Horse by Geraldine Brooks -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Thank you for joining my on Book Beginnings on Fridays! Please share the opening sentence (or so) from the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy or you otherwise want to highlight.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

The deceptively reductive forms of the artist’s work belie the density of meaning forged by a bifurcated existence. These glyphs and ideograms signal to us from the crossroads: freedom and slavery, White and Black, rural and urban.

-- from Horse by Geraldine Brooks.

Those two opening sentences are as pompous and unwieldy as they sound! But they are the character's attempt to write a magazine article about a painting. He rejects them immediately, saying to himself: "No. Nup. That wouldn’t do. It reeked of PhD. This was meant to be read by normal people." 

So have no fear, Horse is completely engaging, with no reek of PhD. I really enjoyed Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book, which my book club read a while back. So when one of my book club friends gave me a copy of Horse for Christmas, it went straight to my nightstand to be read ASAP. 

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your Book Beginnings post in the Linky box below. If you share on social media, please use the #bookbeginnings hashtag.

  

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THE FRIDAY 56

Another fun Friday event is The Friday 56. Share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of your book, or 56% of the way through your e-book or audiobook, on this weekly event hosted by Freda at Freda's Voice.

MY FRIDAY 56

From Horse:

He watched her, a slight white shape in the dark, running up the rise to the house. Instead of taking the shallow stone steps to the grand front entrance, she slipped around the side porch.

Horse is historical fiction with a "braided narrative" going from 1850 to 1954 to 2019. The story is based on a real racehorse in the 1950s named Lexington.