Chapter 18: Teaser Tuesday 8.9.2009

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Open to a random page.
• Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page.
• Be careful not to include spoilers!
• Share the title & author, too, so that other Teaser Tuesday participiants can add the book to their to be read lists if they like your teasers!

My to read list at Goodreads is in three digits at the moment, and at home I have piles of books I would like to read, and it is really hard to choose which one to read next! Well, I admit, that is a happy problem! :)

However, I thought maybe it would be fun to read some non-fiction while I am pondering which novel to read next. I could not choose just one non-fiction book, either, so I'm now reading both Queen Christabel by David Mitchell (my used book for the 9 books for 2009 challenge) and The Incredible Human Journey by Alice Roberts. So, here comes two teasers from two interesting books covering two very different subjects.

Queen Christabel is a biography of the English suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst. The history of women and especially the history of women's suffrage is something very dear to my heart. I wrote my master's thesis on the international connections of Maikki Friberg, one of the leading Finnish women's rights activist in the late 19th-early 20th century, and, hopefully, I will write a PhD on women's history some day. I bought a used copy of Queen Christabel at Foyles in London over a decade ago. Even before that I had read parts of the book for my studies, but now I want to read it from cover to cover. I know Mitchell's book has been said to be quite hostile to Christabel Pankhurst, so I'm looking forward to an interesting read. Here comes the teaser right from the beginning of the introduction:

"Seldom has a political tactician achieved such instant notoriety as when in October 1905 Christabel Pankhurst was sent to prison for the 'crime' of asking Sir Edward Gray, at a political rally in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester: "Will the Liberal Party give Votes for Women?" Overnight the diminutive Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) began to command journalistic attention, and within a few months women's suffrage became an issue which could no longer be ignored or escaped."[p. 1]

The incredible Human Journey: The Story of How We Colonised the Planet I borrowed from work. It caught my eye in the new arrivals shelf and looked so interesting I just had to borrow it. I've read about 50 pages so far and it looks very promising. It is described in the dust jacket as "part detective story, part travelogue" that retraces the migration of early humans out of Africa.

"We are certainly apes; our anatomy is incredibly similar to that of our nearest relations, chimpanzees. I could put a chimpanzee arm bone, or humerus, in an exam for medical students and they wouldn't even notice that it wasn't human." [p. 1]

Interesting isn't it? Happy reading everyone!