Teaser Tuesday 23.11.2010

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by LizB 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 and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

 I finished reading The Small Hand, a ghost story by Susan Hill while in Vienna, Austria during the weekend. I returned home late last night and this morning tried to quickly find a "metro book" to read on my way to work. Sarabande by Marcus Fedder? I'm  1/3 down, but no, later. Frida's Bed by Slavenka Drakulic? There was a very popular Frida Kahlo exhibition in Vienna that I did not see, but saw to queue outside the venue. No, not yet, don't feel like reading about her. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins? YES, but where on earth is my copy of the novel?? At this point I was getting a bit anxious not to miss my metro. I grabbed The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett from another of my bookselves and was out of the door in a few seconds.

 I did end up missing my metro, but it had nothing to do with the book. I had moved my watch forward what I believed to be an hour last night as Vienna and Helsinki are in different time zones. Actually my watch was not accurately in time and I left home just the crusial 3 minutes too late! :) The Holy Machine proved to be the right choice, though. It is a science fiction novel set in somewhere in the Balkans in a city state called Illyria, a radically rational and science-based society surrounded by a world where religious fundamentalism has become the norm. My teaser is from page 11. The leading characher George Simling tells us what his mother has had to witness before she came to Illyria:

"A sociologist called Carp confesses to questioning the institution of marriage, to defending homosexuals, to teaching the satanic doctrine of cultural relativity...
     The crowd explodes with rage."

I like reading science fiction every once in a while and this story looks really promising. So, if you'll excuse me, I'll retreat back to reading my book...

And, yes, the pictures are of Viennese Christmas lights. :)