Weekly Events – Page 10

First Chapter ~ First Paragraph Tuesday Intros

Published on June 18, 2013 by Margaret12 Comments

Every Tuesday Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, sharing the first paragraph or (a few) of a book she’s reading or thinking about reading soon.

Recently I was looking through my many shelves of unread books and came across Not the End of the World by Christopher Brookmyre, a book I started some time again and put to one side, intending to get back to it quite soon. Time has since whizzed by and now, even though I have a bookmark indicating where I got up to, I’ll have to start it again.

It begins with a Prologue:

Joey Murphy was a fisherman. He was the captain and proprietor of a small trawler that was the whole world to him, but which he knew to be merely a speck on the endlessness that was the Pacific Ocean.

He believed in God.

He believed in Jesus.

He believed in His death, resurrection and bodily ascension.

I could have stopped quoting the opening paragraphs here, but that would not really have given a clear indication of the tone of this book. It continues:

He also believed in ghosts, poltergeists, demonic possession, Satanic possession, flying saucers, alien abduction, Roswell, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the Bermuda Triangle, telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, spontaneous combustion, levitation, reincarnation, out-of-body consciousness and the rapture.

There’s more, but I think this should be enough to get the picture that Joey believes in ‘stuff that makes the world seem a more interesting place.‘

Unlike other books by Brookmyre this is not set in Scotland, but in Los Angeles with Lt Larry Freeman of the LAPD investigating the disappearance of the crew of an oceanic research vessel who had gone missing in the Pacific along with their mini-submarine. But there is ‘a Glaswegian photographer with an indecipherable accent and a strong dislike of hypocrisy or of a terrorist who seems to have access to plutonium as well as Semtex.’ (source: Brookmyre)

Lilian's Story by Kate Grenville: a Book Beginnings post

Published on June 14, 2013 by Margaret6 Comments

Book Beginnings on Friday at Gilion’s blog Rose City Reader is the place to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

Lilian’s Story by Kate Grenville begins:

It was a wild night in the year of the Federation that the birth took place. Horses kicked down their stables. Pigs flew, figs grew thorns. the infant mewled and stared and the doctor assured the mother that a caul was a lucky sign. A girl? the father exclaimed, outside in the waiting room, tiled as if for horrible emergencies. This was a contingency he was not prepared for, but he rallied within a day and announced: Lilian. She will be called Lilian Una.

When I returned Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville to the library the other day Lilian’s Story was sitting on the shelf and because I’d enjoyed Sarah Thornhill and before that The Secret River I decided to borrow this book, even though I’ve got more than enough books of my own to keep me busy for a long time.

The back cover tells me that Lilian begins life as the daughter of a prosperous middle-class family and ends it as an eccentric bag-lady living on the streets, quoting Shakespeare for a living. I’m hoping it will be as good as the other two of Grenville’s books that I’ve read! This opening is promising, I think.

Saturday Snapshots

Published on June 8, 2013 by Margaret21 Comments

This Saturday I’m continuing to post photos from our recent holiday in Scotland.

This is Loch Morlich is in the Glenmore Forest Park, 300 metres above sea level, between Aviemore and Cairngorm Mountain.

There is a level circular walk around the Loch, which has a Sailing Club. I took the two photos shown above on a wet and cloudy afternoon when there weren’t many people around. I hadn’t expected to find a beach so close to the mountains and about 30 miles from the sea!

Later in the week on a brighter day we went back to Loch Morlich, just a bit further round the shore. This part of the Loch is the home of Loch Morlich Watersports Centre and we arrived just as groups of young people were leaving, so we had the beach to ourselves: :

There is a Beach Cafe:

Loch Morlich is managed by Forestry Commission Scotland and is the first and only fresh water loch to ever have received the Rural Beach Award in Keep Scotland Beautiful’s (KSB) Seaside Award campaign.

Click on the photos to enlarge.

For more Saturday Snapshots see Melinda’s blog West Metro Mommy.

Wondrous Words Wednesday

Published on June 5, 2013 by Margaret11 Comments

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Kathy at Bermuda Onion where you can share new words that you’ve encountered or spotlight words you love.

I’ve recently read A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a book that I’ll be writing about in more detail. It’s his account of his journey in 1933/4 walking to Constantinople. He uses many words that either were completely new to me or words that I wasn’t quite sure what they mean. As I was reading it on Kindle I was able to look up their meaning without too much distraction. Most of the words I didn’t know are described as ‘archaic’ and some of the words aren’t in the Kindle dictionary.

Here are just two:

imberb – ‘The figure of St John the Divine – imberb, quizzically smiling, quill in hand and at ease in a dressing-gown with his hair flowing loose like an undress-wig …’

This isn’t in the Kindle dictionary and my guess was that it meant he had a beard. I was nearly right, but also completely wrong – the online Oxford English Dictionary has this definition: adjective from the French imberbe, Latin imberbis – a rare word meaning beardless.

flocculent – ‘Ragged and flocculent, fading to grey, scattered with specks of pink from the declining sun, varying in width as random fragments were dropping away and recohering and agitated with motion as though its whole length were a single thread, a thick white line of crowding storks stretched from one side of the heavens to the other.’

I like this sentence, which draws a clear picture for me of the storks flying across the scene in front of the setting sun, but wasn’t sure about ‘flocculent’ – a flock of storks?

It means having or resembling tufts of wool, having a loosely clumped texture from the Latin floccus.

Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville: a Book Beginnings post

Published on May 31, 2013 by Margaret13 Comments

I’m currently reading Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville. It begins:

The Hawkesbury was a lovely river, wide and calm, the water dimply green, the cliffs golden in the sun, and white birds roosting in the trees like so much washing. It was a sweet thing of a still morning, the river-oaks whispering and the land standing upside down in the water.

They called us the Colony of New South Wales. I never liked that. We wasn’t new anything. We was ourselves. (page 3)

I heaved a sigh of relief when I read these opening paragraphs. They paint such a beautiful picture in the first paragraph – I love the peaceful image of a dimply green river reflecting the world upside down – and then the contrast of the strongly individual statements in the second paragraph. The narrator is Sarah Thornhill, a young girl at the beginning of the book, the youngest daughter of William Thornhill, who had been transported to Australia for stealing timber and whose story is told in Kate Grenville’s book The Secret River.

My sigh of relief is because recently I’ve been rather disappointed in my choice of books. Sarah Thornhill is the follow up book to The Secret River, a book I absolutely loved and I was concerned that this book wouldn’t live up to my expectations (see my previous post on Joanne Harris’s book The Lollipop Shoes).

I’m now over half way through the book and although it’s written in different style from The Secret River, so far it’s living up to its early promise. My sigh of relief is now a sigh of contentment.

Saturday Snapshot

Published on May 25, 2013March 8, 2018 by Margaret15 Comments

We’ve been away last week – we went here:

Caringorms P1080750 the Cairngorms – and there was snow in May.

Cairngorm shop P1080752 Lower down the snow fell too but didn’t stick. The photo below is of a beautiful little loch in the Glenmore Forest Park, An Lochan Uaine the ‘green lochan’ (although in my photo it looks blue – it was really green!). ‘Lochan’ is Gaelic for ‘ a small loch, or lake’.