Meme: Teaser Tuesdays
Apr 26, 2010 Meme
TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:
- Grab your current read
- Open to a random page
- Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
- Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
My teaser for this week: “He [Thomas Cromwell] is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement.” – p. 31, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
This book has been sitting on my TBR list since last fall (along with a few others) and I’m so happy that I finally have the time to crack at 2009′s Man Booker winner. The synopsis sounds interesting and I’m looking forward to reading it. I’m not far in but from what I’ve read thus far it’s promising. My only (small) issue with it at the moment is the tense; I think this is the historian in me coming out but I find it a bit odd that the prose is written in present tense. But again, it’s just a minor kafuffle on my part, lol. Should be good! =D
Tags: meme: teaser tuesdays
Review: Amsterdam
Apr 26, 2010 Books
Amsterdam
By: Ian McEwan
On a chilly February day two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly’s lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence — Clive as Britain’s most successful modern composer, Vernon as editor of the broadsheet The Judge. But gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers too, notably Julian Garmony, the Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger poised to be the next prime minister. What happens in the aftermath of her funeral has a profound and shocking effect on all her lovers’ lives, and erupts in the most purely enjoyable fiction Ian McEwan has ever written.
This book has been on my want-to-read list for a very long time, probably around the time that I finished reading his book Atonement (which I absolutely loved to pieces; you can read my highly spoilerish review over here). I finally got my hands on it last week and read it last night; it’s a slim volume and I decided not to try updating my website layout so I just delved into the novel in one go. Spoilers ahoy!
Tags: books: fiction, books: review
Website: The Gallery is Back!
Apr 25, 2010 Website
Well, the school year has come to a close on my end and although I have plenty of things to take care of this summer (research for my major research project, work on improving my Russian), I have more time now to be creative, read, write and update my website =D Yay! I actually bought a massive html/website/programming book recently as I seem to have lagged behind in all things website-building. So hopefully the overhauls I make to the website over the summer will reflect the stuff I’ll be catching up on. I am however intent on updating the layout first as it’s been a while since I’ve updated it.
In the meantime, I revived and updated my gallery; this move was partly due to the fact that my flickr account warned me some time ago that I was hitting the max number of images I can upload to my account so I decided to move everything back to my website. Plus, I figured out some more controls on the Zenphoto gallery program so it’s more spiffy than last time, lol. So feel free to check it out and let me know what you think!
Click on the screencap or here to access the gallery
And that’s about it from me for now! It may take a while for me come up with a good layout (it’s been a while) and I’m also trying to catch up on some rest (definitely needed; I started feeling the after effects of the rather strained routine I put myself under these past two months after submitting my final assignment last week) and my TBR list so yeah, ’til next time! =)
Meme: Musing Mondays
Apr 25, 2010 Meme
Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about the war books
With yesterday being Anzac Day, I thought I’d ask a theme question this week. Are you a reader of war books? And if so, do you have any favourites?
I’ve noted this before to friends and colleagues but a lot of the novels I read tend to gravitate towards the 1930s/1940s/WWII period. I guess there’s something about the time and the setting that allows certain stories to be told and for certain human emotions and acts of courage (and acts alone) to be shown. Some of my favourite novels are set in this period: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, C.J. Samson’s Winter in Madrid, Daniel Silva’s The Unlikely Spy, David Benioff’s City of Thieves, Louis de Bernieres’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief but I’ve plenty of others as well (Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo, Paternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Nichol’s Transgression, etc.) So yeah, I guess I am an avid reader of novels set in a war period of sorts. xD
Tags: meme: musing mondays
Review: Possession
Apr 20, 2010 Books
This book has been sitting on my shelf since last autumn; didn’t get around to reading it because I was up in Ottawa for the fall semester so when I got back this past weekend, I figured it be one of the first books to tackle in my TBR list xD
Possession
By: A.S. Byatt
The only thing Maud Bailey and Roland Michell have in common is a love of Victorian poets. They’ve dedicated their lives to finding out as much as they can about two obscure poets when their paths unexpectedly cross. Their independent research reveals that their respective subjects once shared a passionate love affair. At first they’re upset that this information will change all their past research, but soon they become consumed by the romance of long-ago and work feverishly together to unearth every detail.
I heard of this book last year on GoodReads; a lot of the book groups I was a member of had read this book in their monthly reads and I heard praises of this book from people in my flist. So I decided to check it out. Have been trying to finish my final draft of my proposal but in the process I couldn’t put this book down, lol. Although I used it as my book for this week’s Teaser Tuesday, I ended up finishing it last night xD Spoilers ahoy!
Tags: books: fiction, books: review
Meme: Teaser Tuesdays
Apr 19, 2010 Meme
Greetings! I missed last week’s Teaser Tuesdays because I was frantically studying for my Russian final exam. But I’m back home now for the summer and cracking at my TBR list =)
TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:
- Grab your current read
- Open to a random page
- Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
- Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
My teaser for this week: “There was more pleasure for Roland and Maud in their walk, the next day, along the becks to the fosses. They walked out from Goathland and saw the threads and glassy interrupted fans of the Mallyan Sprout; they scrambled along river paths above the running peaty water, and crossed moorland,s crambling down again to riversides.” – p. 264, Possession by A.S. Byatt.
This book has been on my TBR list since autumn last year; I’ve heard a lot about this book on GoodReads over the past year and a lot of positive reviews so I decided to check it out. It’s pretty interesting with a lot of different types of medium used to convey the story (i.e. correspondence, biography exerpts, etc.) and it’s interesting not only to read as Maud and Roland piece together the story but also how the story itself unfolded in the past. My only gripe with it is the fact that it’s heavy on literary/poetic theory and feminism, but that’s just a personal academic preference of mine. Otherwise, it’s been pretty interesting so far! =)
Tags: meme: teaser tuesdays
