Review: The Rose of Martinique

The Rose of Martinique by Andrea Stuart

Prior to picking up The Rose of Martinique, I had never read a biography before. Like a great deal of nonfiction, it had just never appealed to me, but that was prior before I took on the mantle of The Literary Omnivore–now I take on books I’m ambivalent about to ferret out the good and make cautionary tales out of the bad! It was one of the first book recommendations I picked up when making my reading list from Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust, and when I needed something a bit more elevated to wash out the bad taste of Sisters Red, The Rose of Martinique was there for me at my local library.

Booking Through Thursday: Travel

When you travel, how many books do you bring with you?
Has this changed since the arrival of ebooks?

This is a very timely question, as I’m traveling to Washington D.C. today!

It depends on the length of the trip and the length of the book. For this particular trip, I’m taking along The Rose of Martinique and Mansfield Park, both of which are just over four hundred pages long–I really don’t expect to finish both of them before Sunday, but I do expect to finish The Rose of Martinique on the flight. On average, though, I usually bring two or three dense books to last me through a trip.

Digital books have changed nothing for me in this regard. I don’t bring my laptop with me when I travel and I don’t have a digital reader, so there’s no way I can access the handful I do have.

Teaser Tuesday: The Rose of Martinique

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

So the lovers simply moved in with each other. The ensuing scandal focused not on their adultery–Parisian society was used to that–but on their audacity in sharing a home.

pg. 29 of The Rose of Martinique by Andrea Stuart.

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your 2 ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks!

The Sunday Salon: The Commonplace Book

Back in August, Eva posted about the way she reads; how she bookmarks, where she usually gets her books, and, most importantly, her commonplace book. If you, like me before I saw the post, don’t know what a commonplace book is, it’s essentially a literary scrapbook, ideally filled with quotes discovered in the course of your reading. Eva kept a commonplace book in high school, but had fallen off the wagon since. In its place, she now keeps a private commonplace blog. After some thought, I decided to start keeping a commonplace book of my own.

The Literary Horizon: Dragon Lady, The Rose of Martinique

I’ve never really read biographies, I have to admit. But in my quest to expand my literary horizons (oh, as if I can resist a pun like that), there are several biographies that have found their way onto my reading list. Today, we look at two biographies that look at two very different women.