Book Beginnings and Friday 56 #3

It's Friday . . . time to share book excerpts with:

• Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader, where bloggers share the first sentence or more of a current read, as well as initial thoughts about the sentence(s), impressions of the book, or anything else that the opening inspires.  
• The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an ebook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

My Book Beginning today is one our library just got, although it was written in 1998. It's "Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire", a biography by Amanda Foreman
           
       "I know I was handsome...and have always been fashionable, but I do assure you", Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, wrote to her daughter at the end of her life, "our negligence and omissions have been forgiven and we have been loved, more from our being free from airs than from any other circumstance."

Page 56, of the same book:

           "He spent so many hours at Brook's that he was rarely out of his gambling clothes."



Georgiana sounds like someone I'd like to get to know. She's very self aware but not pompous. And who would have thought one would have special gambling clothes? Are they like a lucky hat or something? Georgiana Spencer lived in the 17th century, and was an ancestor to Princess Diana Spencer.

Ophelia’s Muse, by Rita Cameron. Kensington, 2015

 Elizabeth Siddel was born in 1829 to a family barely eking out a living in genteel poverty; a family prosperous a few generations past but no longer. She is brought up  to read and value books and art, but is forced to spend her days working at a milliner’s shop, making hats for fashionable ladies, and turning her wages over to her mother.  But one day an opportunity arises; a young artist, Walter Deverell, comes into the shop with his mother, and is taken by Lizzie’s beauty and her red hair. He wants her to pose for him. In those days, artist’s models were considered no better than prostitutes, frequently sleeping with the artist’s they sat for. But an arrangement is made; a respectable female chaperon will be provided, Lizzie will make far better wages than she does sewing hats, and her job will be held open for her. While sitting for Deverell, his friend and fellow member of the newly formed pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, sees Lizzie and is smitten. Her life takes a considerably less respectable turn after this.

Theirs’s was a relationship filled with obstacles. Rossetti was from a well to do family, and Lizzie’s situation was not acceptable to them- even before she started sleeping with Rossetti. Plus, Rossetti felt that a wife would mean establishing a house and being conventional, which would distract him from the art he was devoted to. There were also issues of opiate addiction, near constant infidelity, and Lizzie’s isolation from her family once she became Rossetti’s mistress. The brilliant artist Rossetti was, in many ways, a spoiled child. These days, his art redeems him, but he could not have been an easy person to love.

This sounds like I’m giving away the whole plot, but I’m not. I knew these facts before I read the novel, and it still absorbed me. Lizzie and Dante came alive in these pages. While the members of the PRB are fairly well known today, the models still are not. Life for women in that era was very circumscribed, and anyone who stepped outside the lines of respectability had a very hard time of it.

The author describes things in detail without getting bogged down. The clothing, the art, the houses, all spring into the reader’s mind in full color. The characters are rounded and real; there are no villains here, just people trying to do the best they can. A great fictionalized biography; anyone with interest in the pre-Raphaelites should give this book a go.

 

 The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something, Amazon will give me a few cents. 

I received this book free from Net Galley.

Neither of these things influenced my review.

Waiting on Wednesday II

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly feature of the Breaking the Spine blog.  It's a great way to share information about forthcoming books with other readers.  Today I'm featuring The King's Sisters by Sarah Kennedy. It's the third in the Cross and the Crown series, set in Tudor England, following Henry VIII's dissolution of the Catholic religious houses.

The King's Sisters features Catherine Havens, a former nun who married and had children when the nunnery she lived in was dissolved. Now a widow with two young children, as she faces the constant changes at court and the threat of being accused of heresy. The book will be released in late September.

Book Beginnings and Friday 56 #2

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It's Friday . . . time to share book excerpts with:

• Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader, where bloggers share the first sentence or more of a current read, as well as initial thoughts about the sentence(s), impressions of the book, or anything else that the opening inspires.  
• The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an ebook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

My Book Beginning today is not a new book (other than new to me)- it was written in 1996. It's The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte and translated from Spanish into English by Sonia Soto.

          "The flash projected the outline of the hanged man onto the wall" 

Page 56, of the same book:

           "The book hunter turned more pages"

The opening line certainly grabs the attention of the reader; page 56 not so much. But the back cover makes it sound very promising; a book detective who hunts down rare books for collectors finds himself involved with devil worship, the occult, and high adventure. It is billed as an intellectual thriller. And it's got assorted diagrams and line drawings!

 

A Simplified Map of the Real World: the Renata Stories, by Stevan Allred. Forest Avenue Press, 2013

Renata is the small town at the center of a county in central Oregon. The fifteen stories set there span several generations; characters show up in more than one story; sometimes we see a story from various perspective. There is a continuity that doesn’t normally occur in short story collections, even though the stories are not arranged chronologically (which was confusing at times). These are tales of divorce, love, death, prejudice, greed, poor choices- lots of poor choices including trying to make a tractor fly- and all the other things that make us human.

I’ve been living in a small town/rural area for over 30 years now, and I recognize these people: the farmers, sheriffs, delinquents, bullies and all the types that make up life in small town USA. I’m not normally the biggest fan of short stories, because there tends to be a lack of character development, but because of the format, these tales are all about character development, sometimes spanning multiple stories. I loved this book, and rather hope that more stories come out of this rural county. 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something, Amazon will give me a few cents. This in no way influenced my review. 

Food: The History of Taste, edited by Paul Freedman. University of California Press; pub. by arrangement with Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2007

This lavishly illustrated book on food through the ages is a fairly scholarly account. Each of the ten sections is written by a different author, a specialist in the era and area. The editor himself is a history professor, one of whose specialties is medieval cuisine. Starting with hunter-gatherers and early farming, the book takes us through Greece and Rome, Imperial Chine, medieval Islamic foods and customs, the European Middle Ages, post Renaissance and the foods from the new world, the changes that occurred in the 1800s, French cuisine and the changes it has gone through (a LOT of changes) and the rise of the celebrity chef, the development of the restaurant, and the changing face of food in the modern age.

It’s a very interesting read if one is into social history. Because of the multiple authors, there is a bit of a lack of flow between chapters, but this is actually good: the authors come from a variety of countries, so we get to see the international side of things. This is not a cookbook; this is a book about food itself and how it fit into the society, with all its relations to status, religion, and wealth. I found it fascinating, although it did drag in a places. It reminds me of a really good college text book, the kind you find yourself reading ahead in while neglected one’s other classwork. 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something, Amazon will give me a few cents. This in no way altered my review.