Book Beginnings: The Young Widower's Handbook

The Young Widower's Handbook: A Novel, by Tom McAllister (Algonquin Books, February 2017). From the novel:

On Monday Kaitlyn Cady went for a five-mile run, on Tuesday night she experienced severe stomach pains, by Wednesday morning she was dead, on Thursday she was burned down to ashes and poured into a stainless steel cube, and on Friday she was delivered by a stranger to her husband, Hunter. 

To describe her death as sudden is to reduce it to cliché, to not do justice to the swiftness with which she stopped existing.

About the Book:

After his wife Kait dies suddenly, 29-year-old Hunter Cady decides to take her ashes with him on a road trip so he can fulfill the promises he’d made to her that they would someday travel the country.

Initial Thoughts:

I'm cheating a little today — these lines are actually the first sentences of Chapter Two in the book, but somehow they just seem more like the book's beginning. Chapter One is short and has more of a feeling of "prologue" about it.

I was a little dubious about this one. Sounded like it could be a really depressing read. But I was encouraged by the claims that it was insightful, wry, and "laugh-out-loud" funny. And after reading the first 50 or so pages, I can say I'm enjoying it, but haven't really hit anything I'm laughing out loud about.

Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Friday.  As she says, the idea is to post the first sentence (or so) of the book you're currently reading, along with any first impressions or thoughts you have about the book, the author, etc.  It's a wonderful way of adding new books to your must-read list, and a chance to connect with other readers and bloggers.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Hard to believe the year is more than half over, isn't it? Or maybe that's just me. Summer is in full swing already, and generally I get a lot of reading done during the summer. But that hasn't been true this year.

It's been over a month since I actually finished a book, but I've started quite a few. I've got my current reading list divided up into several categories.

(1) Books I'm more than halfway through:

Anything Is Possible, by Elizabeth Strout

The Fifth Petal, by Brunonia Barry

Our Spoons Came From Woolworths,
by Barbara Comyns

(2) Books I've got started, but haven't yet reached that halfway point in:

South and West: From a Notebook,
by Joan Didion

Tell Me How This Ends Well,
by David Samuel Levinson

(3) Books I've had on my TBR list for this spring/summer, that I haven't actually started yet:

Grief Cottage, by Gail Godwin

Heartbreak Hotel, by Jonathan Kellerman

The Heirs, by Susan Rieger

How to Be Human, by Paula Cocozza

And then there are those "maybe" books I've been downloading onto my Kindle because I just can't pass up a cheap/free book from Amazon. And those books I bought at the spring sale over at our local public library. And those upcoming late summer/early autumn ARCs I really do need to get to pretty soon.

So you can see I'm not lacking for ideas about what to read next. I just need to get back to reading something right now. But first, I'm gonna visit a few other blogs and see what everyone else is reading. Maybe that'll give me the nudge I need.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is now hosted by Kathryn at Book Date. If you want to let the world know what you're going to be reading this week, head on over to her blog and leave your link. It's also a great way to discover new books and new blogs.

Book Beginnings: Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, by Barbara Comyns (first published 1950). These are the first lines of Chapter 1:

I told Helen my story and she went home and cried. In the evening her husband came to see me and brought some strawberries; he mended my bicycle, too, and was kind, but he needn't have been, because it all happened eight years ago, and I'm not unhappy now.

About the Book:

"Sophia is twenty-one and naïve when she marries fellow artist Charles. She seems hardly fonder of her husband than she is of her pet newt; she can’t keep house (everything she cooks tastes of soap); and she mistakes morning sickness for the aftereffects of a bad batch of strawberries. England is in the middle of the Great Depression, and the money Sophia makes from the occasional modeling gig doesn’t make up for her husband’s indifference to paying the rent. Predictably, the marriage falters; not so predictably, Sophia’s artlessness will be the very thing that turns her life around."

Initial Thoughts:

After reading those opening lines, my first thought was that the narrator (Sophia) sounds oddly disengaged from the story she's relating — which is, after all, the story of her own history. Almost like she's talking about another person she once knew, and not all that well.

I picked this one up when I was looking for something to read for the What's In a Name Reading Challenge — one of the categories is "an item/items of cutlery," and spoons would fit. But I'm not sure how much of Sophia's airy-ness I can put up with.

How about it? Does this one sound like something you'd go on reading? Do the opening lines spark your interest, or would they send you dashing back to your shelves for another book?

Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Friday.  As she says, the idea is to post the first sentence (or so) of the book you're currently reading, along with any first impressions or thoughts you have about the book, the author, etc.  It's a wonderful way of adding new books to your must-read list, and a chance to connect with other readers and bloggers.