Teaser Tuesday (2.16.10)

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!

Having taken advantage of my 3-day weekend to finish Nanny Returns and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I've now moved on to The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven. I'm really enjoying the writing so far, for which I'm not sure whether to credit Gail Hareven, or her translator, Dalya Bilu. Here's my teaser - sorry it's on the long side this week!

Thirty-six steps of an external stairway led to the apartment on the second floor. I didn't count them then. Forget the prophecies of the heart:  No premonition told me that for the next twenty-nine years I would go up and down them about seventy thousand times, a few hundred of them with a baby carriage; no tingling of my toes hinted that I would wound my exposed big toe four times on the rusty can holding the sick jasmine bush that refused to die; that in certain moods I would decide to change the soil and plant a new bush there, and in others I would plan to drag it to the dumpster, and that I would never do either; I had no inkling that I was to see the top of the shaky iron banister covered with a strip of snow, and that its unsteadiness would would worry me from time to time, and that about this too, I would do nothing. (p29)