Booking Through Thursday: Live In

This week BTT asks: "If you had to choose to live within a novel, which would it be?" -- which is a very intriguing question for me at the moment. M and I are in the midst of our move from Virginia back to Texas, and I've been spending the last couple of weeks packing, packing, packing. Oh, and doing a little packing, too! And now we're just days away from hitting the road to follow the van (so to speak) on its way to our new abode.

Sooooo.... While I can't really think of any specific novel I'd like to live in, I really would appreciate the benefits of a teleporter right now -- something that would just scramble all the molecules of all the stuff we've got to move and then reassemble everything, 1500 miles away. And do the same with the hubby and me. So my new-environment-novel would probably have to be science fiction -- most likely one of the Star Trek books. Hey there, Scotty, fire up the old transporter and beam me home!

Teaser Tuesdays: The Key

This week my teaser lines come from one of the vintage mysteries I've been reading: The Key, by Patricia Wentworth -- one of her "Miss Silver" series. I'm reading the Kindle edition on my iPad, so I'm not sure about page numbers, but it's from Chapter 18 and Location 1518 of 3440 (44%):

Darling...it really wouldn't be at all nice to feel you'd been living with a murderer. But...of course the police wouldn't have arrested him unless they were quite, quite sure he'd done it, and it would be too, too dreadful if they were to hang him when he was innocent.

Ah, yes - just too, too dreadful indeed.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or take part yourself, just head on over to her blog.
And please feel free to leave me a link to your Teaser Tuesday post in your comment here.

Theme Thursday: Yes!

Theme Thursday is a weekly event hosted by Reading Between the Pages. Each Thursday, a theme is posted for that week. Participants select a conversation, snippet, or sentence from whatever book they're reading and post it for everyone to read. It's a great way to discover new books and authors, so here goes.

This week's theme is Yes!!! (or Okay, Sure, etc.), and here's my snippet (from Chapter 25 of The Key: A Miss Silver Mystery, by Patricia Wentworth):

"...there's a lot of difference between language and shooting people."
"Yes, indeed," said Miss Silver in reverential tones.

Booking Through Thursday: Changes

This week BTT asks about life-changing reads:

There have been books I loved, books that I fell in love with, and books that changed my life, and they’re not always the same nor mutually exclusive....Has a book ever inspired you to change anything in your life, fiction or non-fiction alike?

OK, I'm going to be lazy here (one of the few things I'm really good at). A couple of years ago, BTT asked almost this same question, so I'm just going to recycle the answer I posted back then. Here goes:

This week, BTT asks "Which Book Changed Your Life?" and at first I thought "that's easy – none of them." Many books have affected me in one way or another, but I really couldn't think of any that were noticeably life-changing.

But then I remembered a sunny spring day, many centuries ago on a planet far, far away. I was a senior in high school. It was lunchtime. And this tall skinny kid with long, Beatlesque hair, who I'd had my eye on for weeks, spent an entire half hour telling me the plot of a novel he'd read recently.

The book was How Awful About Allan, a fairly forgettable potboiler by Henry Farrell, the same writer who produced Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? I remember almost nothing at all about the plot of the book, but I certainly remember the young man who told it to me. Two years later I married him, and he's sitting in the next room right now drinking coffee and reading the newspaper.

So I guess my life really was changed by a book. And one I never even read!

Booking Through Thursday: Pet Peeves

This week's BTT question was suggested by Bookish Sarah, and it's something I've been thinking about lately: "What are your literary 'pet peeves'?" I suppose my main "literary" pet peeve is not having enough time for reading, but I don't think that's exactly what this is all about.

So, not necessarily in order of annoyance, here are the things that can really put me off a piece of writing:

1. Unnecessary padding. More and more these days, I'm finding books that seem to be longer than they really should be. What's happened to editors, I wonder?
2. Too much skipping around between points of view, plot lines, or time periods. Just tell the story, please.
3. Characters who seem to be interchangeable parts. I get bored very quickly if I can't distinguish one character from another.
4. Introduction of pets or animals (other than human animals!) for the sole purpose of killing them off. This is a very cheap shot, and it can cause me to abandon the book completely, and maybe even the author.
5. What I call Hollywood-ization. You know the sort of books I mean -- every female is breathtakingly gorgeous, every male is ruggedly handsome and brave but also caring and sensitive, every child is precocious beyond its years or criminally bratty, plots are formulaic and predictable, endings are happy ever after. If I want formulaic, I'll just watch TV.
   
6. Incorrect use of the word "myriad."

I'll end it there. I could probably keep blathering on and on, but that's one of my pet peeves, too (see No. 1, above).

Booking Through Thursday: Recommendation

This week BTT asks a question suggested by Bookish Sarah: "If someone asked you for a book recommendation, what is the FIRST book you’d think to recommend (without extra thought)?"

I'm always very hesitant when it comes to recommending books, no matter how much thought I'm allowed to give the process. I do it, of course -- but it makes me nervous. I have fairly idiosyncratic taste in reading matter, so I know that what I love isn't always what others will enjoy. I think the last book I whole-heartedly recommended to other readers (and just about everyone I met) was probably The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows -- and I was actually a little surprised to discover that not everyone loved the book as much as I did.

Even in my reviews and reading reports, I'm a bit reluctant about recommending books -- even the ones I've loved. Of course, a glowing review is in itself sort of a recommendation, I suppose. But that's about as far as I generally like to go.

Teaser and Review: The Other Side of the Fire

Written by Alice Thomas Ellis Viking/Elisabeth Sifton Books, 1984; 156 pages

On the last day of summer Mrs Bohannon fell in love. The poplars, fallaciously pathetic, looked horrified, their branches rising on the wind like startled hair, and a pilgrim cloud wept a few chill tears.
It began in a garden, as these things will, and she fell in love with her husband's son.
Bloody hell!
It happened like this... (first lines of the novel)

I've just recently discovered Alice Thomas Ellis -- descriptions of her books sounded a lot like Barbara Pym, so I was immediately intrigued. Pym is one of the authors I absolutely love, and I'm always looking for books with something of the flavor of her novels. And in The Other Side of the Fire, there is a distinct similarity, although no one can really equal Dear Barbara in my opinion.

The novel tells the story of Claudia Bohannon, a respectable, upper middle-class housewife who develops a sudden passionate and alarming crush on her grown-up stepson, Philip. Bewildered by the turn of events, Claudia turns to her best friend Sylvie for advice and sympathy, but Sylvie has no patience or words of wisdom -- when Claudia tells her she's fallen in love, Sylvie only cautions, "Be careful....It can be dangerous at your age." Sylvie likewise is no comfort to Claudia's husband (and Philip's father) Charles when he also seeks her consolation, telling him that she thinks marriage "is like a three-legged race with each participant harnessed to a loser."

Complications set in when Sylvie's daughter Evvie enters the fray. Evvie is in the process of writing her first novel -- a pulp romance based (rather loosely) on the local Scottish vet, his pet cow Violet, and his very odd (at least in Evvie's telling) group of relatives and companions. Very soon, Evvie is blurring the lines between her fictional world and the real one, and also getting Claudia and Philip involved in her creation. Eventually, of course, the two worlds collide in a painful but hilarious dust-up before things start getting back to normal.

This really is a very funny book, with lots of wonderfully wacky characters. Don't know how I've missed out on Alice Thomas Ellis up to now. I definitely want to read more of her books, but they're not that easy to find.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or take part yourself, just head on over to her blog.
And please feel free to leave me a link to your Teaser Tuesday post in your comment here.