Book Beginnings is hosted at A Few More Pages, and The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda’s Voice.

Today’s book is Tombstones and Banana Trees by Medad Birungi with Craig Borlase.

Summary:

Growing up with a violent father in the country of Uganda in the 1960s, Medad Birungi faced physical and emotional pain that few people can imagine––yet today he speaks of a revolutionary forgiveness we all can experience. Once a boy who begged to die by the side of the road, once a teenager angry enough to kill, once a man broken and searching, today Medad is a testimony to God’s transforming power. Through his story of healing, Medad calls readers to find healing from their own emotional scars. As Medad’s remarkable journey shows, when people forgive each other, they are doing something truly radical. They are changing relationships, communities, countries. They are welcoming God into the corners of the human soul, where real revolution begins.

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How to participate:

Share the first line (or two) of the book you are currently reading on your blog or in the comments. Include the title and the author so we know what you’re reading. Then, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line, and let us know if you liked or did not like the sentence. The link-up will be at A Few More Pages every Friday.

Life is good and I laugh a lot. You need to know that about me before we make a start.

I really like that. It shows that, while he had a very tough childhood, he clearly has made it through and found a way to have a good life.

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Rules:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post in the Linky HERE.

Some of those who have suffered the most understand that tough times come and go but tough people stay.

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Book Beginnings is hosted at A Few More Pages, and The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda’s Voice.

Today’s book is Tales from the Edge of Forever by Alexander Hammond.

Summary:

An anthology of mind bending imagination, Tales from the Edge of Forever offers a delicious collection of wildly original vignettes mixing fantasy, speculation, spirituality and science invention. Hammond has created stories with a depth and thoughtfulness that transcend their brevity. Whether on the streets of Manhattan or at the very edge of time and space itself the authors’ scenarios tease and intrigue in this stunningly unique collection. A total of twenty three creatively brilliant stories to captivate even the most jaded fantasy enthusiast, this book both challenges and enchants. ~ from Goodreads.com

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How to participate:

Share the first line (or two) of the book you are currently reading on your blog or in the comments. Include the title and the author so we know what you’re reading. Then, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line, and let us know if you liked or did not like the sentence. The link-up will be at A Few More Pages every Friday.

The night was warm but not unbearably so. It was for nights like these that the lone figure walking along the beach had travelled so far.

I like how descriptive this is.

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Rules:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post in the Linky HERE.

“The only way that we can achieve our exodus is by taking the best of us and the best of you and essentially achieving a merging of our races.”

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Book Beginnings is hosted at A Few More Pages, and The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda’s Voice.

Today’s book is The False Princess by Eilis O’Neal.

Summary:

Princess and heir to the throne of Thorvaldor, Nalia’s led a privileged life at court. But everything changes when it’s revealed, just after her sixteenth birthday, that she is a false princess, a stand-in for the real Nalia, who has been hidden away for her protection. Cast out with little more than the clothes on her back, the girl now called Sinda must leave behind the city of Vivaskari, her best friend, Keirnan, and the only life she’s ever known.
Sinda is sent to live with her only surviving relative, an aunt who is a dyer in a distant village. She is a cold, scornful woman with little patience for her newfound niece, and Sinda proves inept at even the simplest tasks. But when Sinda discovers that magic runs through her veins – long-suppressed, dangerous magic that she must learn to control – she realizes that she can never learn to be a simple village girl.
Returning to Vivaskari for answers, Sinda finds her purpose as a wizard scribe, rediscovers the boy who saw her all along, and uncovers a secret that could change the course of Thorvaldor’s history, forever.

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How to participate:

Share the first line (or two) of the book you are currently reading on your blog or in the comments. Include the title and the author so we know what you’re reading. Then, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line, and let us know if you liked or did not like the sentence. The link-up will be at A Few More Pages every Friday.

The day they came to tell me, I was in one of the gardens with Kiernan, trying to decipher a thee-hundred-year-old map of the palace grounds.

This does an excellent job of setting the stage. Right from the get-go, this book is packed with a lot of emotion.

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*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post in the Linky HERE.

I hummed to myself or tried to recount the steps needed to ready tansy for dyeing whenever I began to think about the jokes he would have made about the village animals or the conversations we would have about Aunt Varil. I told myself I did not miss him.

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Book Beginnings is hosted at A Few More Pages, and The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda’s Voice.

For both of these, I’m using an ARC of How Shakespeare Changed Everything by Stephen Marche. Synopsis:

Shakespeare is all around us. From nightclubs to Broadway musicals, in voting booths in the American South and the trees of Central Park – William Shakespeare’s literary power is so intense and widespread that it intrudes into the material world. “Esquire” columnist Stephen Marche takes us on a delightful tour through the continuous stream of Shakespeare’s influence, summoning up the Bard in the most unexpected places: In 1890, as part of a plan to introduce every bird mentioned by Shakespeare to North America, Eugene Schieffelin imported and released a bunch of pesky Starlings into New York’s Central Park. The Nazi Party issued a pamphlet entitled Shakespeare – a Germanic Writer, and in 1936 there were more productions of Shakespeare in Germany than in the rest of the world combined. Shakespeare coined approximately 1,700 words, including lackluster, fashionable, auspicious, bandit, glow, hush, dawn, gnarled, hobnob, traditional, and the name Jessica.

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How to participate:

Share the first line (or two) of the book you are currently reading on your blog or in the comments. Include the title and the author so we know what you’re reading. Then, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line, and let us know if you liked or did not like the sentence. The link-up will be at A Few More Pages every Friday.

William Shakespeare was the most influential person who ever lived. He shaped our world more than any political or religious leader, more than any explorer or engineer.

This is actually from the introduction, but it’s quite a powerful statement! These are hefty claims, indeed. I look forward to seeing how these claims are supported. (So far, about 50 pages in, I’m not completely sold.)

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Rules:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post in the Linky HERE.

Bell’s Shakespeare, an edition from 1773, was the first collected version of plays as they were performed on the English stage, and it reveals that the parts of Shakespeare considered decent enough for public performance in the eighteenth century amounted to roughly two-thirds of the original material.

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