Month: July 2022

Six in Six: The 2022 Edition

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

I’m pleased to see that Jo at The Book Jotter  is running this meme again this year to summarise six months of reading, sorting the books into six categories – you can choose from the ones Jo suggests or come up with your own. I think it’s a good way at looking back over the last six months’ reading.

This year, just like last year, I haven’t been reading as much as in previous years and up to the end of June the total was standing at 38 books. Here are my six categories (with links to my reviews in the first 4 categories).

Six Crime Fiction

  1. Death in the Tunnel by Miles Burton
  2. The Last Trial by Scott Turow
  3. The Second Cut by Louise Welsh
  4. The Drowned City by K L Maitland
  5. Cécile is Dead by Georges Simenon
  6. The Hiding Place by Simon Lelic

Six Authors New to me

  1. How To Catch a Mole by Marc Hamer (nonfiction)
  2. The Chalet by Catherine Cooper
  3. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  4. Rain: Four Walks in English Weather by Melissa Harrison
  5. The Chapel in the Woods by Dolores Gordon-Smith
  6. A Tapping at My Door by David Jackson

Six books from the past that drew me back there

  1. The Queen’s Lady by Joanne Hickson
  2. The Man in the Bunker by Rory Clements
  3. Ashes by Christopher de Vinck
  4. The Red Monarch by Bella Ellis
  5. The Homecoming by Anna Enquist
  6. Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter by Lizzie Pook

Six Books I Read from My To Be Read List

  1. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
  2. The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré
  3. Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo
  4. A Room With a View by E M Forster
  5. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
  6. The Riddle of the Third Mile by Colin Dexter

Six  Books I’ve Read But Not Reviewed

  1. Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
  2. The Storm Sister by Lucinda Riley
  3. Dead Like You by Peter James
  4. Smiley’s People by John le Carré
  5. Holy Island by L J Ross
  6. The Fellowship of the Ring by J R R Tolkein

Six authors I read last year – but not so far this year and their books I have on my shelves to read

  1. Daphne du Maurier – I’ll Never Be Young Again
  2. Lucinda Riley – The Pearl Sister
  3. Charles Dickens – Nicolas Nickleby
  4. Robert Harris – Nucleus
  5. Beryl Bainbridge – Winter Garden
  6. Steve Cavanagh – Thirteen

How is your reading going this year? Do let me know if you take part in Six in Six too

Wanderlust Bingo – Update

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

This challenge was devised by FictionFan in 2021 and I have been filling in the squares at a snail’s pace since then.

Any type of book counts – crime, fiction, science fiction, non-fiction and a country can only appear once. I think this is why I have found it the hardest reading challenge of all – so far only completing 16 of the 25 squares and I’ve been thinking about giving up on it. But after looking through my unread books I have come up with books to fill 8 of the remaining 9 squares.

Books shown in italics are ones I’m thinking of reading or am currently reading.

North America – Inland by Téa Obreht – USA

Small Town – A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson – Canada

Island – The Island by Victoria Hislop – Greece

Train – Stamboul Train by Graham Greene – on the Orient Express travelling from Ostend to Constantinople (Instanbul or Stamboul), via Cologne, Vienna and Belgrade.

Far East – The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré – Hong Kong, Cambodia etc

Indian Sub-Continent – The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai – India

Village – Extra Virgin by Annie Hawes – Italy – I have just started reading this

Oceania – A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville – Australia

Forest – White Rose, Black Forest by Eoin Dempsey – Germany read not yet reviewed

Space – The [Widget], The [Wadget], and Boff, by Theodore Sturgeon

Mountain – The Moon Sister by Lucinda Riley – Spain and other countries

South America – Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Colombia

Free Square – The Fellowship of the Ring by J R R Tolkien – read not yet reviewed – Middle Earth

River – State of Wonder by Ann Patchett – Rio Negro in Brazil – read not yet reviewed

Polar Regions – Ice Bound by Jerri Nielsen – The South Pole, Antarctica

Desert – The Night of the Mi’raj  by Zoë Ferraris – Saudi Arabia

Walk – A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute – Malaya – currently reading

Southeast Asia – The Quiet American by Graham Greene – Vietnam

Africa – Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad – Belgian Congo

Beach – The Night Hawks by Elly Griffiths – Norfolk, England – read not yet reviewed

Road – Coffin Road by Peter May – Scotland

Europe – Ashes by Christopher de Vinck – Belgium

Sea – The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway – in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba.

