Friday Focus: The Friday 56 and Book Beginnings

 

It's Friday . . . time to share book excerpts with:

• Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader, where bloggers share the first sentence or more of a current read, as well as initial thoughts about the sentence(s), impressions of the book, or anything else that the opening inspires.  
• The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Today I'm featuring an upcoming read, The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. The excerpts shared are from a hardcover version borrowed from the library.

Beginning:  While in prison, I received a dictionary. It was sent to me with a note. This is the book I would take to a deserted island. Other books were to arrive from my teacher. But as she had known, this one proved of endless use.

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Page 56:  "Do you believe in ghosts?" I asked.

"You know I don't. Or you know what I think, anyway."

"I was hoping you'd changed your mind."

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My thoughts:  It's a curious beginning that has me wondering who the narrator is; why this person is in prison; who the teacher is; and about the title, which could relate to jail time as well as the mentioned dictionary. I'm eager to begin reading to satisfy my curiosity.

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From GoodReads:  In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors.

Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

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This Friday Focus: The Friday 56 & Book Beginnings post was originally composed and/or compiled and published by Catherine for the blog, bookclublibrarian.com.  It cannot be republished without attribution. 

First Chapter ~ First Paragraph

It's Tuesday . . . time for . . . 

                                                      

 

First Chapter ~ First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, now hosted by Vicki at I'd Rather Be At The Beach, where bloggers post the first paragraph(s) of a book they are currently reading or planning to read sometime soon.  

 

Today I'm featuring an upcoming read, Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich.  The excerpt is from a hardcover edition I recently purchased. 

  

August 7

When I tell you that my white name is Cedar Hawk Songmaker and that I am the adopted child of Minneapolis liberals, and that when I went looking for my Ojibwe parents and found that I was born Mary Potts I hid the knowledge, maybe you'll understand.  Or not.  I'll write this anyway, because ever since last week things have changed.  Apparently--I mean, nobody knows--our world is running backward.  Or forward.  Or maybe sideways, in a way as yet ungrasped.  I am sure somebody will come up with a name for what is happening, but I cannot imagine how everything around us and everything within us can be fixed.  What is happening involves the invisible, the quanta of which we are created.  Whatever is actually occurring, there is constant breaking news about how it will be handled--speculation, really, concerning what comes next--which is why I am writing an account.

 

Historic times!   There have always been letters and diaries written in times of tumult and discovered later, and my thought is that I could be writing one of those.  And even though I realize that all lexical knowledge may be useless, you'll have this record.

 

 

What do you think?  Would you continue reading? 

The opening of the story feels very current--as though the present state of affairs is being described.  Actually the narrator, who is four months pregnant, is writing to her unborn child. 

This First Chapter ~ First Paragraph post was originally composed and/or compiled and published by Catherine for bookclublibrarian.com.  It cannot be republished without attribution.  Retweeting and sharing on Google+ are appreciated.