Teaser Tuesday - 23 March

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!

I'm still in the midst of Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin but I've been needing some light relief, the book is far too dark to read at bedtime and so this week's teaser is from Lily Prior's La Cucina:

I was filled with so much love for Bartolomeo that I feared I would burst if something did not happen soon. What that something was I did not know, for Mama kept me in a state of such complete innocence that at the age of seventeen I still did not know where babies came from, and thought that menstruation was the monthly consequence of eating too many artichokes.

Innocence, librarianship and cooking in rural Sicily. A sort of Italian equivalent of 'Like Water for Chocolate'. From the comments on Amazon it looks as if the resemblance to that book is a little too close! I'm also reading this as part of my 2010 Bibliophilic books challenge.

Teaser Tuesday - 16 Feb

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 fever that weakens your perception as it sharpens your imagination turns the sickroom into someplace new, both familiar and strange; monsters come grinning out of the patterns on the curtains and the carpet, and chairs, tables, bookcases, and wardrobes burst out of their normal shapes and become mountains and buildings and ships you can almost touch although they're far away. Through the long hours of the night you have the church clock for company and the rumble of the occasional passing car that throws its headlights across the walls and ceiling.

Ah yes the memory of childhood sicknesses - yet another re-read of the Reader by Bernhard Schlink a mediation on German wartime guilt - I'm following the Bibliophilic books challenge and this is the first!

A reading meta-challenge!

I've not done a reading challenge for a bit - I tried one in the summer but it rather ran into the sand. So with a New Year approaching and finding something that appealed on Joy's blog so Lesley at A Life in Books comes a challenge to read a number of books about reading during the year 2010, so books about books. It is fairly flexible and there are 3 levels:

• Bookworm (read three books)
• Litlover (read six books)
• Bibliomaniac (read twelve books)

Not sure what I'll read yet (or how many) but I will tag relevant posts with the 'challenge' and 'Bibliophilic' tags. Schlink's the Reader is all I can think of at the moment (and I've read it but would enjoy a re-read!) but the subject area appeals...
If it appeals to you, head over there and sign up!
(only a few more posts to beat last years record - for me - number of blog entries...excuse me while I witter!)
(Feb 2010 - fixed the link to Lesley's original post! - am about to get around to this!)

Allocation failure!

Sometime ago, I blogged that I was going to attempt the True Harbour Take a Chance reading challenge (I see the challenge is actually based at Find Your Next Book Here). Well, the challenge expires at the end of November and so far it is still only the one part of challenge completed. This week I returned to the items and looked at number 2:

Random Word. Go to this random word generator and generate a random word. Find a book with this word in the title. Read the book and write about it.

My word is 'allocation' and I think it will be a challenge(!), I've drawn a blank on anything readable at the library. If anyone can think of a book with the word 'allocation' in the title which isn't on some abstruse area of economics I'd be very grateful. I suppose there might be some - not too mind-numbing books on computing (IP address allocation?) - wake up at the back! - or mathematics? All suggestions very gratefully received (email or by commenting)!!
Otherwise I shall hastily move on to challenge three.