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 Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (published 2017):
First Chapter, First Paragraphs:
On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen. Now, I know what you are thinking: older man (not thin, somewhat bald, lame in one leg, teeth of wood) exercises the marital prerogative, thereby mortifying the poor young—
But that is false.
That is exactly what I refused to do, you see.
On our wedding night I clumped up the stairs, face red with drink and dance, found her arrayed in some thinnish thing an aunt had forced her into, silk collar fluttering slightly with her quaking—and could not do it.
On Hardcover:
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill.
In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president says at the time. "God has called him home."
Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy's body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins a story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying.
Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state -- called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo -- a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul.
What do you think? Would you read this one?
I was a bit distressed at having read only two of the books on the recently published New York Times list of the 100 Best Books of the Twenty-First Century. That prompted me to read reviews of each of the 98 books I have not read and I came up with 25 that I would like to read by the time I turn 60 on 3 December 2025. This is one of them.
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