Month: April 2009

Numbers Game

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

 btt button

Deb writes: For something different, I’m borrowing a question from €¦ here! One of the very first questions ever at Booking Through Thursday. Back from 2005 when Laura owned the blog but, because it was so new, it didn’t get as many responses as it does now €¦ so, why not revisit?

Here’s the question:

Some people read one book at a time. Some people have a number of them on the go at any given time, perhaps a reading in bed book, a breakfast table book, a bathroom book, and so on, which leads me to€¦

  1. Are you currently reading more than one book?
  2. If so, how many books are you currently reading?
  3. Is this normal for you?
  4. Where do you keep your current reads?

My answers:

  1. Yes, I usually do read more than one book at a time – each time I decided to concentrate on just one another one pops up demanding to be read straight away.
  2. Currently I’m reading three.
  3. Normally I have at least three or four – or more – on the go. Some may have got a bit stalled and some I’ve only just read a few chapters.
  4. I have books I’m reading in the kitchen, in the bedroom, computer room, bedroom, and living room. They’re all over the place – I never have to go far to find a book – books in the car too and in my handbag when I go out. The only place there are no books is in the bathroom – I’ve dropped too many books in the bath to read there and you can’t read in the shower!

Tuesday Teaser

Published on by Margaret17 Comments

teaser-tuesdayTeaser 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!

My teaser today is from page 107 of The Cipher Garden by Martin Edwards, a Lake District cipher-garden001murder mystery.

For a wild instant she imagined sidling up behind the woman. It would be so easy to slip off the scarf, loop it around her neck – and squeeze.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Mysterious Affair at StylesThis is the first novel by Agatha Christie, written in 1916 and first published in 1920. In it she created Hercule Poirot, the famous Belgian detective and introduced Captain Hastings and Inspector Japp.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Old Mrs Inglethorp is found dying in her bedroom and although by the end of the book I guessed who had murdered her, I was completely bamboozled most of the way through the book by all the clues and false trails.

The novel is set during the First World War I at Styles Court, a country house in Essex, owned by the very wealthy Mrs Inglethorp, who had shocked her family by marrying Alfred Inglethorp, 20 years her junior. Captain Hastings had been invalided home from the Front and was invited to stay at Styles, the home of a friend, John Cavendish, Mrs Inglethorp’s son.  When she dies from strychnine poisoning there are plenty of suspects. Captain Hastings enlists the help of Poirot, who is living in Styles St Mary with other Belgian refugees, to investigate the matter.

I am so used to seeing David Suchet as Poirot and was delighted to find his portrayal of Poirot is so accurate:

Poirot was an extraordinary-looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was verys tiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.

This is a most ingenious and intricately plotted book, with  plenty of suspects to exercise those “little grey cells”. I do enjoy those detective stories where you’re given the clues that have been dropped into the narrative throughout the book in a seemingly haphazard way and then are reorganised  at the end as Poirot does in this one to explain how and why the murder was committed. So in this book we have a shattered coffee cup, a splash of candle grease, a bed of begonias, a charred fragment of a will, a fragment of green material, an overheard argument, a tilting table, a locked purple dispatch-case and so on and so on. Helpfully the book includes diagrams of the house and the murder scene.

The only other thing I’ll say about who-did-it is that it’s the person I first thought of and then was fooled into changing my mind!

Click here to read more reviews of Agatha Christie’s books.

This is the 10th library book I’ve read this year. I’m well on target for reading 25 library books in 2009 for the Support Your Library Challenge.

Musing Monday – My To-Be-Read List

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

monday-musingToday’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about your to be read list€¦

As a follow up to last week’s question, Joseph asked how you keep track of your tbr list. Do you have a paper list or on your computer? Do you take it with you when you go shopping? How do you decide what gets added to it?

I blithely write about my “tbr read” as though it’s just a list, but it isn’t. It’s several lists, in several places.

  • For years it was just in my head.
  • Then when I found Amazon I started a Wish List on there – books I thought I wanted to own.
  • I soon found that wasn’t enough. I like online book-browsing, but it can’t beat the real thing and there were more and more books that I thought I might like but I wanted to have a proper look at them before actually buying them. So I started a Library List on Amazon, for books I might want to read and I either check them in the library or in a bookshop. Now this is much longer than my Wish List. At one point I did print it out to take with me but now I only note down a few titles when I go shopping or to the library.
  • Then when I started to read blogs I jotted down authors and titles in a notebook and the name of the blog I got it from. I took this book with me to the library or bookshop each time I went and crossed off the books whenever I read one of them. At first this was manageable but as time went on I added more and more books, even sometimes adding them more than once when I saw them reviewed on different blogs.
  • My next list is on LibraryThing. I have tagged the books I own and haven’t read “TBR” and this is very useful as I can bring up on the screen all the books on my own shelves to remind me of what I have waiting patiently to-be-read without going out and buying/borrowing any more.

Even though I have these lists the most frequently used one is the one in my head, because I often forget to take the notebook with me or to check my Amazon Library List . Recently I’ve tried to be more selective about adding books to the lists because there are already so many books on them and I’m sure there are some I’ll never get round to reading – so why add more? Of course I do, because there are always unmissable books being written that I want to read.