Teaser Tuesdays: In the Swim

My teaser this week comes from Stardust, by Joseph Kanon. I'm enjoying this one quite a lot – enough to stay up reading into the wee hours. But it's a long book (over 500 pages), so I'll be interested to see if Kanon can go on keeping me up past my bedtime.

In this excerpt Ben Collier, the book's protagonist, comes back to his brother's house in the Hollywood hills to find his sister-in-law enjoying a late-night swim:

She was in the pool when he got home. He followed the faint sounds of splashes through the quiet house and out onto the terrace, stopping for a second by the lemon tree near the door. Only the pool lights were on, a grotto effect, with blue light rising up, not spilling down, and he saw that she was naked, her body gliding through the water with a mermaid's freedom, alone in her own watery world. [p.114]

Hmmm. Joy's Blog seems to have gone a little R-rated here, haven't we? Well, I'll just reassure you – the sister-in-law covers up pretty quickly and nothing illicit happens. 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 somewhere on that page. 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!

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Last night I finished one of the books I've been reading for what seems like months now (but it's really only been weeks!) – E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley (review to come later today, hopefully). I've got a couple of other books going right now, but this week I'm concentrating on finishing Stardust by Joseph Kanon. It's a library book and has to go back soon, so that should give me a little extra push to stick with it.

I'm also trying to read at least one shorter work this week, for the November Novella Challenge. Probably Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome or one of the novellas from her collection, Old New York.

Also trying to get caught up with reviews before the end of the year which, although hard to believe, is almost upon us!

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is a weekly event hosted by J. Kaye of J. Kaye's Book Blog. To find out what everyone is reading, or to participate yourself, head on over to her blog.

The Sunday Salon: Hi, There!

It's been a couple of months since my last Sunday Salon visit. Sundays around here are usually taken up with errands, shopping, and watching countless football games on TV (or basketball games, or tennis matches, or . . . well, you get the idea). But today, the hubby is away on a business trip and I'm here on my own with no real schedule to keep. A perfect time to catch up on my reading.

I've got three books going at the moment – actually, I've been reading the same books for several weeks now. I'm trying to train myself to read one book at a time, as I really think that's the most sensible way of handling things: start a book, read it right to the end, then start another. See how nice and regular that sounds? But I keep backsliding.

The book I'm reading today (I'm determined to finish it tonight) is E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley. It's a novel based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, New York City's notorious hoarders who lived together in a boarded up brownstone filled with massive stacks of newspapers, broken furniture, bits of machinery, and other paraphernalia the brothers had "collected" over the years. After the two men were found dead in their home in 1947, more than a hundred tons of garbage were hauled away by the authorities.

The Collyers have been the subject of other fictions over the years, but Doctorow's has probably made the biggest splash. So far, I'm enjoying it quite a lot. I love his imagining of a reason for Langley's newspaper collecting mania, his ". . . collection of the daily papers with the ultimate aim of creating one day's edition of a newspaper that could be read forevermore as sufficient to any day thereof."

He would run out for all the morning papers, and in the afternoon for the evening papers, and then there were the business papers, the sex gazettes, the freak sheets, the vaudeville papers, and so on. He wanted to fix American life finally in one edition, what he called Collyer's eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need. [pp. 48-49]

Yes, it's OCD at its most rampant, but I can see how it would be a very satisfying endeavor. And, yes, I've got hoarding in my genetic makeup, too. They used to just call us pack rats!

Hmmmm. Now that I think about it, maybe I should stop reading for a while and do something about those boxes of old magazines that seem to be building up in the corners here. Before someone has to break into this place and dig me out from under a ton or so of old New Yorkers and Metropolitan Homes!

The Christmas Reading Challenge

Now I know exactly what you're gonna say: Somebody who's still struggling to finish this year's reading challenges really shouldn't be looking around for MORE challenges to join. That's what I've told myself, too. But see, this one just looks like so much darn fun. And it'll give me incentive to read a couple of books I already wanted to read. And it just makes me feel so Christmas-y and festive, and all.

So call me crazy, but I'm signing up for the Christmas Reading Challenge hosted by Michelle of The True Book Addict. The challenge runs from Thanksgiving Day, November 26 through New Year's Eve, December 31, 2009. The books have to be Christmas books – either novels with a Christmas theme, or books of Christmas short stories, or nonfiction books about the holiday (no children's books, but YA is allowed). And participants only need to read one book (or more, of course) – which is great, since this is such a busy time for everyone.

