Month: December 2010

Weekly Geeks – Reading Challenges

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

This week the question is about reading challenges:

Do you plan on participating in any reading challenges in 2011? Are you planning on hosting any reading challenges? You don’t have to “officially” join any of the challenges for this weekly geek.  You might want to spend some time browsing A Novel Challenge. Are there any challenges you are looking forward to that haven’t been announced yet? Regardless of your challenge plans, are you starting to plan ahead for next year? Do you make lists or goals? Are you a person who enjoys reading more if it is structured? Or are you all about being free to read what you want, when you want?

I’ve already signed up for two challenges next year – 2011 Global Reading Challenge and What’s in a Name and I’ll be carrying on with the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge.

I’m in two minds about reading challenges. Part of me enjoys them. I like the challenge and making lists and deciding what to read is very appealing. But another part of me reacts quite badly and I find that once I’ve decided I ‘should’ read a book within a set deadline I don’t want to read it. So the best challenges for me are those that give me flexibility to change my mind about what and when I read, which the three I’ve joined do.

You could argue that the very nature of a challenge is to extend yourself, to broaden your reading experience and read books you wouldn’t otherwise. And to a certain extent I like that and the challenges I’ve done in the past have done just that, but I now have so many of my own books that I have yet to read, that I’ve tended to use challenges to nudge me into reading those books instead of searching out new ones, just to do a challenge. My reading, is after all, purely for me, for my own entertainment and information. I no longer have to read from anyone else’s reading lists to take a course or exam, or for work, so I like to read what I want, when I want.

Having said all that I expect that I will want to read something different, in a genre I’m not familiar with and by authors that are new to me. I love variety in my reading.

I hadn’t come across A Novel Challenge blog before. It’s an amazing resource, listing so many different challenges and weekly events that my mind just boggles! No doubt I will be tempted by one or more of these, but I could spend hours just finding out about challenges and planning to do them and not have time for reading!

So, I’ll probably just stick to those three – unless Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise decides to host another Crime Fiction Alphabet challenge, that would be good.

Weekend Cooking

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Time now to think about cooking for Christmas. I’ve made the Christmas Cake and that is maturing nicely (I hope). Whilst out shopping I found this book with more ideas for Christmas Cakes and Cookies:

It’s a flip-over book that is also free-standing, so you can stand it up whilst looking at the recipes as you cook. There are recipes for Shortbread Snowmen, Gingerbread Reindeer, Snowflake Delight, Festive Fudge, Christmas Crunchers and Christmas Toffee Pudding and many more delicious temptations.

I’m very tempted by the Christmas Toffee Pudding which is made with dates:

(click image to enlarge)

For more tempting cooking posts have a look at Beth Fish Reads

Sunday Salon – Non-Fiction

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

I’m often reading more than one book at a time, sometimes as many as four or more. Sometimes I think it would be better to read just one at a time but that rarely happens. A library book may be due back and I can’t renew it so that has to take precedence, or one of the books I’m reading may be so compelling that I have to finish that one and I drop the others for a while.

At the present I’m reading two books and both of them are non-fiction, which is a novelty for me. I usually have one non-fiction on the go along with one or more fiction books, so not reading any fiction is very strange for me. Both my non-fiction books are autobiographies and are riveting and remarkable books. They are:

  • Agatha Christie: An Autobiography
  • Seeing Things: a Memoir by Oliver Postgate

I’ve written some posts already about Agatha Christie’s book and will link to those in my Author Index. I’m nearly at the end of it now, but she is only still writing about 1943. She wrote the Autobiography in 1965 and the twenty intervening years are compressed into 25 pages – as she wrote ‘Time has altered for me, as it does for the old.’ (page 525). I’ll try to write a summary post about the book as a whole when I’ve finished it.

Oliver Postgate’s book is absolutely amazing. I’m enjoying it on several levels. There are the autobiographical details of the chronology of his life, the fascinating accounts of how he created those wonderful TV films of Ivor the Engine, The Clangers, Noggin the Nog and Bagpuss, and his own philosophical thoughts.

It’s quite difficult to write about such books as a whole but I’ll try to concentrate on what I most liked about them, which in both cases is a lot.

Now, after sorting out what to buy the grandchildren for Christmas, which of course will include some books, I need to decide what to read next – I think it will be fiction for a while.

Saturday Scene

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

It’s a little bit warmer today, the icicles hanging from the gutters are melting, and the sky is blue. This is the view of the back garden where the sun is shining.

The front garden all is in shade. The birds disappeared when I opened the door to take this photo, but the feeders are tremendously popular.

I had to crawl to the window in the front room to take this photo of a lesser spotted woodpecker on the bird feeder as the slightest movement and it flew away.

It’s difficult to see the woodpecker’s beautiful plumage because the tree is in the shade and the woodpecker refused to move round so I could take a photo of it’s lovely colours.

What’s In a Name 4

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Challenge completed!

The What’s In a Name Challenge, hosted by Beth Fish Reads is running for the fourth time. I took part in the first two, but missed out last year. I’m tempted to join in again in 2011. I just need to read one book from each category and I’ve gone through my To-Be-Read books to find these titles:

1. A book with a number in the title – One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
2. A book with jewelry or a gem in the title – The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
3. A book with a size in the title – Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
4. A book with travel or movement in the title – Exit Lines by Reginald Hill
5. A book with evil in the title – Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie
6. A book with a life stage in the title – Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden

Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Curtain was first published in 1975, but it was written in the 1940s during the Second World War. Agatha Christie had written it with the intention that it be published after her death, but in 1975 her publishers persuaded her to release it so that it could appear in time for the Christmas season – a ‘Christie for Christmas’.

In this book Poirot and Hastings have come full circle, returning to Styles, the scene of their first case. Poirot is now an old man (just how old is not revealed  – I think if you go by the chronology of the novels he must have been about 120, but there is no need to be too precise), and close to death.  Hastings is the narrator of this mystery. He is saddened by the devastation age has had on Poirot:

My poor friend. I have described him many times. Now to convey to you the difference. Crippled with arthritis, he propelled himself about in a wheeled chair. His once plump frame had fallen in. He was a thin little man now. His face was lined and wrinkled. His moustache and hair, it is true, were still of a jet black colour, but candidly, though I would not for the world have hurt his feeling by saying so to him, this was a mistake. There comes a moment when hair dye is only too painfully obvious. There had been a time when I had been surprised to learn that the blackness of Poirot’s hair came out of a bottle. but now the theatricality was apparent and merely created the impression that he wore a wig and had adorned his upper lip to amuse the children!

Only his eyes were the same as ever, shrewd and twinkling, and now – yes, undoubtedly – softened with emotion. (pages 12-13)

Curtain is in many ways a sad book. Sad because this is Poirot’s last case and he dies, with  X, the murderer, apparently having got away with his crimes. Sad, too because Hastings is in a nostalgic and morbid frame of mind, mourning the death of his wife and wishing himself back into happier times. It doesn’t help him that one of his children, Judith, a secretive child now aged 21, is also staying at Styles, the assistant to Dr Franklin who is engaged in research work connected with tropical disease. She resents her father’s interference in her life and is scornful of what she considers his sentimental and old fashioned ideas. Sad too, because of the setting. Styles, once a well-kept country house has been sold  and is now being run as a guest house, the drive badly kept and overgrown with weeds and the house iself badly needing a coat of paint.

But is also an interesting puzzle. Poirot knows the identity of X, a murderer who is present at Styles but will not tell Hastings, because Hastings would not be able to conceal his knowledge – his face would give him away. Poirot is convinced that X will kill again, but he doesn’t know who the victim will be. He asks Hastings to be his eyes and ears whilst he is confined to his wheelchair. He also gives Hastings newspaper cuttings of five murder cases, all of which were committed by different people. X apparently had no motive for killing any of the victims, but he/she was connected with all of them.

Hastings is intrigued and suspects all the people staying at Styles in turn. The first mishap occurs when Colonel Luttrell, the owner of Styles, accidently shoots his wife, but she is only wounded and recovers. Then Barbara, Dr Franklin’s wife, who suffers from her nerves and is looked after by Nurse Craven is found dead, poisoned by one of the toxic substances her husband is researching. Finally Stephen Norton, another guest is found dead in his locked bedroom with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. It looks like suicide, but there is something about the scene that reminds Hastings of an earlier death.

When Poirot, himself dies, the mystery is unsolved, but there is a twist in the ending, which I didn’t see coming, making this one of my favourite Agatha Christie books. It is also a theatrical and dramatic ending to the book and to Poirot, himself.