[Wednesday] Teasers

Monique from The Little Reading Nook blog has a Tuesday Teasers request that I decided to fulfill. Yes, I realize that’s it’s Wednesday. Her instructions note:

Grab your current read. Let the book fall open to a random page. Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! Please avoid spoilers!

So…I’m on page 29 (SHAME!) of The Ecstatic by Victor LaValle…and here is my random teaser:

Opposite the perfumes there were bath gels so I went along opening many, putting them to Grandma’s nose until she decided which one she liked. As she sniffed she pursed her lips close to the bottle. If I couldn’t be trusted to soap up I didn’t trust myself to choose.

What a finicky woman. On the twenty-third try, a hand lotion, she said, —This.

It didn’t smell like flowers; not candle wax or ocean water. Worst of the lot. It was dank. It smelled like dirt really. Hearth Scented Body Gel by Mennen.

—If you take one that’s too sweet, people will still smell you underneath. This one is strong, but not perfume. It will hide what you have done. (158)

I don’t follow directions well. I started at the top of the page AND I went over two (2) sentences. Forgive me, Monique, but thanks for motivating me to turn off the television for a second and get some reading done. Oh, but while we’re talking about LaValle, I should mention that he has an upcoming August book release. Learn more:

A fiendishly imaginative comic novel about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us. Ricky Rice was as good as invisible: a middling hustler, recovering dope fiend, and traumatized suicide cult survivor running out the string of his life as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York. Until one day a letter appears, summoning him to the frozen woods of Vermont. There, Ricky is inducted into a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard The Voice: a mysterious murmur on the wind, a disembodied shout, or a whisper in an empty room that may or may not be from God. Evoking the disorienting wonder of writers like Haruki Murakami and Kevin Brockmeier, but driven by Victor LaValle’s perfectly pitched comic sensibility BIG MACHINE is a mind-rattling literary adventure about sex, race, and the eternal struggle between faith and doubt.

Mos Def  is impressed. His book blurb mentions, “Big Machine is like nothing I’ve ever read, incredibly human and alien at the same time. LaValle writes like Gabriel Garcia Marquez mixed with Edgar Allen Poe, but this is even more than that. He’s written the first great book of the next America.” Right Mos. And I have to question whether he has truly read much by Edgar Allen Poe. I mean, we’ve all read “The Tell-Tale Heart,” right? Whatever. Anyway, Mos Def loved The Ecstatic so much that he titled his new album (June 9th) after the book. According to some other blogs, the cover will look something like this:

Read more about it at FroLab.

Happy reading, y’all.