Tag Archives: books

Great opening paragraph 64… ‘True Grit’ #amreading #FirstPara

Leave a reply

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.”
Charles PortisFrom ‘True Grit’ by Charles Portis

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘The Big Sleep’ by Raymond Chandler
‘Brighton Rock’ by Graham Greene
‘The Ghost Road’ by Pat Barker

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-eB

#BookReview ‘The Pure in Heart’ by Susan Hill @susanhillwriter #crime

16 Replies

The nature of death, grieving and hope are examined in The Pure in Heart, the second Simon Serrailler novel by Susan Hill. To give these books a label – thriller, crime novel, detective novel – is to underplay the complexity of the subject. It is an examination of human nature. Susan HillA nine-year boy waits by the garden gate for his lift to school, but is never seen again. A severely handicapped young woman dies. Both families struggle with grief, reacting in different ways, ways which cause tension within the family. And involved in the mix is a local man, an ex-con newly released from prison, struggling to stay straight, struggling with the prejudices of his family. Reading this book will make you examine your own prejudices, your attitude to death and dying, it will make you as ‘what would I do if…’
The small cathedral town of Lafferton is like an extra character in Susan Hill’s Serrailler novels. Surrounded by wooden hills and deep ravines, it is at once brooding and at the same time reassuring.

Read my reviews of the other novels in the series:-
THE VARIOUS HAUNTS OF MEN #1SIMONSERRAILLER
THE RISK OF DARKNESS #3SIMONSERRAILLER
THE VOWS OF SILENCE #4SIMONSERRAILLER
THE SHADOWS IN THE STREET #5SIMONSERRAILLER
THE BETRAYAL OF TRUST #6SIMONSERRAILLER
A QUESTION OF IDENTITY #7SIMONSERRAILLER
THE SOUL OF DISCRETION #8SIMONSERRAILLER
THE COMFORTS OF HOME #9SIMONSERRAILLER
THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT #10SIMONSERRAILLER
A CHANGE OF CIRCUMSTANCE #11SIMONSERRAILLER

And also by Susan Hill, HOWARD’S END IS ON THE LANDING

If you like this, try:-
‘The Truth Will Out’ by Jane Isaac
‘No Other Darkness’ by Sarah Hilary #2MARNIEROME
‘A Fatal Crossing’ by Tom Hindle

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE PURE IN HEART by Susan Hill @susanhillwriter http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1oE via @SandraDanby 

Great opening paragraph 63… ‘Pride and Prejudice’ #amreading #FirstPara

1 Reply

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” jane austenFrom ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen

Learn about the first edition of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, first published in 1813.

Read more about Austen in Claire Tomalin’s biography, JANE AUSTEN: A LIFE.

If you’re a Jane Austen fan, try these two ‘extension’ novels by Molly Greeley:-
THE CLERGYMAN’S WIFE
THE HEIRESS

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ by Rachel Joyce
‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ by Carson McCullers
‘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:
#FirstPara PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by #JaneAusten http://wp.me/p5gEM4-8t via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Magicians’ by Lev Grossman @leverus #fantasy #magic

8 Replies

In the first sentence of The Magicians by Lev Grossman, Quentin Coldwater does a magic trick with a nickel. A human version of magic. A great opening to a new fantasy trilogy. Lev GrossmanAnother series about magic, I hear you ask? Well this is nothing like Harry Potter. Quentin is due to sit an entrance exam for Princeton when he wanders into the grounds of a mysterious school in upstate New York. In a large room full of unknown teenagers, he sits the oddest test he has ever known. Then he is told he has passed and is accepted at Brakebills, a school of magic. For the first few months his best friend is a glass marble on which he practises his magic.
This is an adult tale. Brakebills is not Hogwarts and Quentin is a young man on the cusp of adulthood, with lingering adolescent depression and lack of confidence. The teenage magicians practise their magic, get drunk and have sex. At his ‘youngest’ moments Quentin remembers the magical tales he loved as a child about a land called Fillory. When he is down, he wishes he could escape to Fillory. And at first, he thinks Brakebills might be Fillory. But it isn’t because Fillory, of course, is fictional.
There are three books in the series and out of necessity in this book Quentin learns his magic. There were times I wished it would move more quickly, the carrot of Fillory is dangled in front of Quentin so much. In Harry Potter – oh how Lev Grossman must be tired of the comparisons – the threat of Lord Voldemort hovers from the first pages. There is no dark threat hovering over Quentin, just teenage angst, teenage love, and a longing to escape his daily life into Fillory. When he does reach Fillory, will it be what he expects?

