Teaser Tuesdays: A Little Illumination

So far this week I've finished one book and started two more. The book I've just managed to wade through is The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I don't mean that to sound negative – I did enjoy the book, just found it hard to keep reading. For some reason, it's taken me several weeks to finish. So right now I've got about four books going, which is fairly normal in my case.

My teasers this week come from Jill Ciment's new novel Heroic Measures. I haven't gotten very far into it, but I can tell you it's about an older couple, living in New York City and preparing to sell the apartment they've lived in for many years. This snippet is about the husband, Alex, an artist whose latest works are illuminated manuscripts:

As monks once illustrated the Bible with gold leaf and devotion, he is illuminating the seven-hundred-and-fifty-page file that the FBI had kept on Ruth and him during the heyday of the cold war. Initial showings of the manuscript pages have garnered him just enough attention from the art world to offer promise, though at his age, he isn't exactly sure what promise means anymore. [p. 31]

Alex is seventy-eight years old, so I suppose I can understand his skepticism about any potential fame that might be staring him in the face. But it's never too late to court success, of course. Alex should take my advice and just remember Helen Hooven Santmyer. She was 88 when her most famous work And Ladies of the Club was published and became a best-seller in 1984. So you see, there's hope for all of us aging artists, even if we haven't had our fifteen minutes yet.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB17 at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or participate yourself, head on over to her blog. And these are the rules: 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 lines 7 and 12. 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! Please avoid spoilers!