Month: February 2009

A Saturday Stroll – Saturday Scenes

Published on by Margaret13 Comments

On such a beautiful sunny day, even reading The Madonna of the Rocks by Marina Fiorato (her new book due out in May) couldn’t keep me indoors, so D and I went out for a walk. Although it’s still only February it feels and looks as though spring is here. We went down a narrow uneven footpath near opposite our house to an old country lane and then across fields to the edge of a lake.

path-by-wall1

 

There were plenty of birds, including this heron perched on a fence in the distance.

heron2

And a swan:

swan

As we continued on our walk overhead a red kite soared above the trees, chased away by the rooks making a terrific racket. The path home is over more fields rather wet and boggy after the wet weather and snow.

wet-path

The cattle were also noisy, waiting to be let out into the fields.

cattle1

Back over the fields. This is a well-used path but today we only passed one other walker.

field-path

Signs of spring along the way – snowdrops

snowdrops2

 

and croscuses.

snowdropscrocus

 

crocus1

 

Home with muddy boots.

boots

Booking Through Thursday – Storage

Published on by Margaret17 Comments

btt button

This week’s question is suggested by Kat:

I recently got new bookshelves for my room, and I’m just loving them. Spent the afternoon putting up my books and sharing it on my blog . One of my friends asked a question and I thought it would be a great BTT question. So from Tina & myself, we’d like to know ‘How do you arrange your books on your shelves? Is it by author, by genre, or you just put it where it falls on?’

 Storage is a problem. I haven’t got enough space for all my books so they are double shelved where possible and also in piles in different rooms. I have fiction arranged a-z by author surname in bookcases in the dining room and I keep the unread books in a separate bookcase in the lounge. This seemed like a good idea when I started it but doesn’t work because there is no room to transfer them to the other bookcases when I’ve read them. So now that bookcase is a mixture of books I’ve read and books to-be-read. I also have one bookcase mainly containing children’s books in a spare bedroom – not arranged in any order – just as I put them on the shelves. These are a mixture of my own books from childhood, including some that were my parents’ childhood books and some from my sister who collected secondhand books.

I arrange non-fiction a-z by subject and within that a-z by author surname. These are mainly in bookcases lining one wall in the hall at the back of the house with some on two small bookcases on the landing. One of these is the bookcase my Dad made me for my bedroom when I was about 8. It doesn’t look anything special – just a three shelf wooden bookcase he painted white, but I could never part with it. It’s looking a bit the worse for wear now. I keep a mixture of books in it –  including literature, Shakespeare plays etc, biographies, and history books.

bookcase

The books in piles are a mixture. They are in most rooms – I’m not very tidy. Some are books I’ve looked at and read a chapter or a few pages before deciding whether to start them properly, some are books I’m reading and others are books I’ve read and not put away because I either want to re-read them or write about them and some because there’s no room to put them on the bookshelves.

When Will There Be Good News?

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When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie, #3)


Complex but so very satisfying!  This has had very mixed reviews on Amazon which just goes to show that you have to make up your own mind about a book. I read it very quickly because I loved it. I know I missed bits – just when did Jackson lose his jacket? I’ve tried to track it down but I can’t spot it, so I’m thinking of reading it again before I have to take it back to the library.

It really is a case of bad news all round. To start at the beginning – six year old Joanna witnesses the murder of her mother, older sister and baby brother.  It goes from bad to worse with several interlinking plots (some with convenient coincidences) to keep me guessing what disaster would happen next.Thirty years later the killer is about to be released. Joanna, is now Dr Hunter, and has a baby and an unlikeable husband Neil. She is helped by Reggie, an extremely likeable and resourceful sixteen year old girl. When Joanna goes missing Reggie is the one who insists the police in the form of Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe (not very likable) investigates. Louise has her own problems in the form of a likeable husband. Then there is Jackson Brodie, formerly a police officer and private investigator, who gets involved due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

At times the plots got so complicated that I couldn’t quite remember who did what – one problem of reading too quickly. Reggie had to leave school after the death of her mother. She is still doing her A-Levels and is tutored by her former teacher, Ms MacDonald who is suffering from cancer. Her brother Billy and his ‘friends’ threaten both Reggie and Ms MacDonald with unpleasant consequences. Then there is Alison living in dread of the return of  her homicidal maniac of a husband who is on the run, a train crash, and the unexplained murder of two men in a burnt down house – etc, etc.

It seems like a catalogue of disasters but it’s also funny and light at the same time and there are plenty of allusions to keep me working out where they come from. The easiest were the nursery rhymes Joanna sings to her baby and that Kate Atkinson works into the text. It’s set in Edinburgh, a place that is new to me, but as my son and family are now living nearby, of great interest and I could identify some of the locations. There is plenty of action, good  characterisation and dramatisation of how relationships work – or don’t work.

I’ve previously read Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, also featuring Jackson Brodie and I thought I’d read One Good Turn, the second Jackson book – but I haven’t. It’s a toss-up now between re-reading When Will there Be Good News? and One Good Turn (which I own). I just hope no one has reserved the library book!

