Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the first paragraph of her current read. Anyone can join in. Go to Diane's website for the image and share the first paragraph of the current book you are reading.
Continuing my obsession with all things French, I have the book 13 rue Therese by Elena Mauli Shapiro. I picked this book up at the beginning of summer, thinking Grace might want to read it before she headed off to France, but she didn't. Last night I picked it up and thought it looked intriguing.
An American professor arrives in Paris and finds a box of artifacts that tell the life of a woman who lived through both World Wars. He becomes consumed with the story and the gaps between. Here's the first paragraph:Josianne's gift is a simple square box, its sides about as long as her forearm. It is about as deep as her hand is wide. The white plastic lid has a quaint red crosshatch pattern on it, like the sort you might see on a tablecloth in a small family-owned restaurant. The box is nothing extraordinary, though its contents have been known to induce fevers. At least, that is one of the effects it had on Josianne when it first came to her -- perhaps she decided to pass on her gift as much from a need to get it away from herself as to share it with another. At least, the box let her think she decided.
What do you think? Would you keep reading? Just in case you haven't decided, take a look at this Tuesday Teaser.
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's my teaser from a random page:
She wants to laugh at this, but at the same time, she wants to curl up, wrapped in sadness. The fire of this overwrought feeling -- this constant feeling of the animal self caged and unable to run free -- she thought that this feeling would wane after the end of the war, after the first flame of her youth faded. It is not so.~p. 128, 13 rue Therese by Elena Mauli Shapiro
To keep reading or not, that is the question?
