15 October 2020

Book Beginning: The Peppermint Tea Chronicles by Alexander McCall Smith

 

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. We share the first sentence (or so) of the book we are reading, along with our initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

Domenica Macdonald, anthropologist, resident of Scotland Street, and wife of Angus Lordie, portrait painter and long-standing member of the Scottish Arts Club, sat in the kitchen of her flat in Scotland Street.

 


Huzzah, a comfort read for troubled times. This is book 13 in the 44 Scotland Street series by Alexander McCall Smith, published late last year. I do so love these books, as well as most of his other works. They won't win him the Nobel Prize or even the Booker Prize, but they are extremely enjoyable and full of stories about regular, normal, everyday humans, replete with all their foibles.

Sometimes the books can seem a bit disjointed, as each short chapter tends to repeat or summarize some of the scenes of last one. This is the result of their original format: they have been serialized daily in "The Scotsman" newspaper since 2004.

I can't wait to see what Bertie, Cyril, Mathew and Elspeth, Pat, Big Lou, and the other characters are up to now!




09 October 2020

Book Beginning: Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

 

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. We share the first sentence (or so) of the book we are reading, along with our initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.
 

When I was ten years old, I wrote a letter to my future self and buried it in my backyard. Seventeen years later, I remembered that I was supposed to remember to dig it up two years earlier. 

I looked forward to getting a nostalgic glimpse into my childhood - perhaps I would marvel at my own innocence or see the first glimmer of my current aspirations. As it turns out, it just made me feel real weird about myself.

 

This is a graphic/comic memoir that came out of Allie Brosh's blog of the same name. The subtitle is "unfortunate situations, flawed coping mechanisms, mayhem, and other things that happened". I've read a lot of it already and it is strangely compelling and repelling at the same time.