“James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.”
‘Goldfinger’ by Ian Fleming
Great opening paragraph… 6
Leave a reply
A book I love… Stig of the Dump
To my sadness, I haven’t got my original copy of this book. I read it when I was about 9 or 10, I guess, and it opened up a new world of possibilities to me. That you could be free to live your own life, free of adults, free of rules, free to imagine, free to believe. The writer Clive King grew up in a house near a chalk pit, so I’d like to think he did actually meet Stig. I re-read it recently and the story was just as fresh. It was published 40 years ago but it hasn’t aged at all.
‘Stig of the Dump’ by Clive King
Great opening paragraph 5… ‘Moon Tiger’ #amreading #FirstPara
” ‘I’m writing a history of the world,’ she says. And the hands of the nurse are arrested for a moment; she looks down at this old woman, this old ill woman. ‘Well, my goodness,’ the nurse says. ‘That’s quite a thing to be doing, isn’t it?’ And then she becomes busy again, she heaves and tucks and smooths – ‘Upsy a bit, dear, that’s a good girl – then we’ll get you a cup of tea.’ ”
From ‘Moon Tiger’ by Penelope Lively
Read the #FirstPara of FAMILY ALBUM, another novel by Penelope Lively.
Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Spies’ by Michael Frayn
‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue
‘After You’d Gone’ by Maggie O’Farrell
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara MOON TIGER by Penelope Lively via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-7w
Great opening paragraph…5
“‘I’m writing a history of the world,’ she says. And the hands of the nurse are arrested for a moment; she looks down at this old woman, this old ill woman. ‘Well, my goodness,’ the nurse says. ‘That’s quite a thing to be doing, isn’t it?’ And then she becomes busy again, she heaves and tucks and smooths – ‘Upsy a bit, dear, that’s a good girl – then we’ll get you a cup of tea.'”
‘Moon Tiger’ by Penelope Lively
Great opening paragraph… 4 ‘Sophie’s World’ #amreading #FirstPara
“Sophie Amundsen was on her way home from school. She had walked the first part of the way with Joanna. They had been discussing robots. Joanna thought the human brain was like an advanced computer. Sophie was not certain she agreed. Surely a person was more than a piece of hardware?”
From ‘Sophie’s World’ by Jostein Gaarder
Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ by Carson McCullers
‘The Sense of an Ending’ by Julian Barnes
‘That They May Face the Rising Sun’ by John McGahern
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara SOPHIE’S WORLD by Jostein Gaarder http://wp.me/p5gEM4-4S via @SandraDanby
Great opening paragraph…4
Sophie Amundsen was on her way home from school. She had walked the first part of the way with Joanna. They had been discussing robots. Joanna thought the human brain was like an advanced computer. Sophie was not certain she agreed. Surely a person was more than a piece of hardware?
‘Sophie’s World’ by Jostein Gaarder
Great opening paragraph 3… ‘Herzog’ #amreading #FirstPara
“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.”
From ‘Herzog’ by Saul Bellow
Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Enduring Love’ by Ian McKewan
‘Lord of the Flies’ by William Golding
‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ by Rachel Joyce
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara HERZOG by Saul Bellow http://wp.me/p5gEM4-4G via @SandraDanby
Great opening paragraph… 3
“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.”
Herzog, Saul Bellow
#BookReview ‘The Last Runaway’ by @Tracy_Chevalier #historical
Tracy Chevalier is so skilled at getting under the skin of the protagonist in a specific period whether it’s a 19th century fossil collector or a 15th century Belgian weaver, you always believe her. Honor Bright is a real person from page 1 of The Last Runaway and you are rooting for her. 
The book tackles a difficult subject: the rights and wrongs of helping escaping slaves, and the moral issue this poses for Ohio’s Quakers. Honor struggles to understand this sometimes frightening new country with its huge skies and geometrical roads, forthright people and different social rules. Even the air seems strange. “I feel when I am in it as if the air around me has shifted and is not the same air I breathed and moved in back in England, but is some other substance,” she writes to her parents.
Chevalier does her research thoroughly, but feels no need to wave the depth of her research in her reader’s face. Instead it informs every simple description. Woven throughout the book is Honor’s sewing of quilts. Even this is different in Ohio where Honor’s calm nature and precise sewing is admired by the local hat-wearing ladies, but her needle workmanship is deemed overly exact for the local Quaker ladies who prefer to quickly sew appliqué quilts rather than take time to plan traditional patchwork designs.
Strong women play a key role in the book. Honor is a strong character, though perhaps she does not know it. Belle Mills, the local milliner is strong too. Honor describes Belle, “If women were meant to look like doves these days, Belle resembled a buzzard.” The quilt Honor most admires is owned and made by Mrs Reed, a small black woman who decorates her hat with fresh wildflowers.
Read my reviews of Tracy Chevalier’s other novels:-
A SINGLE THREAD
AT THE EDGE OF THE ORCHARD
NEW BOY
THE GLASSMAKER
If you like this, try:-
‘The Signature of All Things’ by Elizabeth Gilbert
‘The Knife with the Ivory Handle’ by Cynthia Bruchman
‘Summertime’ by Vanessa Lafaye
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE LAST RUNAWAY by @Tracy_Chevalier via @SandraDanby https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-1iN
Great opening paragraph 2… ‘Middlesex’ #amreading #FirstPara
“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr Peter Luce’s study, ‘Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,’ published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated ‘Genetics and Heredity.’ That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes.” 
From ‘Middlesex’ by Jeffrey Eugenides
Read my review of THE MARRIAGE PLOT, also by Jeffrey Eugenides.
Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘American Psycho’ by Brett Easton Ellis
‘Astonishing Splashes of Colour’ by Clare Morrall
‘Queen Camilla’ by Sue Townsend
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara MIDDLESEX by Jeffrey Eugenides http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2q via @SandraDanby
SANDRA DANBY'S BOOK REVIEWS 