Middle East – Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie – present-day Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey

City – The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles – France

~~~

This leaves me with just one book to find to fill the Desert square – any suggestions, please!

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: Extra Virgin by Annie Hawes

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

My book this week is Extra Virgin: Amongst the Olive Groves of Liguria by Annie Hawes. I had completely forgotten that I had bought this book; I have no idea when or where I bought it, but it’s there on my bookshelves waiting to be read. I’m guessing I bought it after reading other books about life in Italy by Frances Mayes, Bella Tuscany and  Under the Tuscan Sun about restoring a crumbling villa and building a new life in the Italian countryside, full of the pleasures of living in Tuscany – the sun, the food, the wine and the local people. 

It begins with a Prologue:

Hearing the racket from above, Franco wades through his pile of prunings and peers up through the trailing branches. A pair of foreign females, skin so white it’s blinding in the glare of the sun, are messing about outside Pompeo’s old place, a few terraces uphill, shouting and giggling.

Followed by Chapter I :

Glamour , we soon spotted was not the outstanding feature of the village of Diano San Pietro.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 56:

Here in Liguria you are surrounded by life-threatening terrors.

Synopsis from Amazon

A small stone house deep among the olive groves of Liguria, going for the price of a dodgy second-hand car. Annie Hawes and her sister, on the spot by chance, have no plans whatsoever to move to the Italian Riviera but find naturally that it’s an offer they can’t refuse. The laugh is on the Foreign Females who discover that here amongst the hardcore olive farming folk their incompetence is positively alarming. Not to worry: the thrifty villagers of Diano San Pietro are on the case, and soon plying the Pallid Sisters with advice, ridicule, tall tales and copious hillside refreshments …

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Covers That Feel Like Summer

Published on by Margaret17 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is Book Covers That Feel Like Summer. They are mainly beach scenes, covering books from different genres, love stories, crime fiction and two nonfiction books.

The Colour of Murder by Julian Symonds – a murder mystery with a focus on the psychological aspects of crime. John Wilkins is accused of a murder on the beach at Brighton.

The Lady of Sorrows by Anne Zouroudi – the 4th in the Mysteries of the  Greek Detective series featuring Hermes Diaktoros. Each one features one of the Seven Deadly Sins.Hermes is a detective with a difference. Just who he is and who he works for is never explained.

Dreaming of Florence by T A Williams – a love story about taking chances, overcoming challenges, developing new relationships, finding happiness, and falling in love.

The Last Summer by Karen Swan – a love story set on St Kilda, a remote Scottish island in the 1930s. Effie falls for the heir to the Earl of Dumfries, but their summer affair seems doomed, when the islanders are evacuated to the mainland.

The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow England 1911 by Juliet Nicolson, nonfiction looking at life in Britain during the one of the hottest years of the twentieth century, during the summer of George V’s Coronation year, 1911.

All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison – a novel set in 1933 in Suffolk, about rural England between the wars, before mechanisation.

Extra Virgin by Annie Hawes – a memoir about life, love, the locals – and of course lunch – in Liguria, where she bought a small stone house deep among the olive groves of Liguria in the Italian hills.

Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud – Set in 1914 on the Suffolk coast just as war with Germany is declared, this is a story of an unlikely friendship between a mysterious artist the locals call Mr Mac (Charles Rennie Macintosh) and Thomas the crippled son of the village publican.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan,  set on the Dorset coast where a newly married couple struggle to suppress their fears of their wedding night to come.

Maigret’s Holiday by George Simenon – a murder mystery set in the seaside town of Les Sables d’Olonne, where Maigret and his wife are on holiday.


The Key in the Lock by Beth Underdown

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Penguin UK| 13 January 2022| 283 pages| e-book| Review copy/4*

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Synopsis:

I still dream, every night, of Polneath on fire. Smoke unravelling from an upper window, and the terrace bathed in a hectic orange light…. Now I see that the decision I made at Polneath was the only decision of my life. Everything marred in that one dark minute.

By day, Ivy Boscawen mourns the loss of her son Tim in the Great War. But by night she mourns another boy – one whose death decades ago haunts her still.

For Ivy is sure that there is more to what happened all those years ago: the fire at the Great House, and the terrible events that came after. A truth she must uncover, if she is ever to be free.

From the award-winning author of The Witchfinder’s Sister comes a captivating story of burning secrets and buried shame, and of the loyalty and love that rises from the ashes.

My thoughts:

