Teaser Tuesday

“Miss Matty made no secret of being an arrant coward, but she went regularly through her housekeeper’s duty of inspection – only the hour became earlier and earlier, till at last we went the rounds at half-past six, and Miss Matty adjourned to bed soon after seven, ‘in order to get the night over the sooner’.”

-page 108 from Cranford by Elizabeth C. Gaskell

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! (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!

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

I’ve been avoiding reading anything by Isabel Allende for years. I’m not sure there’s an actual reason for this, it just never happened that I picked up one of her books. I’m really glad I finally did. The House of the Spirits was the first book I finished this year and I loved it.

It’s set in Chile, a country I admit I knew little about, and it revolves around various members of one rather strange family. Through the years, we follow their lives, witness them hurting or helping each other, see how their actions unwillingly affect people who come years later.

This is very much an epic novel. Each chapter focuses on a different family member and the whole book spans decades, starting from Rosa, the green-haired goddess and ending with Blanca, the young political activist. The changing country is the background for all the family drama as the main social, political and economic events of 20th century Chile irreversibly change the characters’ lives.

It is beautifully written, the descriptions for the chilean countryside are amazing. The writing is often blunt, there are a lot of unpleasant events taking place in the book and a few times I was a bit shocked and disturbed because Allende can make it clear just how devastating and violent these are. The characters are flawed, sometimes they are really hard to like, but they feel real and their actions seem to stay true to who they are.

So, I am now very keen to read more by this author and I’m a bit upset it took me so long to get to it. This book is highly recommended and I think anyone who’s been putting off reading Isabel Allende books should hurry up and do it. (Michelle, I’m looking at you)

A walk in Highgate village

Took a stroll through Highgate yesterday, hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Highgate village was a distinct village outside of London until late victorian times and it still retains it’s 19th-century feel today. It’s built on a hill and offers spectacular views of London and it’s also where the famous Highgate cemetery is.

Five minutes walk from Highgate tube station, is the beige coloured townhouse where Charles Dickens and his family lived for a while, apparently in an attempt to avoid their creditors.

Walking past The Gatehouse pub, you reach Pond Square, a lovely place that, besides the cars, feels unchanged since the 19th century.

Up ahead, you reach Church house. It is believed to have been the ‘old brick house at Highgate on the very summit of the hill’, to which David Copperfield was invited to stay.

Walking past The Flask, another historic pub, you find The Grove, with many elegant houses. One of them is where the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived from 1823 until his death in 1834.

Merton Lane takes you to the east end of Hampstead Heath and the ponds.

You soon get to Makepeace Avenue, once called ‘London’s loveliest garden colony’. This offers amazing views of London; on a clear day you can see St Paul’s Cathedral, the London Eye and the BT Tower.

On Swain’s Lane you reach the rather eccentric but pretty Holly Village, consisting of nine gothic cottage built in 1865.

Up the hill is the entrance to Highgate cemetery East, where nature definitely conquers over anything manmade and where famous great people like Karl Marx and George Eliot are buried.

Next to the cemetery is the Waterlow Park, where once again the views of London on a clear day are beautiful.

This leads you to Highgate high Street where you can have a drink and a bite to eat at one of many pubs, but as you make your way to Archway station you see the little statue of a cat that casts a wary backward glance at London below, and which marks the site where Dick Whittington reputedly heard the bells of Bow Church urging him to ‘turn again’. This is also the stone cat that Bill Sikes passed after the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist.

 

Picture of the day 21/01/2011

Once again, I’m posting more than one picture because Bath is such a lovely place and I couldn’t possibly pick one.

Walking around in Bath all one sees is beautiful Georgian architecture and impressive Victorian buildings.

The Roman baths, dedicated to the goddess Sulis Minerva, founded in the 1st century AD, with the Abbey church of St Peter and St Paul, founded in 1499, in the background.

The main pool in the spa is warm, around 35 degrees Celsius, and was particularly tempting on this really cold day.

Picture of the day 20/01/2011

The Pergola in Hampstead Heath.