First Lines: November 2023 edition

Below are the first lines of the books I finished reading in November.  My ability to retain what I read was low.  After all, we had an election and its aftermath to deal with.   My favorite candidate won, which is good and actually rather overwhelming to consider. 

 

Book 1

A Stranger’s Gaze

Bombay February 1921

On the morning Perveen saw the stranger, they’d almost collided.

 

 

Book 2

In October there were yellow trees.  Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare.  

 

Dusk falls in North Park
November 18, 2016

Book 3

Toward the northern reaches of the Appalachian Mountains, at the point where the East Coast ends and the great American Midwest begins, three rivers meet. 

 

Book 4

Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body.

 

 

Book 5

The morning was wet and it must have been raining all night, for a pool of water had seeped under the back door of Miss Selbourne’s cottage.

 

 

Book 6

The Civil Rights Movement was one of the most dramatic periods of American history, marked by rapid and profound change.  During this short span of time – from the 1950s to the 1970s – African Americans led the fight to free this country from the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow.  African American women played significant roles at all levels of the Civil Rights Movement, yet too often they remain invisible to the larger public.

 

The titles and authors revealed:

 

 

Book 1

The Widows of Malabar Hill (Perveen Mistry #1)  by Sujata Massey. 

400 pages.  Published 2018.

The book takes place in 1917-1921 in British India, mostly in Mumbai (then known as Bombay), and introduces the interesting character of Perveen Mistry, the first woman lawyer to work as a solicitor in India.   It’s a murder mystery, but also provides a description of some of the distinct cultures of that time and place: Parsi, Muslim, including women living in complete isolation (purdah), British, Hindu.  I look forward to reading the next in the series. 

 

Book 2

Small Things Like These  by Claire Keegan.  187 pages.  Published 2018.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

I quite enjoyed this novella for the introspection of the main character.  To me it had a feel that it takes place longer ago than the year in which it was set - 1986 in Ireland.  The mix of sadness at past life, current struggle to commit to doing the right thing, and joy at arriving at doing the right thing, in spite of the cost, was poignant.   Recommend.

I read this for book club for our December gathering.  It is great to have a short and well-written book for December.  If you, Dear Reader,  know of any other well-written books that take place in winter-time, please let me know.

 

Book 3

Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance, by Mark Whitaker.  448 pages, but the text itself is not quite that long.  Published 2018.

I skipped the parts about boxing (my eyes utterly glazed over – just could not absorb any of that material) and skimmed over the parts about baseball.  But I found the rest of it fascinating, including the chapter on journalist Evelyn Cunningham and the chapter on playwright August Wilson. 

 

Book 4

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  176 pages. Published 2015.

Second reading.  This time for book club. This is a short and meaty text – one long essay, really.  Published in 2015 and definitely still relevant.  Highly recommend.

  

 

Book 5

Bramton Wick, by Elizabeth Fair.  200 pages   First published 1952.

It took me a while to get going on this one.  Part of my problem was that each house in the village has a name.  It was hard to keep track, at first, of which family lived in each named house.  I enjoyed the characters in this light romance, which is part of the Furrowed Middlebrow collection of “Twentieth Century Women’s Fiction” (whatever that means).  Includes tea drinking and dogs.

Book 6

Lighting the Fires of Freedom:  African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, by Janet Dewart Bell.  211 pages. Published 2018.

The book is a compilation of the author’s interviews with women who worked in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s to 1970s.  I picked this book because I wanted to read more about Diane Nash.  I learned that she is a woman of unequaled courage.  She recognized that when the first Freedom Rides met with violence, if the rides ended then “southern white racists would have believed that a Movement project could be stopped by inflicting a great deal of violence on it.  And if that message got sent, we would’ve had so many people killed after that.  It would’ve been impossible to have a movement about anything.  Voting rights, desegregation, or whatever.”   

While the nine women interviewed for this book were interesting and the actions they took inspiring, the interviews could have used more editing. The speaker would mention an event that I had no knowledge of, so I was unable to fully understand.  There was a fair amount of repetition.  Nevertheless, it was worthwhile to read the thoughts, in their own words, of these important and often overlooked women.

First Lines: September 2023 edition

  

Art at our local library - 
a book tree!

Below are the first lines of the books I finished reading in September.  Includes one memoir, one Y.A. lit, one Bible book, two history books, one mystery, and one dystopian novel.

 

Book 1

“Work hard, kid, and you will be rewarded with a piece of the American Dream.” 

- Every suburban dad born between 1939 and 1963.

It came from a good place.  They wanted you to follow the path that had worked for them – the path that got them the home and the midsize sedan and the patch of lawn they’d constantly bitch about having to maintain. 

