Teaser Tuesday - Sept 30

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author 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!

The salami and olives seemed to have disappeared: inroads had been made into the ciabatta. Mentally he substituted grapes for the sliced oranges with cointreau he had planned. His attention was claimed in a quite other direction.

Taking another sentence to the end of the paragraph - another teaser from our book group book for the month. As with the last teaser - choices!

Mutterings - Sept 28

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. 20 :: 20
2. Spark :: (fly) upwards (from the Old Testament book of Job)
3. Hangnail :: and I
4. Distant :: Relation
5. Muffin :: Mule I didn't realise (or had forgotten the BBC had recently revived this)
6. Compute :: Does not
7. Bangs :: Explosions
8. Mattress :: Springs
9. Tense :: Future
10. Sarah :: Rachel

Teaser Tuesday - Sept 23

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author 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 this spectacular and, it seemed, defining reproach he felt he had only two options. One was to cultivate the life of the mind.

Anita Brookner's Strangers - I'm afraid option 2 doesn't appear for quite a few sentences so you'll have to remain teased both to the reproach and his other option! This is our book group of the month which I am, at last, getting down to! Here's Hilary Mantel's review of the book in the Guardian:

Sustained only by grilled sole, the pale repast of the dead, he haunts galleries and museums. Then, in the hopeless cause of cheering himself up, he locks up his gloomy flat and takes off to Venice. .... Each book [of Brookner] is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night.

Mutterings - Sept 21

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Equality :: Justice
2. Strappy :: Underground (probably via the straps for holding onto)
3. Kitten :: Sex
4. Program :: begin (showing my pascal roots!)
5. Inventory :: List
6. Choice :: Road less travelled (Frost - though the word choice never appears in that poem and neither do my associations!)
7. Scuba :: Diving
8. Purchase :: Order
9. Promotion :: Value
10. Organization :: Corporate

Teaser Tuesday - Sept 16

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author 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!

Soap left streaks on the black tiles. The first, wet rub was important for loosening the dirt, but it was the second bit that really counted, passing the wrung cloth over the floor in one supple, unbroken movement ... There!

More 1920's detail from Sarah Waters The Paying Guests and oozing with sensuality. Here's a review:

Frances Wray doesn’t know the first thing about being a landlady. The first thing about being a landlady is that under no circumstances should you sleep with your young married female lodger, especially if it’s 1922. But given that Frances is the protagonist of a novel by Sarah Waters, a torrid lesbian affair is perhaps only to be expected. The question in Waters’ new book, The Paying Guests, is just how spectacularly Frances’ decision will lead to disaster—and whether or not she will find a path through the wreckage to the other side.

An incoherent mumbling of ice-floes

I'm in the midst of reading (very slowly!) Thomas Merton's Journal for 1939-41 and last night I found this sentence:

Then the Archbishop of Canterbury, smiling in his sleep, announces like the incoherent mumbling of ice-floes breaking up in the wastes of the Antarctic, 'You know Russia is gravitating back towards religion. The people will insensibly return to God because they have to.'

Wishful thinking then, wishful thinking by some on the right now. Merton was obviously not a fan of Cosmo Gordon Lang!

Mutterings - Sept 14

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Men :: Women
2. Partial :: Eclipse
3. Expenses :: Scandal
4. Notification :: Popup
5. Bubble wrap :: Squeezable
6. Speech :: Direct
7. Rumble :: West Side Story
8. Sounds :: Gong
9. Sweaty :: Wrist band
10. Mud :: Slide

Mutterings - Sept 7

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Bubbles :: Squeak
2. Urges :: Primal
3. Doorknob :: Broomstick
4. Insipid :: Stew
5. Freckles :: Arm
6. Leafy :: Glade
7. Volkswagon :: Golf
8. Scrap :: Metal
9. Illuminate :: Display
10. Headboard :: Bed

Teaser Tuesday - Sep 2

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author 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!

It was as if a giant mouth had sucked a bag of boiled sweets and then given the house a lick. The faded carpet in her mother's old bedroom was lost beneath faded pseudo-Persian rugs.

Wonderful imagery and dripping with 1920's detail is Sarah Water's The Paying Guests, you just have this feeling that it is going to end badly!