Teaser Tuesdays – Soccer in Sun and Shadow (Jan 7)

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers for this week:

Panting, he runs up the wing. On one side awaits heaven’s glory; on the other, ruin’s abyss.

From page 3 of Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano.

Bookmark Monday – Sherlock Holmes (Jan 6)

Bookmark Monday is a weekly meme hosted by Aloi from guiltless reading. Take a picture of one of your favourite bookmarks, post it on your blog, and head over to guiltless reading to share a link to your post.

I’m a big fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories and January 6 is celebrated as the birthday of the fictitious detective. According to the stories, he was born in 1854, making today his 160th birthday. In celebration of this, I share a couple of Sherlock Holmes bookmarks I found online:

Project 52-01

I had a lot of fun last year with a Project 52 group on Flickr and as the group is continuing in 2014 I signed up again. The first theme of the year is ‘Endings & Beginnings’. Here is my submission for this week:

Book Beginnings and Friday 56 – Tales from the Perilous Realm (Jan 3)

As today is the 122nd anniversary of the birth of J.R.R. Tolkien I have chosen his Tales from the Perilous Realm as my choice of book for this week’s Friday meme combo. It is a small collection of short stories and poetry, which GoodReads describes as follows:

The definitive collection of J.R.R.Tolkien’s four acclaimed modern classic fairy tales, finally together in a volume which reaffirms his place as a master storyteller for readers young and old.

The fat and unheroic Farmer Giles of Ham is called upon to do battle with the dragon Chrysophylax; Niggle the painter sets out to paint the perfect tree in Leaf by Niggle; hobbits, princesses, dwarves and trolls partake in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; and Smith of Wootton Major journeys to the Land of Faery via the magical ingredients of a giant cake.

Now for this week’s excerpts:

Book Beginnings is hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader, who invites anyone to join in, saying: ‘Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.  Please remember to include the title of the book and the author. Leave a link to your post.  If you don’t have a blog, but want to participate, please leave a comment with your Book Beginning.’

The beginning of Tales from the Perilous Realm:

Aegidius de Hammo was a man who lived in the midmost parts of the Island of Britain. In full his name was Aegidius Ahenobarbus Julius Agricola de Hammo; for people were richly endowed with names in those days, now long ago, when this island was still happily divided into many kingdoms.

This is a great beginning. Tolkien had a way with words and was one of the greatest storytellers of all time and this beginning demonstrates this so well.

The Friday 56 is a book meme hosted by Freda’s Voice and the rules are as follows:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post below in Linky. Add the post url, not your blog url.

It’s that simple.

From page 56 of Tales from the Perilous Realm:

Chyrsophylax begged often for his liberty; and he proved expensive to feed, since he continued to grow, as dragons will, like trees, as long as there is life in them.

I really need to read this collection again soon. It’s been a few years since I last read it, but I remember really enjoying it. I think that this year I’ll try and read more Tolkien, and avoid watching really poor movie adaptations of his great writing.

Classics Club Spin #4 – Review (Jan 1)

In November I signed up for The Classics Spin #4. There’s always the chance that when you sign up for one of these spins you may end up with a book that you weren’t looking forward to. That happened to me with Spin #3, when I got Thomas More’s Utopia, which I didn’t enjoy as much as I had anticipated I would. This time, however, I got one that I figured I would find enjoyable, War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. I did enjoy it and here is my review, as posted on GoodReads:

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The War of the Worlds surprised me. I thought I knew the story, but I didn’t really. I should say that it surprised me in a good way. I had heard both good and bad comments about the book, many of the latter being in regards to it being dated, but taken in its context of the late 19th century, I did not really find this to be so.

The story centres around a Martian invasion of earth and is the story is told through the eyes of an eyewitness to the events that take place following this invasion.

Wells paints a very detailed picture of the invading Martians and their technology. His ideas seemed to be well ahead of their time, considering that the book was first published in 1898 and it is a credit to his imagination that many of his ideas were used/adapted by other writes in the years that followed. Without giving any details away, if you are curious then I’d recommend that you read the book for yourself.

I haven’t seen the most recent movie adaptation of this story, so I have no idea how it stands up to the book, but I am curious to see it now. I’d recommend this book to anyone who enjoys science fiction, but at its heart it is not totally a science fiction story, so it should have appeal to others as well.

View all my reviews