Tuesday Teaser

Must keep up, must keep up! Here's this Tuesday's Teaser, which is a quick blip from wherever in whatever book I happen to be reading on Tuesdays. In this exerpt, the young witch-wizard-maybe-heroine Eskarina is perched in a tree, yelling to her brothers below. Terry Pratchett...gotta love him!

""If you don't want me to come then I'll come,' she said. This sort of thing passes for logic between sibblings."

--from Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett.

And there you have it. I love me some Pratchett, especially the ones with Granny Weatherwax. Or Death. Both are solid bets for a laugh.

Tuesday Teaser

Almost forgot! This week's tease is from Too Much Happiness, a collection of short stories. Here we go...

"When I told Charlene about her we had gotten into the deeper reaches of our conversation--that conversation which seems to only have been broken when we swam or slept. Verna was not so solid an offering, not so vividly repulsive, as Charlene's brother's pumping pimpled bum, and I remember saying that she was awful in a way that I could not describe." --from "Child's Play"  by Alice Munro

Tuesday Teaser

This week's teaser is from an author I've not yet read. I like the writing style, and even like the way the story is meandering about...but I still have no idea what to think of it, lol. Anyway...

Let's get right to it!

"The startle came into Steve's eyes and he jumped up from the table and cracked his head on the crossbeam, heading for the door behind Sess even as she dashed into the new room to look out the window above the bed, where she could get a view of the garden and this strange white element beating against the green of the leaves and the black nullity of the plastic. She had a moment, only that--seconds--to register the hulking dark form grazing there in the midst of the windowblown vegetable garden like an overfed cow, and there was the report of the rifle and the thing went down without a fuss, without a whimper, three hundred fifty pounds of meat, fur and fat delivered right up to them, right in their own garden, and she hardly had time to register the joy and triumph of it when she spotted the cub."  Drop City, by T.C. Boyle

Tuesday Teaser

I know, I know. I've partially fallen off the blogging bandwagon. But I'm back now! Promise! Woot!

And so we come to the Tuesday Teaser: today's random-page tease is.....


"I voted for Dick Gregory in '68, and for "No" in '64 ... but this one is different, and since McGovern is so goddamn maddeningly inept with the kind of words he needs to make people understand what he's up to,  it will save a lot of time here--and strain on my weary head--to remember Bobby Kennedy's ultimate characterization of Richard Nixon, in  a speech at Vanderbilt University in the spring of 1968, not long before he was murdered.

'Richard Nixon,' he said, 'represents the dark side of the American spirit.'" --The Great Shark Hunt, by Hunter S. Thompson


Hmmm....well now! What are you folks reading?

Tuesday Teaser

I just finished a book this evening and loved it. Without further ado.....


"'Why did she want a coal miner if she could've had you?' And he said, 'Because when he sings...even the birds stop to listen.'"--The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

That's all you get, folks! Get reading~!

Tuesday Teaser

It's that time of the week again, and this go-round I've been digging into some D. H. Lawrence. Since it's poetry, the tease I'll post will be two stanzas, rather than two sentences or lines. Because two sentences or lines just wouldn't be enough!


Drumroll, please...


"The night turns slowly round,
Swift trains go by in a rush of light;
Slow trains steal past.
This train beats anxiously, outward bound.

But I am not here.
I am away, beyond the scope of this turning;
There, where the pivot is, the axis
of all this gear."
                              --"Going Back" by D. H. Lawrence

Tuesday Teaser

...and I have the creeping crud. Just so you know. It's awful.

*sigh*

But that does mean I've been doing plenty of reading, as I convalesce--read cough uncontrollably--in bed! Here's the tease for the week, from a nonfiction must-read:

"'Once I dreamed,' declared the little boy, 'that I was captured by cannon balls. They all began to jump and yell.'" The Hero With A Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell

Odd, right? Just a tidbit of the weirdo anecdotes you get to read about in this book, and who doesn't love weirdo anecdotes, especially in regards to nature of story telling?

Tuesday Teaser

It's that time again! This week's tease is from one of my favorite authors:

"The feeling of love is so crucial to our species it is excessive, like labor pain. Lasting love is an act of will."
--The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard

Love, love, love Annie Dillard. The book isn't what I was expecting, but then I don't know exactly what I was expecting. It's an altogether good read. Toodles!

Tuesday Teaser

I love it when tourists leave behind brand new, uncracked-spine books for yours truly to find and begin reading! I've not yet read this author, and I'm really digging the quirky Southern voice.

As for the tease...

"Every morning she sat at her table under the light, painting tiny single things on cheap paper, and every afternoon she gathered them up, looked them over, and threw them away.

Sometimes people are uneasy when they meet strangers at Dumpsters beside country roads, miles from a town--the dark woods in the background, the sinister-looking shiny black bags, frightening glittery things in the sand, the closest building a dessereted church on a hilld around the bend--so Roger stood back to giver her a comfortable distsnace and waited while she squatted in the mud, lining her little paintings up against the flange at the base of the Dumpster." --Quite a Year for Plums, by Bailey White

Tuesday Teaser

Ack! Surprise of all surprises, I got behind! Here's Tuesday's Teaser for you; a nice classy winter selection:

"What is natural in me is natural in many other men, I infer, and so I am not afraid to write that I never had loved Steerforth better than when the ties that bound me to him were broken. In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was brillliant and good in him." --David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

Viola! Happy holiday reading, everyone!

Tuesday Teaser

I almost forgot! Here's this week's Tuesday Teaser, an exerpt from a fun kid's series, 100 Cupboards. These lines are from a letter to one of the character's daughters, as it is expected they will never be in the same world or the same time period ever again. *sniffle, sniffle*

"If you grow old someplace without me and find some man who's my better, tuck some tumbleweed into your bouquet for me. I'm nothing pretty, and I've always been out of place, but something of me belongs there."--N.D. Wilson, Dandelion Fire, Book 2 of the 100 Cupboards series.

Viola!

Tuesday Teaser

Today's tease comes from another young adult book. Though I don't care for the movie, I'm quite pleased with the read. What can I say? I'm backwards. When I was the technical young-reader age I was reading all the big bad heavy books. Guess I thought I was too cool, lol. You know, like when you're a kid and you go through the "I'm too cool for cartoons" phase, even though ten years later you'll plunk your ass down every week/night/whatever and geek out on the latest Adult Swim nonsensical toontherapy. Anyway...

So yeah, I like kid books. Fantasies, adventures, princess stories, all that.

Today's tease:

"I don't know how she managed to pour the words out while smiling so hard, revealing the largest teeth I've ever seen. She must be excellent at cracking nuts." --Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

To clarify, I still read big bad heavy books. Just never seems to happen on Tuesdays, lol.

Tuesday Teaser

So today I'm rereading an oldie but a goodie (for me, at least) .. I admit I should probably be reading up for NANO instead, but...err.. *sigh* I just love Arthuriana. And a retelling from a powerful female perspective? Gotta love that! Several liberties may have been taken with the tale, but I tire of all the damsels-in-distress of the Vulgate cycle, what can I say?

Ready?

"Things were not always as they seemed, it might be that the reel went around the thread, as the thread went round itself, over and over, spinning like a serpent...like a dragon in the sky...if she were a man and could ride out with the Caerleon legion, at least she need not sit and spin, spin, spin, round and round...but even the Caerleon legion went round the Saxons, and the Saxons went round them, round and round, as the blood went round in their veins, red blood flooding, flooding...spilling over the hearth--

Morgaine heard her own shriek only aftyer it shattered the silence in the room. She dropped the spindle, which rolled away into the blood which flooded crimson, spilling, spurting over the hearth... ."  Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Tuesday Teaser

And now, for your friendly weekly tease! I'm still reading the Atwood book, but I did pull out another for this morning's coffee, as a refresher course. I'm betting many of you will recognize it.

Here's the tease:

"Thank heaven that we have found our dear child!" and he told his wife to keep the scythe out of the way, lest Tom Thumb should be hurt with it. Then he drew near and struck the wolf such a blow on the head that he
fell down dead; and then he fetched a knife and a pair of scissors, slit up the wolf's body, and let out the little fellow."  --"Tom Thumb," from the Household Stirues by the Brothers Grimm.

For anyone wondering what a Tuesday Teaser is, check here.

Tuesday Teaser

Well, I've only just started the book; I'm still on the first page even, but I liked it from the very first line. Am I going to tell you the first line? Nope. 'Cuz I'm mean like that.

Instead, you get a random teaser, somewhere mid-bookish:

"Snowman has a clear image of his mother – of Jimmy’s mother – sitting at the kitchen table, still in her bathrobe when he came home from school for his lunch. She would have a cup of coffee in front of her, untouched; she would be looking out the window and smoking."--Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.

