First Chapter, First Paragraph: Tuesday Intros is a weekly meme hosted by Socrates Book Reviews where participants share the first paragraph of one of the books that they are currently reading, have read or are planning to read. According to Socrates, this meme is guaranteed to increase your TBR 🙂
This week, I am participating with The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingslover, published September 24, 1998:
First Chapter, First (Two) Paragraph(s):
IMAGINE A RUIN so strange it must never have happened. First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
What do you think? Would you read this one?
I put this on my first draft list of books I wanted to read during my Crossing Continents Reading Challenge for 2024 for one set in Africa. It is quite lengthy -- more than a thousand pages in my epub version -- so I believe I had better start it soon if I have any hope of finishing it during February.
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