Not only does Gilion host the European Reading Challenge and TBR 25 in 25 Challenge on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, a few years ago I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. After taking last week off I’ve returned with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

John Adams’s long life began in one world and ended in another. The year he was born, 1737, a handful of kings ruled over most of Europe and a good part of the American landmass. He grew up in a world of empires built around political and social hierarchies that set the rulers apart from the ruled. By the time Adams died in 1826, a series of revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic had swept away much of this old regime: the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions; the Spanish American independence movements; and a host of smaller uprisings.

Last week I featured Colin Harrison’s 2004 neo-noir thriller The Havana Room. Before that it was Louise Erdrich’s highly acclaimed 2021 novel The Sentence. This week it’s Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s 2024 The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It.

One of my plans for 2025 was to do a series of posts featuring books about notable revolutions from history. After scoring great Kindle deals on Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 and Enzo Traverso’s Revolution: An Intellectual History together with my local public library’s acquisition of Fareed Zakaria’s Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s similarly titled The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It it felt like, at least at the beginning an attainable goal. Sadly though, I failed miserably by not cracking open any of the four above-mentioned books, opting instead to indulge myself in historical fiction and who knows what else.

But alas all is not lost. 2026 marks the 150th anniversary of the American Revolution. Therefore, what could be more appropriate than reading these promising books over the course of next year. Consider this week’s post a bit of a preview.

Here’s what Amazon has to say about The Age of Revolutions.

The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality.

In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown—from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun—he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story. The first revolutionary generation, fired by radical ideas, struggled to slip the hierarchical bonds of the old order. Their failures molded a second generation, more adept at mass organizing but with an illiberal tint. The sweeping political transformations they accomplished after 1800 etched social and racial inequalities into the foundations of modern democracy.

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading Challenge and TBR 25 in 25 Challenge on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, a few years ago I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. After taking last week off I’ve returned with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Begin on the night that my old life ended. Begin on a warm April evening with a rumpled thirty-nine-year-old man stepping out of his cab at Park Avenue and Seventy-seventh. Manhattan steams and rumbles around him. He needs food, he wants sex, he must have sleep, and he’d prefer them in that order.

Last week I featured Louise Erdrich’s highly acclaimed 2021 novel The Sentence. Before that it was Hedrick Smith’s 1976 best-seller The Russians.   This week it’s Colin Harrison’s 2004 neo-noir thriller The Havana Room.

I’m sure most, if not all of us have a book or two someone gave us that we politely accepted even though we figured we’d never read. Frequently, that book winds up tossed in some box or tucked away on a shelf and forgotten. But over time your curiosity grows so you decide to read it. So it is with The Havana Room, a book an old friend and former co-worker of mine bestowed upon me almost 20 years ago. After stumbling across my copy the other day while rummaging through my personal library I gave it a quick inspection. Once I read the book’s opening few sentences I knew I had to feature it on a Book Beginnings on Friday post.

Here’s what Amazon has to say about The Havana Room.

Bill Wyeth is a rising real estate attorney living the lofty heights of success. Then a tragic accident claims everything he has: his family, his fortune, his career. But this is Manhattan, and Bill has much further to fall. His downward spiral lands him at the table of Allison Sparks, the dangerously alluring owner of a midtown steakhouse. She needs a personal favor of him–to engineer a midnight trade-off in a shady multimillion-dollar real estate deal. For a man with nothing left to lose, the set-up is too lucrative to refuse, and like Allison, too forbidden to resist. But her favor draws him deeper into a web of sex, deception, and murder–and to a secret place at the back of her restaurant, the Havana Room, where a man might find both evil and redemption. The Havana Room is a great New York thriller from a modern master of the genre.

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading Challenge and TBR 25 in 25 Challenge on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, a few years ago I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. After taking last week off I’ve returned with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

While in prison, I received a dictionary. It was sent to me with a note. This is the book I would take to a deserted island. Other books were to arrive from my teacher. But as she had known, this one proved of endless use.

Last week I featured Hedrick Smith’s 1976 best-seller The Russians. Before that it was Ben Macintyre’s 2020 Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy. This week it’s Louise Erdrich’s highly acclaimed 2021 novel The Sentence.

About midway through this year I realized the only fiction I’ve been reading  has been historical, mystery, espionage or some combination thereof. It feels like it’s been years since I read anything one might consider contemporary or literary fiction. Even though I prefer nonfiction I nevertheless look back fondly on all the excellent fiction I read back in 2017 and wonder if that was my high-water mark for consuming great fiction. Therefore, in hopes of improving, or at least diversifying my fiction intake I’m gonna kick things off with The Sentence. When I came across a copy the other day at the public library I remembered Maureen Corrigan’s glowing review on NPR’s Fresh Air four years ago and figured I’d give it a chance.

Here’s what Amazon has to say about The Sentence.

Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading “with murderous attention,” must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.