Happy reading, everyone!

Tuesday Teaser

Err...I'm afraid the only book my nose has been in today is the AP Stylebook *grin*, so I cheated and whipped out an oldie-but-a-goodie.

Any Whitman fans in the blogosphere? Show of hands, please? *looking intently around* Ahh, there you are. All the cool, baddass, readerly-and-writerly-type-people squished into the front row with your reading glasses and your awkward little ticks and your notepads. Okay, not all of you have reading glasses. I'm just projecting a little.

Anyway, since this is a poetry exerpt, I'm not going by sentences, just a few strophes:

"Recorders ages hence,
Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior,
        I will tell you what to say of me,
Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest
        lover,
The friend the lover's portraitl of whom his friend his lover was
        fondest,
Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean
        of love within him, and freely pour'd it forth"  --Recorders Ages Hence, in Leaves and Grass, by Walt Whitman

Tuesday Teaser

I'm knee-deep in the grunt work of research for NANOWRIMO--luckily, I get to read about beautiful, driven ballerinas (every little girl's wish...err...at least, every little girl who is clumsy, and a tomboy, and a bookworm. Much safer to read about ballet than to try and pull it off physically, you see.). On that note, anyone who knows of good autobiographies or histories of ballet, please be sure to share!

Here's the tease; the subject is Dame Alicia Markova, world renowned prima:

"It was at this time that the Manchester Guardian wrote about Giselle: 'It is not necessary to say that Markova is a dancer of very great genius, and yet the scene in which she realizes, as the program charmingly phrases it, that *she has bestowed the fullness of her virgin love on one who can never be hers, and goes quietly and convincingly mad, owes less to her dancing than to her acting. Markova, one thinks, could be a great Ophelia, without a movement of her body. And yet it is precisely because she made her body reproduce a life- less travesty of the dance she had so bewitchingly executed with her lover ten minutes before that she achieved her effect.'" --Alicia Markova: Her Life and Art by Anton Dolin

And I'm going to try some more high-tech witchery and post you all a Youtube clip of Markova dancing Giselle. All the clips of her and Anton together were rather blurry; this is one of the best I've found:





 I can't wait until I'm onto Anna Pavlova's stuff; "The Dying Swan" is absolutely stunning....Yeah, I'm in geek-out mode.

Tuesday Teaser

Well, my head may still be pounding but I think the worst of that summer bug has passed now; hooray! Now I'm behind again...gah. This morning I began A Wrinkle In Time; it's one of those I kept meaning to read when I was a kid, and just somehow never got around to it. No time like the present, is there?

Here's the tease; it's from a discussion between Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, Mrs. Whatsit, and Charles, Calvin and Meg, of the abstract principle "tesseract":

" 'Well, the fifth dimension's a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.'"A Wrinkle In Time by Madeline L'Engle
 

Last week's TCE story still pending; I didn't do much writing this weekend. Didn't do much of anything. Lol. Except moan and groan and complain. Ha! True though.

If anyone has good recommendations for ballet books (preferably about the art itself, or biographies), please let me know.

Tuesday Teaser

Though it's technically a re-read, it's been so long since my first perusal I barely remember it. Frankly, I remember the writing style being much more refined when I read it the first time; I find myself glazing over large chunks of text. But it is still an enjoyable read all the same, if not so good as I remember.

Here's the tease:

"This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely. During the rest of the spring and all that summer following the letter, I felt like a child lost on a lake in the fog." Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Walden


Incidentally, if any of you are geeks like me and are curious about what real Kyoto geiko and maiko culture is like now, there's a pretty neat BBC production that follows a young girl, then named Yukina, during maiko training. She's now been a full geiko since ... hmm ... October of last year, I think. Here's the link: 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrDGTUm2vBc

Tuesday Teaser

Today's (err--tonight's) Tuesday Teaser is from one of the Anita Blake books. Vampires, cheesy sex, metaphysical woopsies and the like; you know, all that jazz. This snippet is from Blood Noir, and is classic Anita. Must say though, I found this book to be one of the weaker ones of the series. Here you are:


"Frankly, all grenades scared me, but something that burned even in water would be truly bad news to the
undead of any kind. It would even work on zombies and ghouls, which are both so much harder to kill than vamps." Laurell K. Hamilton