 

Book 2

Case 1: Till Death Us Do Part

Saturday, June 6, 1812

We were to meet him at midnight in the Dark Walk.  It was not an ideal arrangement: two unaccompanied women confronting a blackmailer in the most ill-lit, deserted part of Vauxhall Gardens.

 

 

Book 3

Grand Failure

Eleven-year-old Virgil Salinas already regretted the rest of middle school, and he’d only just finished sixth grade.

 

 

Book 4

The beginnings of this story lie far back in time, and its reverberations still sound today.

 

Book 5

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,  ….

 

 

Book 6

One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.

 

Book 7

Chapter 1: The Gas Man

If you want to get to the beginning of the shale revolution, pick up Interstate 35E out of Dallas and head north forty miles and then take the turnoff for the tiny town of Ponder.  Pass the feed store, the white water tower, the sign for the Cowboy Church, and the donut store that’s closed down.

 

Did not finish 

Understanding the Contours of Africa’s Past

The stories of entire continents cannot adequately be told in single-volume histories.

Altered Book
by artist Chris Fondi, August 2019

The titles and authors revealed:

 

Book 1

American Grunt: Ridiculous Stories of a Life Lived at $8.00 an Hour, by Kevin Cramer.

Local author!  354 pages. Published 2023.  

This book is funny and poignant all at the same time.  This fascinating memoir gives us a first-person look at what it is like to work at certain jobs, and especially reminds us to be very kind to the person who cleans out our rental cars.  Or who clean out anything.  Plenty of cuss language but it is all warranted and effective.  I recommend this book, especially if you have lived in SWPA.

 

 

Book 2

The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (The Ill-Mannered Ladies #1), by Alison Goodman.  464 pages. Published 2023.

This book is essentially Woke Jane Austen.  Interesting characters, clever and unlikely plot twists.  I enjoyed it.  I have yet to find the existence of Book #2 in the supposed series.

 

Book 3

Hello, Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly with Isabel Roxas (Illustrator)  320 pages.  Published 2017.  Y.A. lit.  Winner of the Newbery Medal.

Quirky but lovable characters, except for the bully, who does not get his comeuppance, which makes the ending slightly unsatisfying, but more realistic.  Includes some scenes which were truly scary to me.

 

Book 4

King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild.  376 pages (text thru page 323; the rest is end notes). Published 1998.  With an intro by Barbara Kingsolver (which I did not read).

I feel that this is a book that a certain governor-running-for-president would not want people to read.  This book is not for the squeamish, but delves into an important part of history.  There is one part where the King of Belgium carries out exactly the same public relations move done by one Atty General William P. Barr, getting in front of a potentially damaging government report.  This is a well-written book on a disturbing topic.

 

 

Book 5

Letter to the Romans, by Paul.  Yes, that Paul.   20 pages.   First published about 58 CE.

I did a speed reading of this difficult biblical text.  There’s a fair amount of contradictory stuff in this letter.  You are saved by God’s grace, not by your acts, but also Do good acts so God doesn't punish you.  One very touching part is the mention of a whole bunch of women, presumably leaders in the early groups of Christians, at the end of the book.  What impressed me most was how little snippets of the book were extremely familiar, as this book is often quoted in short spurts, but most people, including me, have little understanding of the context for those snippets.

 

Book 6

The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid.  180 pages.  Published 2022.

This short book presents an interesting dystopian scenario. The opening is reminiscent of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.  The writing style, mostly lengthy sentences that wander all over the place, conveys uncertainty, which may have been the best for the subject matter (but I am not certain!).  I kept thinking that the scenario was meant to be a stand in for the pandemic, decided against it, only to revert to my original thought.  Its main concern is racism, but I feel it just stayed on the surface of that complicated societal ill.  In short, an unsettling book. 

RE the writing style:  The first sentence (above) is probably the shortest sentence in this book.  The second sentence is:

This dawned upon him gradually, and then suddenly, first as a sense as he reached for his phone that the early light was doing something strange to the color of his forearm, subsequently, and with a start, as a momentary conviction that there was somebody else in bed with him, male, darker, but this, terrifying though it was, was surely impossible, and he was reassured that the other moved as he moved, was in fact not a person, not a separate person, but was just him, Anders, causing a wave of relief, for if the idea that someone else was there was only imagined, then of course the notion that he had changed color was a trick too, an optical illusion, or a mental artifact, born in the slippery halfway place between dreams and wakefulness, except that by now he had his phone in his hands and he had reversed the camera, and he saw that the face looking back at him was not his at all.

Book 7

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin.  512 pages, but not all of that is text.  Published 2020.

I read this because I wanted an overview of the energy market, including the onset of fracking.  This is a good overview, although I found the author too dismissive of Native American needs and wants.  He gave a flippant treatment of the protest at Standing Rock against the oil pipeline.  The book did not include anything about renewable biodiesel, which I want to understand better.

