Teaser Tuesday – 31st July, 2018 #Brainfluffbookblog #TeaserTuesday

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by The Purple Booker.
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!

This is my choice of the day:

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

p. 103. ‘Do you think Mrs Neal is stooping?’ Polly Campbell muses.
‘Hmm?’ Elinor licks a fresh thread for her needle.
‘For she has not so much as seen the gentleman – if gentleman he may be called – and now she must escort him all evening? I had not expected her to capitulate so easy.’
Elinor shrugs. ‘She is not so different from us.’
‘Oh she is. Utterly so. She can disoblige any body she chooses.’
‘She’s not so well set in the world as you think. She still needs Mrs Chappell’s favour. And Mrs Chappell needs Mr Hancock’s favour, so you see Mrs Neal is quite trapped.’

BLURB: This voyage is special. It will change everything…

One September evening in 1785, the merchant Jonah Hancock hears urgent knocking on his front door. One of his captains is waiting eagerly on the step. He has sold Jonah’s ship for what appears to be a mermaid.

And this is what I have against modern blurbs – I’m on page 103 and the next paragraph of the blurb then goes on to reveal the next plotpoint that I haven’t yet got around to reading! Clearly I’m not going to include it in this week’s teaser… So far, I’m enjoying this one but I don’t yet love it. There is no one I have yet really bonded with as the writing style, though very accomplished and fluent, is doing a lot of telling. However, there’s plenty of time as this is a fairly hefty read.

Teaser Tuesday – 23rd January, 2018

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by The Purple Booker.
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!

This is my choice of the day:

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew P. Walker

60% It is said that time heals all wounds. Several years ago I decided to scientifically test this age-old wisdom, as I wondered whether an amendment was in order. Perhaps it was not time that heals all wounds, but rather time spent in dream sleep. I had been developing a theory based on the combined patterns of brain activity and brain neurochemistry of REM sleep, and from this theory came a specific prediction: REM-sleep dreaming offers a form of overnight therapy.

BLURB: An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming. Within the brain, sleep enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity.

Walker answers important questions about sleep: how do caffeine and alcohol affect sleep? What really happens during REM sleep? Why do our sleep patterns change across a lifetime? How do common sleep aids affect us and can they do long-term damage? Charting cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and synthesizing decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood, and energy levels; regulate hormones; prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes; slow the effects of aging; increase longevity; enhance the education and lifespan of our children, and boost the efficiency, success, and productivity of our businesses. Clear-eyed, fascinating, and accessible, Why We Sleep is a crucial and illuminating book.

I am conscious that I hardly ever read non-fiction and when I saw this one on offer, given our recent, rather scary experience with my husband’s severe sleep apnea, I decided I wanted to know more about this subject. Now I do, I’m making strenuous efforts to get my own broken sleep rhythm back into some kind of order. This book is not just recommended – for those of you who don’t regularly get 7-8 hours sleep a night, this is required reading.

Teaser Tuesday – 17th October, 2017

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by The Purple Booker.
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!

This is my choice of the day:
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
8% An instant later she is flying at a wall. She recognises a print from the Dogs Playing Poker series by Coolidge, supposedly ubiquitous, but she realises this is the first time she has actually ever seen one, and then she hits. Hunter’s house is of distressingly solid construction. In a more modern dwelling this might cave in a plasterboard wall but not here. She slides down the wall and lands badly, and a huge shape, comically thuggish, blocks her view of the room.

BLURB: Gnomon, which took Harkaway more than three years to complete, is set in a world of ubiquitous surveillance. Pitched as “a mind-bending Borgesian puzzle box of identity, meaning and reality in which the solution steps sideways as you approach it”, it features: a detective who finds herself investigating the very society she believes in, urged on by a suspect who may be an assassin or an ally, hunting through the dreams of a torture victim in search of the key to something she does not yet understand; a banker who is pursued by a shark that swallows Fortune 500 companies; Saint Augustine’s jilted mistress who reshapes the world with miracles; a refugee grandfather turned games designer who must remember how to walk through walls or be burned alive by fascists; and a sociopath who falls backwards through time in order to commit a murder.

As you can see, I’m not very far into this one and it isn’t particularly straightforward. I’m just getting used to the writing style which is quite wordy and literary. I loved Gone-Away World and enjoyed Angelmaker, so I’m hoping that I’ll soon fully bond with this one and the pages will start turning themselves…