FRIDAY MEMES: BEGINNINGS & FRIDAY 56 — FEB. 18

 

 

Good morning!  Welcome to our Friday memes, in which we share excerpts from our current (or upcoming) reads.

Beginnings is hosted by A Few More Pages, and The Friday 56 is hosted by Freda’s Voice.

For our beginnings, we excerpt one or two opening lines, and then share our reactions to them, then link up at the host’s site.

In the p. 56 event, we excerpt something from that page, and then link up at the host’s site.

This coming week, I plan to include this title in my stack to read.  Freedom:  A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen, has received a lot of buzz, including an Oprah nod.

With 562 pages, I’m adding it to my list this week, but will probably take awhile to finish it, since I’ll be reading other books, too.  But I’ve been eager to dive into it for some time.

Here’s an Amazon Snippet:

Freedom…is a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock, focused on the court and a little lost off it, and a stolid budding lawyer, besotted with her and almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and, over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues–among them mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock’n’roll–and in some ways can’t be separated from them, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other: not for their charm or goodness, but because they have their reasons, and you know them. –Tom Nissley
Now for the Beginning:

The news about Walter Berglund wasn’t picked up locally—he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now—but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times. According to a long and very unflattering story in theTimes, Walter had made quite a mess of his professional life out there in the nation’s capital.

This opener tells me that we’re going to be reading a bit about this character’s flaws and mistakes.  It doesn’t really captivate me, but I am curious.

 

Now for p. 56:

Eliza’s parents were big-deal Twin Cities psychotherapists and lived out in Wayzata, where everybody was rich, and she had an older brother, a junior at Bard College, whom she described as peculiar.

 

What have your discovered within your pages today?  I hope you’ll stop by and share.…