 

Did not finish 

A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present (Second Edition, published 2012) by Richard J. Reid.  448 pages.  The first edition was published in 2009.  

The first lines of this book counseled me not to read this very book!  So I didn’t.  I wanted to learn more about Africa.  This book probably would have partially met my need, but I chose to finish reading King Leopold’s Ghost instead, going for depth instead of breadth.  This book was not available for kindle, so I would have been required to read it on my tablet - another thing that helped me decide not to read it.  I might come back to this one.

 

 

 

First lines: March 2022 edition

A small portion of my parents' books

Below are the first lines of the books I finished reading in March.   Six books, including three (!) for kids/young adults, and two re-reads.  March was a very busy and tense month, with petition signing to get candidates on the ballot squished into a shorter time frame, and yet at the same time prolonged into an entire month.  Yinz please make all that activity worthwhile by voting in the primary election.

 

 

Book 1

The First Chapter: One home is forsaken in hopes of finding another

It was not Miss Penelope Lumley’s first journey on a train, but it was the first one she had taken alone.

         As you may know, traveling alone is quite a different kettle of fish from traveling with companions.

 

 

Book 2

Four young girls busily prepared for their big day. 

 

 

Book 3

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. 

 

Book 4

The First Chapter: A fit of pique encounters a bit of pluck.

“But the workmen swore the repairs to the house would be finished by now!” The blushing pink circles that typically adorned the cheeks of Lady Constance Ashton were now as scarlet as two ripe nectarines.

 

Book 5

After the thing was all over, when peril had ceased to loom and happy endings had been distributed in heaping handfuls and we were driving home with our hats on the side of our heads, having shaken the dust of Steeple Bumpleigh from our tyres, I confessed to Jeeves that there had been moments during the recent proceedings when Bertram Wooster, though no weakling, had come very near to despair. 

 

Book 6

I still remember the awe I felt the first time I walked into the Alameda County Superior Courthouse, in Oakland, California, as an employee.

 

 

The titles and authors revealed:

 

 

Book 1

 The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book 1: The Mysterious Howling, by Maryrose Wood.  Illustrated by Jon Klassen.

This is really only half a book.  Many of the mysteries were not resolved, which will force me to read the next book.  Which is not a bad thing, as I liked the characters and the moderately snarky writing style.  It’s like a mild Lemony Snicket of the famous A Series of Unfortunate Events, although I have only read snippets of Snicket so I can’t really give a good comparison.  The Incorrigible children behave somewhat like wolves, and yet are much better behaved than many of the adults.  It was wonderful to read children’s literature.

 

Book 2

The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, by Jemar Tisby.  © 2019.  250 pages.

Second reading (first time was in 2019).  This time it is suggested reading for the church anti-racism group.  

 

 

Book 3

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen.  Published 1813. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that this book’s opening line is one of the most famous in English literature.

Readers view this book either as a much-beloved classic exploring early 19th century English upper middle class society, or as a useless tome about a bunch of people who need to get real jobs and do something useful.  The book raises lots of questions.  Is Elizabeth Bennet a feminist hero, ahead of her time for wanting to marry for love and not just to secure her economic future?  Hard to tell – she ends up getting both love and economic security.  And when asked when was the first time she knew she loved Darcy, she says it was when she saw his mansion.  What’s not to love about a man with a mansion?  But still, I think Jane Austen wrote Lizzy Bennet as a bold character who wants it all and is willing to talk back defiantly to the authorities of her circle.

More on the Common Household’s reading of P&P at this link.

 

Book 4

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book 2: The Hidden Gallery, by Maryrose Wood.  Illustrated by Jon Klassen.

The plucky governess Penelope Lumley and her charges, the wolf-children of Lord Ashton, continue their adventures, leaving the countryside to spend some time in London.  Most mysteries of the first in the series are still not resolved, and new mysteries have been revealed.  We can guess at the answer for some of the unknowns.  And this book introduces a friend or possibly a love interest for our heroine. 

 

Book 5

Joy in the Morning, by P.G. Wodehouse.  Published 1946. 229 pages.

This book is the Anti-Pride-and-Prejudice.  Bertie Wooster does not want to get married and goes through contortions to avoid it.  It’s the usual Jeeves & Wooster caper.  Very funny.

 

 

Book 6

The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, by Kamala Harris, adapted for young readers by Ruby Shamir.  Published 2019. Young Readers Edition.  260 pages.

This is one of those memoirs written by a person planning to run for higher office, except I read the kids’ version.  I especially enjoyed the parts about how Kamala Harris’ mother inspired her.  My mother has inspired me.