Tag Archives: am reading

Great opening paragraph 77… ‘Vanishing Acts’ #amreading #FirstPara

2 Replies

“I was six years old the first time I disappeared.
My father was working on a magic act for the annual Christmas show at the senior centre, and his assistant, the receptionist who had a real gold tooth and false eyelashes as thick as spiders, got the flu. I was fully prepared to beg my father to be part of the act, but he asked, as if I were the one who would be doing him a favour.”
Jodi PicoultFrom ‘Vanishing Acts’ by Jodi Picoult

Click the title to read my review of VANISHING ACTS, and try the #FirstPara of another novel by Jodi Picoult, NINETEEN MINUTES.

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘The Long Drop’ by Denise Mina 
‘The Guest Cat’ by Takashi Hiraide 
‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara VANISHING ACTS by @jodipicoult http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1GQ via @SandraDanby

Great opening paragraph 76… ‘Jack Maggs’ #amreading #FirstPara

3 Replies

“It was a Saturday night when the man with the red waistcoat arrived in London. It was, to be precise, six of the clock on the fifteenth of April in the year of 1837 that those hooded eyes looked out the window of the Dover coach and beheld, in the bright aura of gas light, a golden bull and an overgrown mouth opening to devour him – the sign of his inn, the Golden Ox.”
Peter Carey From ‘Jack Maggs’ by Peter Carey 

Read the #FirstPara of ILLYWHACKER, also by Peter Carey.

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Sea Glass’ by Anita Shreve 
‘Such a Long Journey’ by Rohinton Mistry 
‘Jane Eyre’ by Charlotte Bronte 

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara JACK MAGGS by Peter Carey http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1GN via @SandraDanby

Great opening paragraph 75… ‘Diary of an Ordinary Woman’ #amreading #FirstPara

Leave a reply

“26 November 1914. Father said if I want to keep a diary I must begin it on New Year’s Day. He said no one starts a diary in November. But New Year’s Day is five weeks away and I do not want to wait. I don’t see why I should either. Why should diaries have to start on 1st January. It is tidy, I admit, and I am a tidy person, but that is all.”
Margaret ForsterFrom ‘Diary of an Ordinary Woman’ by Margaret Forster

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Affinity’ by Sarah Waters
‘A Month in the Country’ by JL Carr
‘Armadillo’ by William Boyd

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara DIARY OF AN ORDINARY WOMAN by Margaret Forster http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1GK via @SandraDanby

Great opening paragraph 74… ‘The Last Juror’ #amreading #FirstPara

4 Replies

“After decades of patient mismanagement and loving neglect, The Ford County Times went bankrupt in 1970. The owner and publisher, Miss Emma Caudle, was ninety-three years old and strapped to a bed in a nursing home in Tupelo. The editor, her son Wilson Caudle, was in his seventies and had a plate in his head from the First War. A perfect circle of dark grafted skin covered the plate at the top of his long, sloping forehead, and throughout his adult life he had endured the nickname of Spot. Spot did this. Spot did that. Here, Spot. There, Spot.”
John GrishamFrom ‘The Last Juror’ by John Grisham

Read these #FirstParas also by John Grisham:-
THE PELICAN BRIEF
THE RAINMAKER

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Death in Summer’ by William Trevor
‘The Impressionist’ by Hari Kunzru
‘Lord Jim’ by Joseph Conrad

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara THE LAST JUROR by @JohnGrisham via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Fv

#BookReview ‘The Girls’ by Lisa Jewell @lisajewelluk #thriller

8 Replies

It’s a long time since I read a Lisa Jewell novel. I loved her first, Ralph’s Party, which still sits on my bookshelf along with four of her other books. I gave up reading somewhere about Vince and Joy, turned off by the pink chick lit branding and feeling that I had grown-up beyond the subject matter. Lisa JewellThen I heard that The Girls was ‘something different,’ and it is. Satisfying dark, mysterious, unspoken danger lurks above the heads of the girls – Grace and Pip. The setting is outwardly comforting: a communal garden surrounded by houses and apartments, where residents mingle and have barbecues together, where children roam safe from roads and strangers. But are they safe? And what is the threat?
The two girls and their mother move to an empty apartment after the family home is burnt down by their father. He is now in psychiatric care, they lost all their belongings and walk cautiously into this cliquey community where everyone seems to know everyone else. Grace and Pip unknowingly trample onto secrets and the dynamics of teenage relationships, their mother Clare stumbles around the edge of tangled adult relationships, struggling to be there for her daughters while dealing with the betrayal of her husband. And at the centre of daily life is the garden, the hub of the wheel around which this community turns.
Then one hot summer’s day, Grace’s 13th birthday, it all comes to a head.
I finished this in two sittings, reading late into the night. A satisfying family thriller with hints of the truth and plenty of dodgy things to be suspicious about.

