A Blogger Recommended - Tulip Fever

   Welcome to A Blogger Recommended, a series where I will periodically write about a book I've read based on the review/post of another blogger.


    Today's recommendation  is Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach and I learned about this book on leeswammes' blog.

    The novel is set in 17th Century Amsterdam and is about Sophia, the young wife of an older, prosperous merchant.  The marriage is rather happy, although Sophia has not yet borne any children, and Cornelis - her husband - has decided to immortalize their union by having their portrait painted.  The painter - Jan van Loos - arrives; he and Sophia are initially hostile to each other, but of course that only masked their mutual passion.

     Sophia realizes what she is missing in her life (or what she thinks she is missing) and wants to be with Jan, but she also does not want to hurt her husband.  The lovers - with the cooperation of Sophia's maid, Maria - concoct a plot that not only touches on the tulip fever of the title (immense speculation on tulip bulbs that caused prices to rise dramatically) but which also reminded me a little bit of the first season of Glee.

    As leeswammes mentioned in her review, I too would have liked to read more detail about the Tulip Fever that gripped Amsterdam and the rest of Holland.  I would have expected it to have a larger presence in the novel given the title and I was left unsatisfied with how this part of history was described (*sigh* I guess I'll have to find some more books about the subject to read).  Having said that, though, I've always enjoyed novels that represent "average" life in a past era and this was no exception; the descriptions of the markets and taverns of Amsterdam were very enticing and make me want to visit the city even more to see if I would be able to experience at least a sense of what it was like at that time. 

   Thank you, leeswammes, for introducing me to this novel!

Book Beginnings on Friday

 

  Book Beginnings on Friday is a meme created by Becky at Page Turners, and is now hosted by Katy at A Few More Pages. Anyone can participate; just share the opening sentence of your current read, making sure that you include the title and author so others know what you're reading. If you like, share with everyone why you do, or do not, like the sentence.


  This week's beginning comes from The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson, winner of this year's Man Booker Prize:

He should have seen it coming.

  This sentence makes me want to read further -- what happened?  I'm not that far into the novel yet, so I still have no idea what it is that he should have seen coming.

November's Reading List

  It's hard to believe it is already November -- the weather is cooling off, the days are getting shorter, and the holidays are fast approaching, but there is always plenty of reading to be done!

  My book club reads for this month are:

• Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
• Silas Marner by George Eliot
• Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya
• Michelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King

 Blogger Recommendations this month are:

• Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach (recommended by leeswammes)
• Annexed by Sharon Dogar (recommended by see scoot read)

  I am also going to get started on War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, which is my Classics group's January book for discussion.  When I do begin I will post my progress.

  Aside from these books I will certainly work through my TBR piles (that thing I mentioned last month about not buying books?  yeah, didn't happen).  I have to spend some time organizing them so I can be reminded of what is there, but I'd really much rather spend the time reading .....

  Oh, and later this month will be my one year blogiversary!  I'm thinking of offering some sort of giveaway, so stay tuned!

Top Ten Tuesday -- Books that made me cry

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This week's question is to list your top 10 books that made you cry:

   1.  Terry Fox's autobiography.  Terry Fox was an amazing Canadian who attempted to run across Canada on one good leg and one prosthetic one to raise money for cancer research. I can't remember the title because I read it when I was about 12 (many many years ago) but I distinctly remember crying my eyes out when his cancer returned and he wrote about giving up the run and accepting that he was going to die.  His mother, Betty, was one of the final torchbearers at the Winter Olympics' opening ceremony in Vancouver this year and I cried at that too (yep, I'm a marshmallow)

   2.  The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne.  That ending.  I closed the book at the end and just thought for a moment, then the tears started.

   3.  Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.  OK, I did see the musical first and bawled through most of the second act, so when I cried while reading the book it could have been a Pavlovian response (I still can't hear some of the songs without weeping) but the scene where Eponine dies in Marius' arms gets me every time.

   4.  The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein.  My response to this one was proof that I could never own a pet.  Too emotionally draining.

   There have been other books that have made me horribly sad:  The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, Room by Emma Donoghue, The Tower the Zoo and the Tortoise by Julia Stuart, but I can't say that I cried upon reading them. 


   What books make you cry?

It's Monday -- What are You Reading?

It's Monday - What are you Reading? is a weekly meme hosted by Sheila at bookjourney to allow us to share with others in the book-loving cyberworld what is on our reading plates.

This week I finished the following books:

• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Fall of Giants by Ken Follett
• Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones
• At Home:  A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

 Books in Progress:

• Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya
• Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach
• Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
• Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon

  On Saturday I will be attending a reading of the Best European Fiction as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, so I'm going to try and get through as much of it as I can before then.  It should be an interesting event.

  What are you reading this week?

Book Beginnings on Friday

 
  Book Beginnings on Friday is a meme created by Becky at Page Turners, and is now hosted by Katy at A Few More Pages. Anyone can participate; just share the opening sentence of your current read, making sure that you include the title and author so others know what you're reading. If you like, share with everyone why you do, or do not, like the sentence.


  My beginning is from Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones:

I was with her at the first hotel on the Arabian Sea.

  A simple sentence, yet one that creates some questions for the reader:  the identity of "her", why we need to know where the narrator encountered her.  Since it's also told in the first person, it's an indication that the story might be all about perception. 

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

  One of the things that I love about reading is the ability to go back into history and view events from a different perspective, both in fiction and non-fiction.  An epic novel, both in its length - 985 pages - and its scope - covering about 10 years in the early 20th Century - Fall of Giants is a great story and a fascinating look at the events of the time, especially The First World War.

  The novel is the story of several families from different parts of the world.  The stories do intersect throughout, but they also break off from time to time and we are able to see how historical events - The Great War, but also the Russian Revolution and the movement in Britain for women's suffrage - impact individual people. 

  It seems strange to describe a 985 page book as an easy read, but I really thought it was.  The characters - including some real-life ones such as Lenin, Winston Churchill, and Woodrow Wilson - were all interesting (obviously some more likeable than others) and the history seems to be incredibly accurate.  I did notice a bias toward a particular political view, but to me it did not affect the overall content of the novel.   

  This is the first novel in a proposed "Century" trilogy, and the ground has been laid with specific mention of the names of the children of the main characters in this novel.  I suspect that the second volume will focus on the time around World War II, but that is just a guess; at any rate, I am eagerly awaiting its release. 

  In the meantime, since this was my first Ken Follett novel, I will have to move World Without End and Pillars of the Earth higher up on the to-read list.