Category Archives: Meme

Tuesday Teaser: The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove.

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

As much as I’d rather be looking at different options for redecorating my kitchen, weighing the virtues of Kohler vs. Grohe, and such, I can’t afford to do more than fantasize right now, which is why I’m in another reading mood. (Note to COMMANDER PANTS: Look for the review of your book later this week. Really.) One of my favorite authors is Christopher Moore, and I’m about to start a novel of his that I bought last summer – or the summer before – and never got around to reading.

So here’s my teaser, from The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, by Christopher Moore, page 102:

To distract herself from the dragon next door, Molly had put on her sweats and started to clean her trailer. She got as far as filling three black trash bags with junk food jetsam and was getting ready to vacuum up the collection of sow bug corpses that dotted her carpet when she made the mistake of Windexing the television. Outland Steel: Kendra’s Revenge was playing on the VCR and when the droplets of Windex hit the screen, they magnified the phospphorescent dots, making the picture look like an impressionist painting: Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grande Warrior Babe, perhaps.

Booking Through Thursday: Twisty

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On Thursday, January 28th, Booking through Thursday asked:

Jackie says, “I love books with complicated plots and unexpected endings. What is your favourite book with a fantastic twist at the end?”

  1. Do YOU like books with complicated plots and unexpected endings?
  2. What book with a surprise ending is your favorite? Or your least favorite?

Just as auto insurance quote don’t always give you the result you expect, nor do good novels, but it should be noted that a complicated plot means nothing if the characters aren’t well-drawn, and the story well-told. There are great writers who tell fairly simple stories, and great plotters who pretty much suck at storytelling. Given that, however, I do like it when a book surprises me – it doesn’t happen often. I vaguely recall being surprised by Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels trilogy, but I don’t remember if the twists came within the meat of the stories or at the end.

There’s a novel called The Stake that was completely twisty (it’s a vampire novel that opens with someone finding a body with a stake in its heart and moves forward and backward in time until the story is made clear. Richard Laymon wrote it, but it’s nothing like any of his other work…sort of melding classic horror conventions with a true crime sensibility.

And then there’s Possession by A. S. Byatt. Byatt is always difficult for me to read, and I’m not sure why…but that novel’s ending really surprised me, and not particularly pleasantly.

Teaser Tuesdays: Cleaving: a Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

Sometimes the most effective diet pill isn’t a pill at all, but a bloody scene involving dead meat and sharp knives. I received Julie Powell’s second book on Tuesday (and why, pray tell, is Amazon suddenly using Velocity Express and requiring signatures?) afternoon, and couldn’t resist peeking at it, even though I have other books in progress, because I loved Julia and Julia, when I originally read it just after it came out in hardcover.

Here, then, even though it’s now Thursday morning, is my “Tuesday Teaser,” from Cleaving: a Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, by Julie Powell (page 43):

So I’ve told you a little bit about seams, those networks of filament that both connect muscles and define the boundary between them. Now, the difficulty is that seams can be thick, or they can be thin. The seam of a tenderloin, for instance, is very thin indeed, and therefore hard to follow. It’s easy to lose your way, which is apt to make you nervous, seeing as how the tenderloin is the single most expensive cut of meat on the steer, thirty-nine bucks a pound at Fleisher’s. If you lose the seam in one direction you waste tenderloin, and there’s only something like eight pounds of it per animal. If you lose it in the other direction, especially right at the head of the muscle, what’s called the “chateaubriand,” you cut into the eye of the sirloin, another expensive cut, and one that short-tempered chefs won’t buy mangled. Beginning butchers, needless to say, don’t get assigned to pull out many tenderloins.

Booking Through Thursday: Favorite Unknown

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On Thursday, October 29th, Booking through Thursday asked:

Who’s your favorite author that other people are NOT reading? The one you want to evangelize for, the one you would run popularity campaigns for? The author that, so far as you’re concerned, everyone should be reading–but that nobody seems to have heard of. You know, not JK Rowling, not Jane Austen, not Hemingway–everybody’s heard of them. The author that you think should be that famous and can’t understand why they’re not…

I don’t know that any of the authors I read are particularly obscure, but I do think both Kathleen Norris and Lauren Willig are underrated. Kathleen Norris’s most famous work is The Cloister Walk which had quite a lot of media coverage when it originally came out, but her other works, most notably Dakota: a Spiritual Geography tend to be underplayed, and her poetry is just amazing. She’s one of the authors I would most like to meet. If you like poetry, consider a copy of Little Girls in Church.

Lauren Willig, on the other hand, is prolific and amazing. I don’t know what kind of anti aging product she keeps hidden in her bathroom, nor do I understand where she finds the energy to be an attorney and write historical novels, about a book a year, in hardcover, but as a long-time fan of The Scarlet Pimpernel, I was instantly hooked on Willig’s work when I picked up, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation several years ago. The newest book in the series, The Betrayal of the Blood Lily is new this month.

Thursday 13: Winter Tales

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I haven’t done a Thursday 13 in a while, on any of my blogs, and thought I’d challenge myself, as a hard freeze descends across north Texas, by pulling away from my fantasies of beach vacations in Outer Banks rentals, and instead compile a list of thirteen Winter Tales.

