Month: November 2010

ABC Wednesday – Q is for Queues

Published on by Margaret21 Comments

ABC Wednesday is the place to share a photograph, piece of art or poetry each week. This week it’s the letter Q.

Queuing is not my favourite activity – I always pick the wrong queue at the supermarket for instance. All the other queues move much quicker than the one I’m in. I’m too impatient to wait patiently but I know that if I move to another queue that one will slow down immediately – there will be a query about the price, or the till roll will need changing or the till operator has to go on a break. And those people who queue-jump are most annoying.

Queues at airports are even more frustrating. You’ve dashed to get there hours before take-off as you’re told to do and then queue up to check in, only to be told that the flight’s delayed and then hang around for hours before the announcement to board and then rush to the plane.

Hospital waiting rooms are just as bad. You check in at the reception desk, then sit in the waiting area. Then a nurse calls your name, good you think, and walk off behind her, only to go to yet another waiting area. I always take a book, but it’s hard to concentrate what with crying children, and chatty people all around you, not to mention worrying what the doctor will say or do when you eventually get called through.

These days you also have to queue on the phone, listening to horrible music, interspersed with announcements telling you that ‘your call is important to us’ and ‘you are now number …  5 …  in the queue.’

But here’s a queue I do like. This is my queue of books waiting to be read. These are just the A-L books. I’d lined them up on the floor to sort them in A-Z author order before putting them on the bookcase.

Arranging Books 1

 

Teaser Tuesday – Missing Link by Joyce Holms

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

On Sunday I was wondering which book to read next and eventually decided upon Missing Link by Joyce Holms. She is a new writer to me. I liked the description of her at the front of the book:

Joyce Holms was born and educated in Glasgow. The victim of a low boredom threshold, she has held a variety of jobs, from teaching window dressing and managing a hotel on the Isle of Arran to working for an Edinburgh detective agency and running a B & B in the Highlands. Married with two grown up children she lives in Edinburgh and her interests include hill-walking and garden design.

Val McDermid’s blurb on the front cover reads, ‘Holms is a magician – the reader is so busy laughing, the clues just slip by unnoticed.’ More words by other authors are on Joyce Holms’s website , like this from Ian Rankin: Joyce’s humour is sharp without being nasty, her characters well drawn, and her Edinburgh a place you’ll want to spend time in….. read her books.

I began reading and was immediately drawn into the mystery. Mrs Sullivan wants to be proved guilty of murder and asks Fizz Fitzpatrick, a lawyer to help her. This extract is from the Prologue describing the murder of Amanda Montrose. Amanda is  driving home when the narrow country road ahead is partially blocked by old Volkswagen and someone has the bonnet up and is leaning under it. Amanda goes to see what’s the problem:

The driver straightens and turns, smiling, and fear surges through Amanda’s body like an electric charge. She sees the hammer. She sees the gloating, resolute eyes. And she knows she is looking at her own death. (page 14)

The question is did Mrs Sullivan kill Amanda or was it Terence Lamb, a known criminal, or one of the other people who also claimed to have killed her?

Microfiction Monday – The Girl in the Pink Anorak

Published on by Margaret16 Comments

The woods whispered my name. As the leaves rustled beneath my feet, I walked on; I had to see who was there. How I wish I hadn’t!

Microfiction means the shortest of short stories. Think Aesop’s fables, comic strips, or even jokes: complete stories that can be told in under a minute. For this game, the limit is a tweetable 140 characters or fewer. Microfiction Monday is hosted by Susan at Stony River.

Sunday Salon – Sunday Selection

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Recently the weekend is the time when I’ve just finished a book and am deciding what to read next. This weekend is no exception. Yesterday I finished Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, a book I first read as a young teenager. This is a dramatic romantic tragedy, first written in 1917. It tells the story of Hazel Woodus and her marriage to Edward Marston, the gentle, local church minister. Hazel is an innocent, a child of nature, wild and shy and a protector of all wounded and persecuted things. She becomes the prey of John Reddin, the squire of Undern who is obsessed by her. I’ll write more about it in a later post.

Because I enjoyed Gone to Earth so much it’s hard to find a suitable book to read next.  I have started All Bones and Lies by Anne Fine, which is the choice for my local book club. But so far I’m not sure if I want to finish it. It’s about Colin and his mother, who could complain for Britain. He has a twin sister who is estranged from her mother, making up a unhappy family who don’t get on. It’s about old age and the problems of carers and  up to now I’m not finding it at all uplifting. It paints a sad picture of the frustrations of old age and the problems of everyday life. I’ll give it a few more pages before deciding whether to finish it or not.

Other than that book, I have several library books I could read next.

  • The Beacon by Susan Hill – a short book (154 pages), examining truth, mental health and memory. Maybe that’s not right for me today as it sounds like another family with problems.
  • Missing Link by Joyce Holms – a new author for me, this book is a murder mystery a case for the detective duo Fizz and Buchanan. This one looks promising.
  • The Missing by Andrew O’Hagan – about people who disappear from society, a merging of social history and memoir. Described on the back cover as ‘elegantly written, affecting and intelligent.’

I’ll also look at some of my own books, to reduce the growing pile of to-be-read books. I started A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book a while ago. I think I’ll start that one again, or maybe look at Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, or a shorter book such as The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch.

Although writing posts like this does help a bit to clarify my thoughts, sometimes I just can’t decide what to read next and today is one of those days.

A Detective at Death’s Door

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

A Detective at Death’s Door is the first book by H R F Keating that I’ve read. I was expecting it to be good because Keating, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature  is a winner of the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Awards. From the information in the book I see that his most famous novels are the Inspector Ghote books. A Detective at Death’s Door is the fifth Harriet Martens novel. For more information about Keating see this article by Martin Edwards.

Source: borrowed from the library.

From H R F Keating’s website:

A Detective at Death’s Door (2004)
ISBN: 1405048069

In her most traumatic case yet, Harriet Martens finds herself placed in grave danger at the hands of a deft and cunning poisoner. Whilst relaxing with her husband at the Majestic pool one hot August Bank Holiday, Harriet does not expect the refreshing glass of Campari soda at her side to conceal a deadly drug. When she awakes from a doze she is no longer by the water, but in a hospital bed recovering from a near fatal dose of Aconitine. As Harriet makes her slow recovery, she tries to come to terms with the terrible fact that someone wanted to kill her. Even more difficult for her to face is the knowledge that she must find the person responsible, if anything for her own peace of mind. But no sooner has she mustered enough energy to begin making tentative enquiries and initial investigations, than the poisoner strikes again. And this time he is successful€¦ Will Harriet have the strength of mind and body to find the murderer before he finds another victim and before the local population begin to panic?

I suspect that this is not one of Keating’s better books. The pace was slow as Harriet regains her strength and tries to get involved in the police investigations, against her doctor’s advice and her husband’s wishes. It was repetitive as one by one more deaths occur with little build up of tension.  Harriet is known as the ‘Hard Detective’ but for most of this book she  is in ‘a state of fluffy confusion‘. Still, I liked it enough to borrow One Man and His Bomb, the sixth Harriet Martens book, from the library last week.

Teaser Tuesday – Solar by Ian McEwan

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

I started to read Solar by Ian McEwan on Saturday. I’ve borrowed it from the library and on Saturday I discovered I couldn’t renew it because someone had reserved it. It’s due back tomorrow and I really wanted to read it.  So I stopped reading Gone to Earth and Agatha Christie’s Autobiography (my current books) to concentrate solely on Solar.

I think it’s a strange juxtaposition of the story of a scientist, Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize winning physicist whose fifth marriage has failed, set against a scientific background. I love it when McEwan writes sentences such as this on page 8:

Then her absence hung in the summer dusk like garden bonfire smoke, an erotic charge of invisible particulates that caused him to remain in position for many pointless minutes. He was not actually mad, he kept telling himself, but he thought he was getting a taste, a bitter sip.

And I also am full of admiration for his detailed description of Beard sitting opposite a stranger in a train, both eating salt and vinegar crisps from the same packet:

Inevitably the second crisp was less piquant, less surprising, less penetrating than the first and it was precisely this shortfall, this sensual disappointment, that prompted the need, familiar to drug addicts, to increase the dose. He would eat two crisps at once. (page 123)

But he loses me somewhat with sentences like this:

Without the ‘entexting’ tools the scientists used – the single-photon luminometer, the flow cytometer, immunofluorescence, and so on – the gene could not be said to exist. (page 131)

As I haven’t finished this book yet it’s too soon to decide what I think of it, but so far I’m liking it, despite those words I have only a vague idea about their meanings. Parts of it actually made me laugh out loud, at the morbid humour, but I wonder if it could have done without the science and stood just as well as a story about an ageing, womanising, narcissistic, overweight and food-obsessed man.