Teaser Tuesday

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!


• Share the title & author so that other participants can add the book to their Lists if they like your teasers!

"In America" - Susan Sontag

"GOD is an actor, too. He has been getting some bad reviews, though not
enough bad reviews, yet, to close the show." p.59

Book Meme

Yet another book meme.The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Put this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tag other book lovers.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - X
6 The Bible - X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - X
8 1984 - George Orwell - X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy -
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - (some of them)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X
26 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
27 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X
28 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X
29 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - X
30 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - X
31David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -
32Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X
33Emma-Jane Austen -X
34 Persuasion - Jane Austen - X
35The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
36The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X
37Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
38Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - X
39Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne- X
40Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
41The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - X
42One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X
43A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving -
44The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
45Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - X
46Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
47The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - X
48Lord of the Flies - William Golding -
49 Atonement -Ian McEwan -X
50Life of Pi - Yann Martel - X
51Dune - Frank Herbert -
52Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
53Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - X
54A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
56A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X
57Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - X
58The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon - X
59 Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
60Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - X
61Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - X
62The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
63The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
64Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - X
65On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
66Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
67Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - X
68Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie -
69 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - X
70Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X
71Dracula - Bram Stoker - X
72The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
73Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
74Ulysses - James Joyce
75The Inferno – Dante -X
76Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
77Germinal - Emile Zol
78Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
79 Posession - AS Byatt -
80A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - X
81Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82The Color Purple - Alice Walker - X
83The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
84Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -
85A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
86Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
87The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -
88Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - X
89 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -
90 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - X
91 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint- Exupery - X
92 The Wasp Factory - Ian Banks
93 Watership Down - Richard Adams - X
94A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
95A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - X
97Hamlet - William Shakespeare - X
98Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X
99 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

My friend Amanda from Life and Times of a "New New Yorker" had this list and I thought I would see where I measured up. (I really love quizes like this!)

Drum roll please... I came in with 58.g! Funny I have some of the books on the list in my collection of to read on my shelves. =)

Frank McCourt Memorium

"F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think
I've proven him wrong. And all because I refused to settle for a one-act
existence, the 30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools."
- Frank McCourt

Mr. Frank McCourt passed away yesterday, Sunday July 19, 2009, at the age of 78 in a Manhattan hospice, confirmed his brother Malachy McCourt. Mr. McCourt certainly did not live a one act life.

Born in Brooklyn in 1931, his family returned to Limerick, Ireland to find work. His father, an alcoholic, had a difficult time finding and maintaining work. At the age of 11 his father moved away and left his mother and siblings to fend for themselves. 8 years later Frank McCourt returned to New York City working various odd jobs and eventually was drafted during the Korean War. After his military deployment he enrolled at NYU to study English. Upon graduation he taught English at various schools with New York City's Board of Education.

Frank McCourt dreamed to write a book but it was not until 30 years later after retiring from teaching that this dream became a reality. He won the Pulitzer Prize and Nation Book Award in literature using his early life experiences to write the book "Angela Ashes". He followed this with the book "Tis" based on his personal struggles to return to the United States and find a place for himself as an Irish-American in New York City.

I was introduced to Frank McCourt through my mom. She has always loved Irish-American literature and found his story telling style accessible. We watched the movie "Angela's Ashes "based on his bestselling book together. At that point I had not read the book but decided to read it immediately following this 1999 hit. Several years later as a resident of Brooklyn, I found a copy of Frank McCourt's book "Tis" at Housing Works's Bookstore Cafe in NYC. "Tis" filled in the gaps where "Angela's ashes" left off. My mother was right, Frank McCourt had a way of weaving beautiful stories out of life's dingy corners and fluoresent lights. So here's to you Mr. Frank McCourt for living and sharing your second act with the world!

Book Review: The Women of Brewster Place

"The rattling moving van crept up Brewster like a huge green slug. It was flanked by a battered gypsy cab that also drove respectfully over the hidden patches of ice under the day old snow. It began to snow again, just as the small caravan reached the last building on the block." pg 7

The Women of Brewster Place, in one word is beautiful. The book is about 7 different women living in Brewster Place, a New York City housing project. Gloria Naylor crafts each woman's life as a short story and weaves the women's lives together through Brewster Place.

As a woman and a New Yorker I was touched by each woman's plight. Their very existence as a community is a struggle peppered with small successes. It is evident that Ms. Naylor grew up in New York City because she tastefully illustrates the hum, buzz, pace, and rhythm of the city. Their were moments where I felt like I too was a resident fighting, crying, and laughing along side these women in Brewster Place. This is their home for better and for worse, the place where they live, the women of Brewster Place.

This blog was created as part of the National Book Award Challenge. The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor was a 1983 National Book Award recipient.