At the moment, I'm thinking of going with Christmas-themed mystery novels. There are a lot of those I want to read, but the two I've pretty much settled on are Santa Clawed by Rita Mae Brown and Sneaky Pie Brown, and Crewel Yule by Monica Ferris. Those are both entries in series I've been reading, so they seem like perfect choices for me. However, I've got a list of possible alternates, too – partly gleaned from the lists of other challenge participants. I'll never get all of these read, of course, but some of the titles are:

• A Christmas Guest, or A Christmas Secret, both by Anne Perry (or any of the other "Christmas Stories" novels by Perry)
• A Rumpole Christmas: Stories, by John Mortimer
• The Body in the Sleigh, by Katherine Hall Page
• Christmas is Murder: A Rex Graves Mystery, by C.S. Challinor
• Christmas Stalkings, or Mistletoe Mysteries, by Charlotte MacLeod, et al.
• Hercule Poirot's Christmas, or The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, both by Agatha Christie
• Mistletoe Murder, or Christmas Cookie Murder, both by Leslie Meier
• Plum Pudding Murder, by Joanne Fluke
• Shivers for Christmas, edited by Richard Dalby
• The Twelve Deaths of Christmas, by Marian Babson

Sounds like fun, right? Well, if you think so, why not head on over to Michelle's challenge announcement page, and sign up. And then go read yourself a merry little Christmas book!

Booking Through Thursday: Too Short?

Today BTT asks a question that's close to my heart – do I really believe life is too short to read bad books? ("Do you read everything all the way through or do you feel life really is too short to read bad books?" )

And the short answer is I'm a believer! In fact, I always thought I was the one who invented that line about life being too short to waste any of it on bad books. And I don't seem to be changing my mind with the passing years, folks.

Of course, I read purely for pleasure now – no longer have to read anything for school or work. And that's a luxury I'd be reluctant to part with. It's one of the reasons I've cut way back on requesting or accepting books for review – I really don't want to be committed to finishing a book that just doesn't interest me. Even if it's a book that's enormously popular with other readers. I just don't want to invest the time.

I usually give a book the "fifty page test" – if its author hasn't put me under his or her spell by that time, I move on to the next book waiting on the shelf. Goodness knows there are always plenty to choose from. And more and more I'm finding I really only need twenty or fewer pages to know if a book is going to be readable. In fact, sometimes I can tell after scanning the opening sentences. At this rate, in ten years I really will be able to judge a book by its cover!

WWW Wednesdays: 11 November 2009

WWW Wednesdays is a new meme hosted by mizb17 over at Should Be Reading. It asks three (3) questions:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll be reading next?

Embarrassingly, my answers for this week are pretty much the same as last week:

Currently reading Stardust by Joseph Kanon.







Currently reading Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow (determined to finish this one this week).







Recently finished? Nada!

Reading next? Most likely Ignorance by Milan Kundera, and something for the November Novella Challenge – possibly Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome.







Now, let the world know what's on your reading list. Just click here.

The Awesome Author Challenge 2010

Alyce of At Home With Books is hosting The Awesome Author Challenge in 2010. As she explains:

The idea behind this challenge is to read works by authors who have been recommended to you time and again, yet somehow you haven't managed to read any books by those authors. These are the authors that everyone else tells you are awesome, thus the "Awesome Author Challenge" title.

The challenge runs from January through December, and there are four levels of participation to choose from:

• Easy: Choose three authors and read at least one title from each author.
• Moderate: Choose six authors and read at least one title from each author.
• Challenging: Choose ten authors and read at least one title from each author.
• Over-Achieving: Anything over ten authors.

This is really the kind of challenge I love - there aren't too many rules and regs. Crossovers with other challenges are allowed. You don't have to make a list ahead of time if you don't want to; but if you do, the list can change at any time. And your books can be from any genre or reading level: "the only requirement is that you have heard great things about the author, but haven't yet read any of their works."

I've promised myself to be a little more selective about my reading challenges for next year, but this one is just too tempting to pass up. And since the challenge runs all year, I'm throwing caution to the wind and choosing ten authors to try. The only problem is deciding on exactly which ten authors and which of their books to read; since I've been blogging, I've had so many wonderful authors and books recommended to me. This is my list for now, although it may (verily I say, it definitely will) change over time.

Kate Atkinson: Case Histories, or When Will There Be Good News?
Paul Auster: The Book of Illusions
Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot
Heinrich Boll: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
T.C. Boyle: The Women
Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book
Italo Calvino: If on a winter's night a traveler
Angela Carter: Wise Children
Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dean Koontz: Mr. Murder
Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood, or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Audrey Niffenegger: Her Fearful Symmetry
William Trevor: Love and Summer
Sarah Waters: Affinity, or The Little Stranger
Rebecca West: The Fountain Overflows

And yes, I know there are more than ten authors on my list. Well, I've never been accused of over-achieving. I just don't do decisiveness very well.