oozing to the corners of one’s lips, and that one wipes away without any fear of staining one’s fingers, this plump little globe, unleashing a flood of nature inside us: a tomato, an adventure. (from pages 44-5)

Teaser Tuesday

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of 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!

After feasting on Ian Rankin’s Rebus books, I’ve gone back to reading Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett.  After reading Wolf Hall I’m in the mood for more about Thomas More, and this time the spotlight is on his family and in particular his adopted daughter Meg and her involvement with John Clement, the former family tutor and later President of the Royal College of Physicians and Hans Holbein, the German portrait painter.

Here is Hans Holbein’s reaction on meeting Meg:

She stopped a bit breathless, and looked provocatively at him. Hans Holbein had never seen a woman looking provocative in this completely unflirtatious way, any more than he’d ever come across a woman who had read the Imitation of Christ. She was challenging his mind instead of his body. But Erasmus had told him about More’s family school. This must be what happened to women when you taught them Latin and Greek and the skills of argument. (page 97)

Tuesday Teasers

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

I’ve come to a halt. I’ve finished the books I’ve been reading and can’t make my mind up what to read next. I have books out on loan from the library and plenty of books of my own that I want to read sometime. The problem is, which one should I read next?

So I thought I’d try a few teasers out on myself, taken from the opening chapters of books closest to hand.

The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré, in which George Smiley has become chief of the battered British Secret Service at a time when the betrayals of a Soviet double agent have riddled the spy network.

Afterwards, in the dusty little corners where London’s secret servants drink together, there was argument about where the Dolphin case history should really begin. One crowd, led by a blimpish fellow in charge of microphone transcription, went so far as to claim that the fitting date was sixty years ago when ‘that arch-cad Bill Haydon’ was born into the world under a treacherous star. Haydon’s very name struck a chill into them. (page 15)

The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan about Gwenni Morgan, who is inquisitive and bookish. She can fly in her sleep and loves playing detective.

Like every other night, I sped from the sea to drift along the road that winds its way down beyond the Baptism Pool and the Reservoir high into the hills behind the town. As I passed above the Pool I saw a man floating in it with his arms outstretched and the moon drowning in his eyes. (page 4)

The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie in which Poirot investigates a complicated crime when the Blue Train steams into Nice and a murder is discovered.

It was close on midnight when a man crossed the Place de la Concorde. In spite of the handsome fur coat which garbed his meagre form, there was something essentially weak and paltry about him.

A little man with the face like a rat. (page 1)

Hector and the Search for Happiness by François Lelord about a young psychiatrist finding out whether there is such a thing as the secret of true happiness.

And yet Hector felt dissatisfied.

He felt dissatisfied because he could see perfectly well that he couldn’t make people happy. (page 5)

Well, I still don’t know what to read next. Has anyone read any of these? What would you suggest?

Teaser Tuesdays

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of 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!

My teaser is from King Arthur’s Bones by The Medieval Murderers:

Each of the individuals who stared at these remains in the abbot’s parlour was lost for a time in his imagination, seeing a great and final battle in which a warrior-king had been fatally struck down. They put out their hands – even Michael and the other labourers – to touch the scullcap, the jaw-bone, the mighty shin-bone, the fragments of ribcage, as if some trace of Arthur’s spirit might be transmitted to their own blood and sinew. (page 22) 

This is a book of shortish interlinked stories tracing the whereabouts of King Arthur’s skeletal remains. It begins in 1191, when monks at Glastonbury Abbey discover an ancient cross and lying beneath in a hollowed out tree trunk are bones in the form of a body.

 Are these really King Arthur’s bones? As soon as the bones are found they are carried away by the ‘Guardians’ whose heritage is to protect them until the legend is fulfilled and Arthur returns to save his country. The story moves forward through the centuries and treachery, theft, blackmail  and murder follow the bones.