Click the title below to read my reviews of the next two novels in the trilogy:-
THE MAGICIAN KING #2THEMAGICIANS
THE MAGICIAN’S LAND #3THEMAGICIANS

If you like this, try:-
‘Divergent’ by Veronica Roth #1DIVERGENT
‘Insurgent’ by Veronica Roth #2DIVERGENT
‘Allegiant’ by Veronica Roth #3DIVERGENT

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE MAGICIANS by Lev Grossman @leverus via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1oy

#BookReview ‘The Various Haunts of Men’ by Susan Hill @susanhillwriter #crime

22 Replies

The first Simon Serrailler novel by Susan Hill was published in 2004. I recently read the eighth in the series and it made me want to revisit the beginnings of the character of Detective Inspector Serailler and the cathedral city of Lafferton in the first novel, The Various Haunts of Men. Susan HillI remembered two things, the enigmatic DI, and the misty spooky Hill, its ley lines and standing stones. Re-reading The Various Haunts of Men, the dichotomy of the setting was as I remembered it: cathedral, choir, close-knit community, beautiful countryside and looking over the city, The Hill. Benign and beautiful by day, spooky by night. One woman disappears, a private, quiet, hard-working woman. Next, a dog vanishes on The Hill. Alarm bells start to ring with the third disappearance, a young woman, plump, problem skin, depressed, who has recently developed an interest in alternative therapies. Characters are introduced and there is that extra frisson at the beginning of a series when every character is unknown: which are the victims, which is the murderer? With the luxury of ten years since my first reading, I did not remember the identity of victims or criminal.
Re-reading it, I wasn’t disappointed and it’s spurred me on to re-read the next.

Click the title below for my review of the other novels in this series:-
THE PURE IN HEART #2SIMONSERRAILLER
THE RISK OF DARKNESS #3SIMONSERRAILLER
THE VOWS OF SILENCE #4SIMONSERRAILLER
THE SHADOWS IN THE STREET #5SIMONSERRAILLER
THE BETRAYAL OF TRUST #6SIMONSERRAILLER
A QUESTION OF IDENTITY #7SIMONSERRAILLER
THE SOUL OF DISCRETION #8SIMONSERRAILLER
THE COMFORTS OF HOME #9SIMONSERRAILLER
THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT #10SIMONSERRAILLER
A CHANGE OF CIRCUMSTANCE #11SIMONSERRAILLER

And also by Susan Hill, HOWARD’S END IS ON THE LANDING

If you like this, try:-
‘Wolf’ by Mo Hayder
‘The Black Tower’ by PD James #5ADAMDALGLIESH
‘Deadly Descent’ by Charlotte Hinger #1LOTTIEALBRIGHT

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE VARIOUS HAUNTS OF MEN by Susan Hill @susanhillwriter http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1mn via @SandraDanby 

#BookReview ‘Some Luck’ by Jane Smiley #historical #familylife

5 Replies

It is 1920, the eve of Walter Langdon’s 25th birthday and he is walking the fields of his Iowa farm. The first two pages of Some Luck by Jane Smiley are a wonderful description of him watching a pair of owls nesting in a big elm tree. And so starts the first book in the ‘Last Hundred Years’ trilogy about the Langdon family. Chapter-by-chapter it tells of the family’s life, their farm, the ups and downs of daily life, births and deaths, and always the land.  Jane SmileyAt first it feels as if not much is happening. Smiley is so good at the detail: of Walter farming, Rosanna doing the laundry, babies being born, growing into toddlers and then pupils walking the track to the tiny school where they are taught with their neighbours in one classroom, all ages together. Steadily the chapters, and years, march on. The eldest child Frankie goes away to college and then to war, becoming a sniper in Africa and Europe. His younger brother Joe shows no inclination to leave the farm. Lillian, ‘God’s own gift’, the beautiful daughter, meets a man and goes to Washington DC. And so more babies arrive into the Langdon’s household, and the family’s life expands from Iowa as this next generation lives in a world
I came to this book fresh after reading A Thousand Acres and eager for more. Reading Jane Smiley is a little like reading a novel by Colm Tóibín. Both writers excel at the detail, building the story slowly, like layers of frost thickening on a window in winter which starts off looking cloudy and finishes as an intricate design. As a reader, I trust both authors to deliver in the end. Will I be reading the next two books in the trilogy? Definitely. Some Luck is a book to be read over a quiet winter weekend, hunkered down on the sofa with an endless supply of mugs of hot chocolate. Don’t read it in short snatches, it deserves more than that and it will get beneath

Click the title below to read my reviews of other novels by Jane Smiley:-
A DANGEROUS BUSINESS
A THOUSAND ACRES
EARLY WARNING #2LASTHUNDREDYEARS
GOLDEN AGE #3LASTHUNDREDYEARS

If you like this, try:-
‘Life Class’ by Pat Barker #1LIFECLASS
‘Rush Oh!’ by Shirley Barrett
‘The Museum of You’ by Carys Bray

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview SOME LUCK by Jane Smiley http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1m7 via @SandraDanby

Great opening paragraph 62… ‘The Impressionist’ #amreading #FirstPara

Leave a reply

“One afternoon, three years after the beginning of the new century, red dust which was once rich mountain soil quivers in the air. It falls on a rider who is making slow progress through the ravines which score the plains south of the mountains, drying his throat, filming his clothes, clogging the pores of his pink perspiring English face.”
Hari KunzruFrom ‘The Impressionist’ by Hari Kunzru