Teaser Tuesday

Published on by Margaret16 Comments

teaser-tuesdayFor this the “official rules” are to select a page at random in the book you’re currently reading and pick two sentences between lines 7 and 12. For today’s teaser my selection isn’t random, nor between the specified lines. I picked these sentences because I liked the references to people connected with the Ettrick Valley in the Scottish borders near Selkirk.

My teaser sentences are from page 5 of Alice Munro’s The View From Castle Rock:view-from-castle-rock

In the lower Ettrick Valley was Aikwood, the home of Michael Scott, the philospher and wizard of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who appears in Dante’s Inferno. And if that were not enough, William Wallace, the guerilla hero of the Scots, is said to have hidden from the English, and there is a story of Merlin – Merlin – being hunted down and murdered in the old forest, by Ettrick shepherds.

I’ve just started to read this book in which Alice Munro writes a fictionalised version of her family history, starting with her ancestors’ view from Edinburgh’s Castle Rock in the eighteenth century. It’s really a mix of fact and fiction.

To see more teasers look here.

a Leap

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I received an Advanced Reader’s Copy of a Leap by Anna Enquist, translated by Jeannette K Ringold from LibraryThing Early Reviewer’s Program. It’s a very short book (80 pages), to be published in April 2009, made up of six monologues. Overall they are sad, even tragic stories.

The first one, Alma, was commissioned by the Rotterdam Philharmonic Gergiev Festival and its performance preceded a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. I liked the fact that it’s based on historical facts taken from letters and diaries. Alma was Gustav’s wife and she reflects on her life, having given up her own music to support him. It seems he forced her to do so and she is at once repelled and intoxicated by him, but she is torn between her love for him and Alex, a former lover. This is my favourite of the monologues.

The second story, Mendel Bronstein, shocked me. It’s about a Jewish tailor who decides to leave Rotterdam in 1912 to make a new life in America. He is desperate not to forget his own language, with disastrous consequences. This story actually made me squirm.

Cato and Leendert, form the interlinked monologues three and four. Set again in Rotterdam in the spring of 1940 they are a pair of young lovers. Cato first waits in the kitchen for Leendert as the bombs drop on the city and then goes out to search for him as the Germans take control. Meanwhile Leendert is still working at the zoo and ordered to kill the dangerous animals, including his favourite lion, Alexander. I thought this was a touching story full of pathos. It was also based on historical sources and together with Mendel Bronstein was written for the production of Lazarus as part of Rotterdam Cultural Capital of Europe in 2001.

The Doctor is a very short monologue also set in Rotterdam during World War II from a doctor who saves the life of a wounded German general. He wonders if he has done the right thing. This was commissioned by the Bonheur theater company in 2005 for the commemoration of the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940.

The final monologue is  …and I am Sara. Sara is alone in her parents house. She is twenty seven and so far her life has not turned out how she wanted. So much has gone wrong, but now it seems life is set to improve but then disaster overtakes her.

In all these stories fate or circumstances take control, no matter how the characters have struggled in their lives. Anna Enquist is a musician, and a psychoanalyst as well as a poet and novelist. Her writing is clear bringing the people and places to life. I particularly liked the stage directions in first and last monologues and the insights into the characters’ thoughts.

Sunday Salon – An Ordinary Couple?

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Sunday Salon

After  ploughing my way through White Noise and feeling a bit jaded I turned to an old favourite – Agatha Christie and this week I read By the Pricking of My Thumbs. After such a rambling, verbose book as White Noise it was so refreshing to read this book, posing a mystery to be solved – what had happened in the house by the canal, whose child had died and how, and where was Mrs Lancaster?

pricking-of-my-thumbs

This is the first Tommy and Tuppence story I’ve read, but it’s not the first Agatha Christie wrote – there were earlier ones featuring Tommy and Tuppence, which I’m now going to look out for. Outwardly they are an ordinary couple, pleasant and past the prime of life, just like any other old couple. But appearances are deceptive and in By the Pricking of My Thumbs Tuppence in particular has no hesitation about getting mixed up in dangerous situations. Her daughter wishes that ‘her age she’d learn to sit quiet and not do things.’ There’s no chance of that after Tuppence met Mrs Lancaster in the nursing home where Tommy’s Aunt Ada had died. Seemingly incoherent and rambling Mrs Lancaster referred to ‘something behind the fireplace’ and a ‘poor child’ and when she disappeared after leaving behind a painting of a house by a canal Tuppence sets out to investigate.

As you would imagine from the title of the book (taken from Shakespeare’s Macbeth), ‘something wicked’ is afoot, there is evil about and Tuppence’s life is in danger. A dark and sinister tale.

I was still feeling like reading another mystery and picked up Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News? Jackson Brodie featured in the other book by Kate Atkinson that I’ve read – Case Histories – and I was pleased to find he’s in this one too. I read this in a couple of days, finishing it this morning as I just had to find out what happened. My faith in books has been fully restored as this is a very good book, and very satisfying – a complex and complicated plot with lots of action, good characterisation and drama.  More about that in a separate post.