The Key in the Lock is Beth Underdown’s second book. I read her first book The Witchfinder’s Sister (my review) and enjoyed it immensely, so I had high expectations that I’d enjoy this book too – and it fully met my expectations. It is historical fiction set between two periods 1888 and 1918 in Cornwall.

It captures both time periods, reflecting the society both before and after the First World War showing the changes that the war had made. I loved the slow pace of this book as the secrets surrounding the death of William, the seven year old son of Edward Tremain in 1888 in a fire at Polneath, and that of Ivy’s son, Tim, on the battlefields of France are gradually revealed.

Both stories are shrouded in mystery as the circumstances of how William and Tim died are by no means clear. Ivy is devastated by Tim’s death and is determined to discover what actually happened to him, the letter informing them of his death was not phrased in the normal form of words. She wondered why.

It brought back painful memories of little William’s death. The fire at Polneath had started at night when everyone had gone to bed. William had been in the maid’s room, not his own bedroom when he had died. The postmortem revealed that he had died from asphyxiation by inhaling the smoke. Found under the bed, with paint from the door under William’s fingernails and bruised hands, it appeared that he must have been locked in and yet when he was found the door was standing open. The conclusion was that at some point the door had been locked – and later unlocked by a person or persons unknown.

The events surrounding each death are gradually revealed and there are plenty of secrets that come to light. It is described as a ‘gothic’ novel, but apart from the setting in an old isolated house, that had once been an ancient manor house, I didn’t find it gothic at all. It is a complicated story and at times I had to go back to make sure I’d got the facts right. I really liked Ivy and I liked the way her character is shown to develop with the passage of time. I loved the details about the attitudes to the First World War and the change from the earlier period. This is a novel full of grief and the circumstances surrounding both deaths provide an element of mystery. I loved the way the two time periods were interlocked as the novel progressed. I was fully engaged in it and I’ll be looking out for Beth Underdown’s next book.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Synopsis from Amazon:

For years, rumors of the ‘Marsh Girl’ have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life – until the unthinkable happens.

Where the Crawdads Sing is the story of how Kya, the youngest child of five, grew up, living in a rundown shack in the marshlands in North Carolina. At the age of seven, her mother left home, then her older brothers and sisters also left, leaving her alone with her father, a violent drunkard. He then also abandoned her. It is also a murder mystery and these two strands interweave throughout the book. I wrote about the opening of this book in this Book Beginnings and The Friday 56 post.

Left alone, Kya survived with help from Jumpin’, the general store owner, who lived in Colored Town and his wife, Mabel, and also from Tate, an older boy who taught her to read and write – she only went to school for one day and after that she managed to hide from the school truant officer. Thinking about it after reading the book I did find the story of Kya’s early years rather unbelievable – the fact that such a young child managed to survive independently and that no one paid more attention to the disappearance of her mother and father bothered me. But, as I was reading it seemed plausible and it certainly did not lessen my enjoyment of the book.

I loved the setting, in an area completely unknown to me, beautifully described by Delia Owens. The details of the marshlands, in the coastal region of North Carolina, its wildlife, flora and fauna brought the setting to life for me. I liked the way that Kya gradually began to trust a few people, letting them into her life – she couldn’t have survived physically or emotionally otherwise. Her interest in her surroundings, encouraged by Tate, led to amazing things for her. So much so that she became an expert on the natural world around her.

But, when Chase Andrews, a handsome sporting hero adored by the other teenage girls, pursues her, she believes him when he promises to marry her, only to discover from the local newspaper that he was engaged to marry someone else. Later when Chase is found dead she is suspected of his murder. The latter part of the book became a courtroom drama that didn’t quite live up to the earlier part of the book for me. And before the end It became increasingly clear to me just who had killed Chase.

This is a story of loneliness and of the effects of rejection – a story of survival and the power of love combined with a murder mystery, and full of fascinating characters that had me racing through its pages. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

And for those like me who didn’t know the meaning of the saying, ‘where the crawdads sing’ this is how Tate explained it to Kya when she asked him:

‘What d’ya mean, where the crawdads sing? Ma used to say that.’ Kya remembered Ma always encouraging her to explore the marsh: ‘Go as far as you can – way out yonder where the crawdads sing.’

‘Just means far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters.’ (page 111)

  • Publisher: ‎ Corsair, 2019
  • Language: ‎ English
  • Paperback: ‎ 370 pages
  • Source: a library book
  • My rating: 4*