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Sacred Hearts’ by Sarah Dunant
‘Possession’ by AS Byatt
‘Death in Summer’ by William Trevor

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

#BookReview ‘The Anarchist Detective’ by Jason Webster @Jwebsterwriter #crime #Spain

4 Replies

The Anarchist Detective was the first of the Jason Webster detective series about Max Cámara that I read. It’s not the first in the series, but the third, though this wasn’t a problem, I didn’t feel a lack of back-story. Jason Webster Two story strands combine; a saffron scam, and unearthing the truth about Max’s great-grandfather in the Spanish Civil war [not much of a surprise that, for an author who has written non-fiction about the war]. But there was something missing, for me, something I couldn’t put my finger on. The plot was fine, the history was fine and no doubt accurately portrayed. It was only when I finished the book that I realized what my difficulty was: Max is a Spanish character, written by an Englishman. Albeit an Englishman who lives in Spain, is married to a Spaniard and who speaks the language fluently. But not a Spaniard and I think in this, very Spanish political, emotional, subject, that showed.
I can see a television series here, along the lines of Falcón based on Robert Wilson’s Seville detective Javier Falcón. I can picture the scene in the saffron village in La Mancha, very photogenic. Jason Webster will write a rich series of Max Cámara novels, I’m sure.

Read my reviews of other books in Webster’s Spanish detective series:-
OR THE BULL KILLS YOU #1MAXCÁMARA
A DEATH IN VALENCIA #2MAXCÁMARA
BLOOD MED #4MAXCÁMARA

If you like this, try:-
‘The Blind Man of Seville’ by Robert Wilson #1FALCÓN
‘The Pure in Heart’ by Susan Hill #2SIMONSERRAILLER
‘Eeny Meeny’ by MJ Arlidge #1HELENGRACE

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE ANARCHIST DETECTIVE by Jason Webster @Jwebsterwriter via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1dc

#BookReview ‘A Thousand Acres’ by Jane Smiley #contemporary #family

4 Replies

This is one of those books that I should have read years ago. I don’t know why I didn’t, and I wish I had. the latest book by Jane Smiley, Some Luck, is the first of a new trilogy and is currently sitting on my Kindle waiting to be read. But first, I felt I should read that book I wish I’d read years ago: A Thousand Acres. You know: the one that won the Pulitzer, the one that mirrors King Lear, etc etc. Jane SmileyThe setting is Iowa, remote farmland. The first page took me straight to that wonderful description of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s description of Kansas, more remote farmland. ‘The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there’.’
Smiley had my attention straight away. I was soon immersed in the detail of the Cook family’s daily life on their Iowa farm ‘out there’: the drainage of the land, spreading manure, moisture levels, the hogs, the purchase of a new tractor, yields, profit and loss. Overlaid over the groundwork of farming are the daily lives of the family members: Larry, the aging father, and the two daughters, Rose and Ginny and their husbands, who stayed on the farm. A peripheral character is Caroline, the third daughter, the one who got away, now a lawyer, who visits her father but doesn’t interact much with her sisters. Both farming sisters are used to tragedy: Rose is recovering from breast cancer, Ginny has suffered five miscarriages. But they get on with life, because that’s the pragmatic approach to life they were taught.
Then two things happen and everything changes. Out of the blue, Larry says he is leaving the thousand acre farm to Rose and Ginny, nothing to Caroline. And the son of a neighbouring farmer, who had gone to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, returns. From this point, the family slowly unravels as the traumatic past stories are told alongside the unfolding modern-day traumas, set against the empty Iowa horizon and a neighbourhood where there are no secrets.
I couldn’t put this book down although it is in no way a page-turning thriller. It’s all about the characters: I wanted to know what happened to them in the past as children that turned them into the adults they are now. Is family everything? Will they stay together and keep the thousand acres together? There is a new generation of Cook children, Rose has two daughters. Will the thousand acres be preserved for them to inherit, or will they escape the empty landscape of rural Iowa as Caroline did?

Click the title below to read my reviews of other novels by Jane Smiley:-
A DANGEROUS BUSINESS
SOME LUCK #1LASTHUNDREDYEARS
EARLY WARNING #2LASTHUNDREDYEARS
GOLDEN AGE #3LASTHUNDREDYEARS

If you like this, try:-
‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson
‘Love is Blind’ by William Boyd
‘Poor Caroline’ by Winifred Holtby

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview A THOUSAND ACRES by Jane Smiley via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1kk

Great opening paragraph…61

Leave a reply

haruki murakami - dance dance dance 10-6-13“I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel.

In these dreams, I’m there, implicated in some kind of ongoing circumstance. All indications are that I belong to this dream continuity.

The Dolphin Hotel is distorted, much too narrow. It seems more like a long, covered bridge. A bridge stretching endlessly through time. And there I am, in the middle of it. Someone else is there too, crying.

The hotel envelops me. I can feel its pulse, its heat. In dreams, I am part of the hotel.”
‘Dance Dance Dance’ by Haruki Murakami [translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum]