Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Miz B 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 and author, too, so that other Teaser Tuesday participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!
My teaser
From The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough (Futura, 1983, page 67):
“There were twenty-seven gates between the presbytery in Gillanbone and Drogheda homestead, each one meaning he had to stop, get out of the car, open the gate, get into the car and drive it through, stop, get out, go back to close the gate, then get in the car again and proceed to the next one. Many and many a time he longed to dispense with at least half the ritual, scoot on down the track leaving the gates open like a series of astonished mouths behind him; but even the awesome aura of his calling would not prevent the owners of the gates from tarring and feathering him for it.”
The Thorn Birds took the world by storm upon its publication in the late 1970s. Whereas the mini-series it inspired focussed on the forbidden attraction between Meggie Cleary and Catholic priest Ralph De Bricassart, in the novel their story is merely the thread that connects all the others to weave a multi-generational Australian epic. From the gritty realism of life on a station (ranch) in the Outback and the gut-wrenching tragedies that force the toughest people to their knees, to the price of ambition and the turmoil of love, McCullough’s complex, full-blooded characters are spared little, and show all the strengths and foibles of human nature. I do recall thinking, as I closed the book after the first reading, my head spinning and my heart pumping, thank goodness one couple ended up happy!
The Thorn Birds was the first non-curricular English-language book I read. After twenty or thirty pages of painstakingly switching between the novel and a dictionary, I threw the latter aside and jumped feet first into the story, trusting the context to guide me past obstacles. By Sunday evening, two days later, I had finished the 591 pages. It was as if a dam had broken and torn down the invisible walls between my brain and this interesting, foreign language. Thank goodness, because the next book my English teacher assigned was Wuthering Heights... which is the book that ignited my life-long love of British literature and fiction. But that is another story altogether.
Please feel free to share a link to your own Tuesday Teaser! And if you have a personal “breakthrough book” of any kind, I would enjoy hearing about it.