  1. Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott: a perennial favorite of mine, chock full of cozy fall and winter scenes. And then there’s the moment when Amy falls through the ice.
  2. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino: one of the oddest books I’ve ever read, it’s lingered with me since I was 19. Not for light reading.
  3. My Antonia, by Willa Cather: some people think this is boring, but I love those stories of the prairie…I just don’t want to live there.
  4. Holiday Grind, by Cleo Coyle: the ultimate holiday mystery, with recipes, too.,/li>
  5. Time and Again, by Jack Finney: classic fantasy; pay special attention to scenes like when the young couples are skating in Central Park.
  6. Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson: haunting, and you can re-watch the movie when you’ve finished the book.
  7. Smilla’s Sense of Snow, by Peter Hoeg: a tale of suspense and snow. Gripping!
  8. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin: takes place on a planet called Winter. Must I say more?
  9. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis: always winter, never Christmas, but a classic even so.
  10. The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and To Build a Fire, by Jack London: novellas, really, hence the lumping them together. Light a fire and find a thick blanket before you read these stories.
  11. Icehenge, by Kim Stanley Robinson: what if Mars was under totalitarian law, and there was a Stonehenge like creation made of ice on Pluto? What if?
  12. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, by Vendela Vida: love, loss, and a night at the ice hotel.
  13. The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder: having lived through a few South Dakota winters, I have a new understanding of what Laura and her family went through.


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Teaser Tuesdays: The Ghost and the Dead Man’s Library by Alice Kimberly

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

I’m not sure if having a live-in ghost is something that will remove the necessity of having good, cheap life insurance, but I do know that I’m really enjoying Alice Kimberly’s Haunted Bookshop series. It’s the relationship between Pen and Jack that has me inhaling these books, and also the fact that light reading is nice during the holidays.

In any case, here’s my teaser, from page 192 of book three, The Ghost and the Dead Man’s Library.

Picking a lock is an art. You can’t master it in a few minutes.

“So how do I get in?”

Break the window and turn the knob from the other side.

“Okay.” I raised the Maglite to smash the glass.

Not like that! Jack cried. With finesse. And real quiet like.

“How do you break a window quietly?”

I should note that in the above passage, lines in italics are the words of Jack, the ghost.

Booking Through Thursday: Mark!

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On Thursday, October 29th, Booking through Thursday asked:

What items have you ever used as a bookmark? What is the most unusual item you’ve ever used or seen used?

True confession: Whether it’s a serious novel or a catalog offering a great selection of unique gifts for her, I tend to dog-ear, or use the flaps of a dust cover, rather than an actual bookmark, at least with my own books. I’ve even been known to – horror of horrors – leave an open book face down.

With books that belong to other people, however, I’m much more respectful, and always use bookmarks. What kind? Typical choices are:

  1. Business cards, usually other people’s, sometimes my own.
  2. A clean square of toilet paper (I read in the bathroom a lot.)
  3. The receipt telling me when a book is due back to the library.
  4. A used boarding pass from an airplane flight.
  5. Receipts from recent purchases.
  6. Emery boards.
  7. A dollar bill.
  8. Movie or theatre ticket stubs.
  9. Postcards.
  10. Hang-tags from new clothing.

Sadly, I’ve never noticed any particularly unusual or interesting bookmarks.

Teaser Tuesdays: Christmas Stories compiled by Everyman’s Pocket Classics

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

Several years ago, my aunt Patti began the tradition of sending me a different collection of Christmas stories every year. Last year’s collection, entitled simply Christmas Stories was one of the more literary of the collection – others tend toward lighter fiction, and even humor on occasion, but I like all styles of writing, so I enjoyed it even so.

As it’s December, and I’m a sucker for a good holiday tale – they make a nice change from worrying over wireless security systems and other such technological concerns – I’m using it this week.

So, from the short story “The Burglar’s Christmas,” by Willa Cather, which is included in the Everyman’s Pocket Classics edition of Christmas Stories, I offer the following:

‘O, my poor boy, much or little, what does it matter? Have you wandered so far and paid such a bitter price for knowledge and not yet learned that love has nothing to do with pardon or forgiveness, that it only loves, and loves – and loves? They have not taught you well, the women of your world.’ She leaned over and kissed him, as no woman had kissed him since he left her.

Teaser Tuesdays: Whom God Would Destroy by Commander Pants

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

It’s great fun for me, then, when an author contacts me directly, as did Commander Pants. I’m woefully behind on my reading, having had a weird and insanely busy November, but I am about to FINALLY crack open Whom God Would Destroy.

Here’s the teaser, from pages 170-171:

He walked out of the stall and continued on to the other side of the room. Beyond the last stall there was a matching corridor ending with a matching door; a twin to the way he had entered, except this door was closed. Confident of what was on the other side, he walked down the hall and opened it. He wasn’t disappointed. There it sat in all it’s glory: the missing McDonald’s kitchen from South Bend, Indiana, just as Doc had told Oliver. It appeared to be closed; the oil sat cold in the fryolators and the microwaves weren’t microwaving.