Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB 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!
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

“Well, I don’t say it wasn’t a fine joke, Tom, to keep everybody suffering ‘most a week so you boys had a good time, but it is a pity you could be so hard-hearted as to let me suffer so. If you could come over on a log to go to your funeral, you could have come over and give me a hint some way that you warn’t dead, but only run off.”

It took me flipping pages for a solid five minutes to decide that a non-spoiler teaser from a Harry Potter book is relatively impossible if it’s to be interesting at all. So, I just re-downloaded Stanza to my iPod last night, and decided to find an e-book to use for my teaser today instead.

I read Mark Twain for the first time last year, and loved loved loved Huck Finn. Now, it’s time to move on to Tom Sawyer (though it’s now my understanding that I’m doin’ it wrong. Go figure!).  I can’t get enough of the way Twain makes you truly hear the way the words are spoken; whenever I read this style of written speech, I will always think of my friend Rob, who took Huck Finn from me and read me the first page in exactly the accent I imagined as I was reading. I was delighted, and only wished he could have read the whole book aloud!

So your turn – whatcha readin’?

Mondays have a terrible reputation, and it’s not entirely fair… but at the same time? It’s Monday’s fault that my weekend is over. So how can I be anything but a bit resentful?

At any rate, it’s been another big week since the Readathon, with lots of planning and hoping and planning some more. I’ve officially become a fan of Lost, and we’re about halfway through the first season, maybe a bit further? on DVD and streaming Netflix. If you have a Wii, PS3, or Xbox (I think), you must request the disc to stream from your TV; it makes Instant Play a whole new feature, I swear. In the world of reading, I’ve got three books “actively” in progress, with two others in not-quite-abandoned states of partly-read, and still haven’t made my way over to my catalog to finalize all of the owned/lost/new since summer additions and tags. But, the weather is finally allowing for some fire pit action in the back yard, the beach is beckoning, and it’s baseball season! The Red Sox are playing crap baseball, but they only have one day off in the rest of April, so we caved and paid for MLB TV and watched them this weekend. We also managed to get some sightseeing in with a dear friend visiting from Chicago yesterday, and took lots and lots of pictures; tourist days are fun!

How’s everyone’s week kicking off? Anyone else do anything fun this weekend?

I am so fortunate to live in a city with so many independent bookstores still in business. I could probably name off ten before I’d have to stop and think, but my favorite by far is Dog Eared Books on Valencia Street in San Francisco, along with Red Hill and Phoenix, its sister stores in Bernal Heights and Noe Valley, respectively. Between the three, I have hardly ever been at a loss for a book I’ve wanted or needed, and the used prices can’t be beat anywhere except at thrift stores. They also hold events at all three locations, which I’m hoping to take advantage of with Rachel this summer; yayyyy, bookish adventures!

For this mini-challenge, we were asked for the first book we ever truly loved. This is such a hard one for me, as I have loved books for truly as far back as I can remember. The earliest, though, was probably a Little Golden Book, and the one that comes to mind first is The Poky Little Puppy. I’d go with either that or The Monster at the End of This Book, which popped into my head fractions of a second later. Both are books I’ve repurchased as an adult; regardless of whether we ever have a family of our own, I want to own them :)

This was a simple challenge for me, though I hate to spoil part of the story for anyone, soooooo, I’m only going to post the cover here, and will put details of who and why in the comments. If you’ve not read Tipping the Velvet, I recommend you DO read the book, and do NOT yet read the comment(s) on this post! :)

For the cover mini-challenge, here are my selections:

Scary:

Serial Killers by Brian Innes

Disturbing:

Sniper by Pavel Hak

Beautiful:

Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin

Vibrant:

Fablehaven – Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary

Moving:

Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity

I think they’re mainly self-explanatory, though the last one is probably unfamiliar to most, if not all, of you. It’s moving because of the profound impact some of the pieces in the anthology had on me, both the first time reading it about six years ago, and this most recent time last year.