And here are my review of two other thrillers by Lisa Jewell:-
I FOUND YOU
THEN SHE WAS GONE

If you like this, try:-
‘The Museum of Broken Promises’ by Elizabeth Buchan
‘Wolf Winter’’ by Cecilia Ekback
‘Five Days of Fog’ by Anna Freeman

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE GIRLS by Lisa Jewell @lisajewelluk via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Fm

Great Opening Paragraph 72… ‘Nineteen Minutes’ #amreading #FirstPara

2 Replies

“By the time you read this, I hope to be dead.
You can’t undo something that’s happened; you can’t take back a word that’s already been said out loud. You’ll think about me and wish that you had been able to talk me out of this. You’ll try to figure out what would have been the one right thing to say, to do. I guess I should tell you, Don’t blame yourself; this isn’t your fault, but that would be a lie. We both know that I didn’t get here by myself.”
Jodi Picoult From ‘Nineteen Minutes’ by Jodi Picoult

Read the first paragraph of VANISHING ACTS and my book review of VANISHING ACTS , also by Jodi Picoult.

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Sacred Hearts’ by Sarah Dunant
‘The L-Shaped Room’ By Lynn Reid Banks
‘Bel Canto’ by Ann Patchett

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara NINETEEN MINUTES by @jodipicoult http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1xt via @SandraDanby

Great Opening Paragraph 71… ‘Mara and Dann’ #amreading #FirstPara

Leave a reply

“The scene that the child, then the girl, then the young woman tried so hard to remember was clear enough in its beginnings. She had been hustled – sometimes carried, sometimes pulled along by the hand – through a dark night, nothing to be seen but stars, and then she was pushed into a room and told, Keep quiet, and the people who had brought her disappeared. She had not taken notice of their faces, what they were, she was too frightened, but they were her people, the People, she knew that. The room was nothing she had known. It was a square, built of large blocks of rock. She was inside one of the rock houses. She had seen them all her life. The rock houses were where they lived, the Rock People, not her people, who despised them. She had often see the Rock People walking along the roads, getting quickly out of the way when they saw the People; but a dislike of them that she had been taught made it hard to look much at them. She was afraid of them, and thought them ugly.”
Doris LessingFrom ‘Mara and Dann’ by Doris Lessing

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘A Bouquet of Barbed Wire’ by Andrea Newman
‘After You’d Gone’ by Maggie O’Farrell
‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara MARA AND DANN by Doris Lessing http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1xp via @SandraDanby

Great opening paragraph 68… ‘A Change of Climate’ #amreading #FirstPara

Leave a reply

“One day when Kit was ten years old, a visitor cut her wrists in the kitchen. She was just beginning on this cold, difficult form of death when Kit came in to get a glass of milk.”
Hilary MantelFrom ‘A Change of Climate’ by Hilary Mantel

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Dance Dance Dance’ by Haruki Murakami
‘The God of Small Things’ by Arundhati Roy
‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote 12

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara A CHANGE OF CLIMATE by Hilary Mantel via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-10z

Great opening paragraph 67… ‘American Psycho’ #amreading #FirstPara

5 Replies

“Abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Misérables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, “Be My Baby” on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.”
Bret Easton Ellis From ‘American Psycho’ by Brett Easton Ellis

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘After You’d Gone’ by Maggie O’Farrell
‘To Have and Have Not’ by Ernest Hemingway
‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara AMERICAN PSYCHO by Brett Easton Ellis via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-10w

 

Great Opening Paragraph 66… ‘Animal Farm’ #amreading #FirstPara

3 Replies

“Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side, he lurched across the yard, kicking off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs Jones was already snoring.”
George OrwellFrom ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell

Read this #FirstPara from 1984, also by George Orwell.

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Queen Camilla’ by Sue Townsend
‘Middlesex’ by Jeffrey Eugenides
‘Herzog’ by Saul Bellow

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-kL