Yearly Archives: 2013

Great opening paragraph 13… ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“Sunday 1 January. 9st 3 [but post-Christmas], alcohol units 14 [but effectively covers 2 days as 4 hours of party was on New Year’s Day], cigarettes 22, calories 5424.”
Helen FieldingFrom ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ by Helen Fielding

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Moon Tiger’ by Penelope Lively
‘Freedom’ by Jonathan Franzen
‘The Sense of an Ending’ by Julian Barnes

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY by Helen Fielding http://wp.me/p5gEM4-7S via @SandraDanby

Great opening paragraph…13

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Bridget Jones's Diary

“Sunday 1 January. 9st 3 [but post-Christmas], alcohol units 14 [but effectively covers 2 days as 4 hours of party was on New Year’s Day], cigarettes 22, calories 5424.”

‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ by Helen Fielding

Great opening paragraph 12 ‘In Cold Blood’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there’. Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveller reaches them.”
Truman Capote From ‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote 

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Fortunes of War’ by Olivia Manning
‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ by Thomas Hardy
‘Divisadero’ by Michael Ondaatje

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-4a5 via @SandraDanby

Great opening paragraph 11… ‘Brighton Rock’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong – belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen’s Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.”
Graham Greene From ‘Brighton Rock’ by Graham Greene 

Try one of these First Paras & discover a new author:-
‘Norwegian Wood’ by Haruki Murakami
‘Enduring Love’ by Ian McEwan
‘True Grit’ by Charles Portis

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara BRIGHTON ROCK by Graham Greene https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-4a6 via @SandraDanby

Great opening paragraph 10… ‘Sacred Hearts’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“Before the screaming starts, the night silence of the convent is alive with its own particular sounds.”
Sarah DunantFrom ‘Sacred Hearts’ by Sarah Dunant

Try one of these #FirstPara & discover a new author:-
‘A Farewell to Arms’ by Ernest Hemingway
‘Time Will Darken It’ by William Maxwell
‘Nineteen Minutes’ by Jodi Picoult

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara SACRED HEARTS by Sarah Dunant http://wp.me/p5gEM4-f0 via @SandraDanby

Great opening paragraph…10

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Sacred Hearts - OP
“Before the screaming starts, the night silence of the convent is alive with its own particular sounds.”
‘Sacred Hearts’ by Sarah Dunant

A book I love… The Wind in the Willows

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One of the reasons I still love my copy of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, is the actual edition: a green cloth-covered hardback with a green paper cover. Kenneth Grahame I can remember the excitement at being given a hardback book which in 1969 was expensive. I was more used to devouring as many Famous Five and Secret Seven books as possible that we could pick up secondhand at the school fete: my reading at that age was voracious. Kenneth GrahameThe book was a birthday gift from my parents for my ninth birthday, the birthday greeting inside is written in my elder sister’s neat italic script. Kenneth GrahameIt never dawned on me that the language was old-fashioned – Oddsboddikins! – I just lapped it up. Today the book sits on my bookshelf between Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, and Stamboul Train by Graham Greene.
Kenneth Grahame

 

‘The Wind in the Willows’ by Kenneth Grahame [UK: Wordsworth Editions]

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THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS by Kenneth Grahame http://wp.me/p5gEM4-cZ #bookreview via @SandraDanby

A book I love… Wind in the Willows

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One of the reasons I love this book still is the actual edition: a green cloth-covered hardback with a green paper cover. wind in the willows1 I can remember the excitement at being given a hardback book which in 1969 was expensive. I was more used to devouring as many Famous Five and Secret Seven books as possible that we could pick up secondhand at the school fete: my reading at that age was voracious. wind in the willows3The book was a birthday gift from my parents for my ninth birthday, the birthday greeting inside is written in my elder sister’s neat italic script. wind in the willows2It never dawned on me that the language was old-fashioned – Oddsboddikins! – I just lapped it up. Today the book sits on my bookshelf between Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, and Stamboul Train by Graham Greene.
‘Wind in the Willows’ by Kenneth Grahame

My Top 5… the Booker winners I re-read, and why

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All lists are completely subjective, and I am not claiming to have read every Booker winner. So this list is a little like a celebrity’s ‘Desert Island Discs’, it has changed in recent years and will no doubt change again. There are more recent Booker winners which I love, Hilary Mantel for example, but have yet to re-read and so strictly they do not belong here. In no particular order, my current Top 5 are:-

AS Byatt Possession Possession The plaiting together of storylines and points of view in two centuries, it showed me how to plot

Yann Martel Life of Pi life of Pi The sheer magical ambition of it, a tiger in a boat

Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children midnight's children The scope, the exotic setting, what a way of recounting the birth of a new country

Penelope Lively Moon Tiger Moon Tiger (2) Perhaps my all-time favourite, for its gentle romance, its clever manipulation of point of view, the handling of death and grief. And she gets the dialogue spot-on too

Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda oscar and lucinda The first Peter Carey I read, the first of many, and picked up on impulse because it had won the Booker. It introduced me to Australian writers

Which 5 Booker winners do you re-read?

Great opening paragraph 9… ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I’ve changed all the names.”
Kurt Vonnegut JrFrom ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ by Kurt Vonnegut Jr

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Spies’ by Michael Frayn
‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’ by Haruki Murakami
‘Bel Canto’ by Ann Patchett

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr http://wp.me/p5gEM4-eX via @SandraDanby