Book beginnings on Friday and The Friday 56

The book beginning and the Friday 56 this week comes from a favourite author; Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before. It takes a little bit of time to get into his books, but once you are there, it is really great. I have had this one for many years. I picked it out of my shelves, to fit in the title in one of my challenges, Alphabet Soup Reading Challenge. You read a book starting on one of the letters in the alphabet. I might not be able to finish all letters, the tricky ones are left. 

Book beginnings on Friday hosted by Rose City Reader

"I take pride withal in my humiliation, and as I am to this privilege condemned, almost I find joy in an abhorrent salvation; I am, I believe, alone of all our race, the only man in human memory to have been shipwrecked and cast up upon a deserted ship.
Thus, with unabashed conceits, wrote Roberto della Griva presumably in July or August of 1643."

The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice

"Meanwhile the emperor - and there was no telling the thousand different ways Olivares put pressure on him - remembered that Mantua was in the hands of a commissioner, and Nevers could neither pay nor not pay for something that was still not his due; the emperor lost patience and sent twenty thousand men to besiege the city. The pope, seeing Protestant mercenaries running about Italy, immediately imagined another sack of Rome and sent troops to the Mantuan border. Spinola, more ambitious and determined than Gonzalo, decided to besiege Casale again, but seriously this time. In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace."