Six Degrees of Separation from Intermezzo by Sally Rooney to White Nights

Published on November 2, 2024 by Margaret8 Comments

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I haven’t read this book, so this is the description on Amazon UK:

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

My first link is Thin Air, a novel by Michelle Paver also about two brothers. Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, had claimed many lives and no one had reached the summit. Held to be a sacred mountain, it is one of the most dangerous mountains in the world – believed to be the haunt of demons and evil spirits. An unsuccessful attempt had been made in 1907, led by Edmund Lyell, when only two men had returned. The group in 1935, led by Major Cotterell, attempted to follow the 1907 route up the south-west face. Their story is narrated by medic, Dr. Stephen Pearce, accompanying his older brother, Kits. The brothers have always been rivals and this continues as they make their way up the mountain. Things start to go wrong almost straight away and Stephen is full of foreboding.

My second link is a book that also has ‘air’ in the title – Coming Up For Air, Sarah Leipciger’s second novel. It is a beautiful novel, a story of three people living in different countries and in different times. How their stories connect is gradually revealed as the novel progresses. As the author explains at the end of the novel it is a mix of fact and fiction and has its basis in truth. There is grief and loss and despair in each story, but above all, it is about love, and the desire to live. I think Sarah Leipciger is a great storyteller. It is an inspiring book, beautifully written, which emphasises the importance of the air we breathe and the desire to live. I read this book in June 2021.

My third link is An Officer and a Spy, historical fiction by Robert Harris, another book I read in June 2021. It is a gripping book about the Dreyfus affair in 1890s France. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, was convicted of treason by passing secrets to the Germans in 1895 and sent to solitary confinement on Devil’s Island. It’s narrated by Colonel George Picquart, who became convinced that Dreyfus was innocent. Harris goes into meticulous detail in staying accurate to the actual events, but even so this is a gripping book and I was completely absorbed by it from start to finish.

My fourth link is The Count of Monte Cristo, historical fiction by Alexandre Dumas, in which the main character is also wrongly imprisoned on an island. It begins in 1815 when Edmond Dantès, a sailor, having returned to Marseilles is wrongly accused of being a Bonapartist and imprisoned in the Chateau d’If on the Isle of Monte Cristo, for fourteen years. It’s a great story, action-packed, and full of high drama and emotion. Montecristo is a real island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, part of the Tuscan Archipelago, and administered by the municipality of Portoferraio in the province of Livorno.

So My fifth link is also set on a real island, that of the isolated island of Elliðaey off the coast of Iceland in Ragnar Jónasson’s novel The Island, a murder mystery with elements of horror. Four friends visit the island ten years after the murder of a fifth friend, Katla, but only three of them return. One of them, Klara, fell to her death from a cliff – but did she jump or was she pushed? Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir is sent to investigate. A suspect had been charged, but had committed suicide before the verdict was announced and the case had been closed. But are the two murders connected, even though they are ten years apart? This book is the second in Jónasson’s Hidden Iceland series.

My final link is also the second book in a series, that is White Nights by Ann Cleeve, the second in her Shetland Quartet, featuring Detective Jimmy Perez. It’s set mainly in the village of Biddista, when Kenny Thomson finds a man’s body hanging in the hut where the boat owners of the village keep their lines and pots. At first it looks as though the man, his face covered by a clown’s mask, has committed suicide, but he’d been dead before he was strung up. As well as the mystery of who killed the man in the clown mask and why, there is also the disappearance 15 years earlier of Kenny’s older brother Lawrence. It was thought that he left the island after Bella had broken his heart. Kenny hadn’t heard from him since and at first thought the dead man could be him.

The books in my chain are mainly a mix of crime and historical fiction. And the chain has become a circle with the last book connecting to the starting book and the first book, all containing two brothers.

What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (December 7, 2024), we’ll start with a beach read – Sandwich by Catherine Newman.

Nonfiction November:Week 1 – My Year in Nonfiction

Published on November 1, 2024 by Margaret8 Comments

Throughout the month of November, bloggers Liz, Frances, Heather, Rebekah and Deb invite you to celebrate Nonfiction November with us.

Liz writes: ‘Meet your hosts! Liz (that’s me!), who blogs at Adventures in reading, running and working from home, is an editor, transcriber, reader, reviewer, writer and runner. She likes reading literary fiction and nonfiction, travel and biography. Frances blogs about the books she has read at Volatile Rune and is a published poet, reviewer, sometime storyteller and novelist. Heather of Based on a True Story lives in Ohio with her husband, surrounded by lots and lots of critters! Rebekah reviews social justice books on She Seeks Nonfiction. She is a Pittsburgh-based activist, graphic designer, and cat parent. Deb, who blogs at Readerbuzz, is a Texas librarian-for-life who swims, rides her bike, draws, writes, and loves to read nonfiction-that-reads-like-fiction, literary fiction, classics, and children’s picture books.’

I don’t think I’ll be taking part every week, but this week I am.

Week 1 – Your Year in Nonfiction: Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?
(Hosted by Heather of Based on a True Story)

Nonfiction Read Since December 1, 2023, linked to my reviews, where they exist.

Just One Thing by Michael Mosley 5*
A Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel 5* – In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “Ink is a generative fluid,” she explains. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.” A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.
Shakespeare: The Man who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench, Brendan O’Hea 5*
Maiden Voyages by Sian Evans 5*
The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell 4*

Great Meadow by Dirk Bogarde 5* – Seen through the eyes of a 10-year old in the late 1930s, this novel recaptures an idyllic childhood, a time of love and gentleness with its sounds and scents intact, whilst the world beyond went to war. It was a great pleasure to read, taking me back to a time before I was born, to that time between the two World Wars, covering the years 1930 to 1934. Dirk (Derek) Bogarde was born in 1921 and his sister Elizabeth in 1924. Theirs was a somewhat privileged childhood, with a live-in Nanny, Lally, who also ran their household. Their father was the art editor of The Times and their mother was a former actress.
The Art of Laziness: Overcome Procrastination & Improve Your Productivity by Library Mindset 2* – There’s nothing new in this book for me, but it’s a good reminder about what I already knew.
Getting Better by Michael Rosen 5* Michael Rosen has grieved the loss of a child, lived with debilitating chronic illness, and faced death itself when seriously unwell in hospital with Covid. In spite of this he has survived, and has even learned to find joy in life in the aftermath of tragedy. In Getting Better, he shares his story and the lessons he has learned along the way. Exploring the roles that trauma and grief have played in his own life, Michael investigates the road to recovery, asking how we can find it within ourselves to live well again after – or even during – the darkest times of our lives. Moving and insightful, this is a wonderful book.
Gladys Aylward: My Missionary Life in China by Gladys Aylward 3* Gladys was convinced that she called to preach the Gospel in China and in 1930 went to Yangchen, in the mountainous province of Shansi, a little south of Peking (Beijing). She worked with a 73-year-old missionary, Jeannie Lawson in an inn where, in the evening, they would entertain their guests with stories from the Bible. Gladys also began taking children into her home, and soon she had an orphanage with about 100 children. Then in 1938 in the spring of 1938, Japanese planes bombed the city of Yangcheng, killing many and causing the survivors to flee into the mountains. Five days later, the Japanese Army occupied Yangchen. She and the children fled walking over the mountains to Sian. In 1957, Alan Burgess,The Small Woman, which I read in my teens. So when I saw this autobiography I was keen to read it.

My favourites are the six books I gave 5 stars to on Goodreads. I like to read books on a wide variety of topics, such as history, philosophy, religion, biography, and diaries and letters. And currently I’m reading Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews In Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 by Ian Black, an immensely detailed book; and Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn, about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place.

By participating in Nonfiction November I’m hoping this will encourage me to read more nonfiction rather than picking up the next novel to read and I’m looking forward to seeing what others recommend.

Are you participating in Nonfiction November this year? Leave me a comment or a link to your post–I’d love to see what you’ve read this year.

Top 5:books to recommend for Halloween

Published on October 29, 2024 by Margaret3 Comments

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Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for October to December, see Meeghan’s post here.

It’s time to talk about Top 5 books to recommend for Halloween. It’s trick or treat time — are you going to tell us your best scary books or cutesy Halloween tales?

I’m a reluctant reader of scary stories but these are five I have read and enjoyed:

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a suspense story of a young woman slowly but surely losing her mind – or is it a case of a woman suffering from post-natal depression most cruelly treated by her doctor husband? The un-named woman has just had a baby, which she is unable to bear to be near her. She spends most of her time in an attic bedroom, with barred windows and a bed fixed to the floor. The walls are covered in a hideous yellow wallpaper which has been torn off in places. It’s not a beautiful yellow like buttercups but it makes her think of old, foul bad yellow things – and it smells. The pattern is tortuous and she sees a woman trapped behind the wallpaper as though behind bars, crawling and shaking the pattern attempting to escape. Definitely a creepy and disturbing story! By the end I began to question just what was real and what was imagination – it’s psychologically scary!

The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine, a horrifying mystery. I think it is one of the best of Barbara Vine’s books that I’ve read – nearly as good as A Dark-Adapted Eye and writing under her real name, Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone. Jenny Warner is a carer at a retirement home, Middleton Hall where she meets Stella Newland, who is dying of lung cancer. At first Stella never mentions her husband or her past life, but gradually she confides in Jenny, telling her things she has never said to her son and daughter – things about her life she doesn’t want them to know. The subtle horror of what I was reading gripped me. It is indeed a ‘chilling’ book.

Broken Voices by Andrew Taylor, a ghost story set in an East Anglian cathedral city just before the First World War when two schoolboys are left at the cathedral school during the Christmas holidays. They lodge with Mr Ratcliffe, a semi-retired schoolmaster, a bachelor now in his seventies who lived with Mordred, his malevolent cat, in a grace-and-favour house granted to him by the Dean and chapter of the cathedral. An ancient tragedy is connected with the cathedral and the bell tower – the cathedral is full of shifting shadows, and the bell tower is haunted by fragments of melody, which one of the boys can hear. The story has a creepy atmosphere and a tension as the boys investigate the tower in the dead of night. It’s suitably ambiguous. It’s not spelled out and you can make your own decision – was there a ghost and was there a murder.

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, a ghost story in the form of a diary – that of Jack Miller who in 1937 was part of an expedition to the High Arctic to study its biology, geology and ice dynamics and to carry out a meteorological survey. As the darkness descends, Jack is left alone at the camp and his nightmare really begins. Jack describes the ‘dark matter‘ of the title, as that part of the universe that cannot be seen or detected, but is there. It’s a chilling book, very chilling, both in the setting in the High Arctic and in atmosphere. And it is very scary!

Joyland, by Stephen King, a ghost story, a love story, a story of loss and heartbreak, set in a funfair. It’s also a murder mystery and utterly compelling to read. It’s narrated by Devin Jones, looking back forty years to the time he was a student, suffering from a broken heart, as his girlfriend had just rejected him and he spent a summer working at Joyland, in North Carolina, an amusement park with ‘a little of the old-time carny flavor‘. The Horror House, is a ‘spook’ house which is said to be haunted by the ghost of Linda Gray, whose boyfriend cut her throat in the Horror House. The boyfriend had not been found and it appears he may be a serial killer as there had been four other similar murders in Georgia and the Carolinas.

It’s also a story of friendship, of Tom and Erin, of children with the ‘sight’, a young boy in a wheelchair and his mother, and Dev’s search for the killer. I loved it! King tells his tale, with just a touch of horror and the supernatural.

Dead Man’s Time by Peter James: Book Beginnings & The Friday 56

Published on October 25, 2024 by Margaret2 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.

I’m featuring Dead Man’s Time by Peter James, his 9th Roy Grace crime fiction thriller. It’s one of my TBRs. I started reading it a few days ago.

Brooklyn, February 1922

The boy’s father kissed him goodnight for the last time – although neither of them knew that.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. 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.

‘It’s Nurse Wilson, Mr Daly. Your sister is weakening. I think you should come back quickly.’

Description from Amazon UK

Detective Superintendent Roy Grace is haunted by the past in his latest case, and his private life, in Dead Man’s Time, by award winning crime writer Peter James.

A vicious robbery at a secluded Brighton mansion leaves its elderly occupant fighting for her life. Millions of pounds’ worth of valuables have been stolen.

Within days, Grace is racing against the clock, following a murderous trail that leads him from the shady antiques world of England, across Europe and all the way back to the New York waterfront’s gang struggles of 1922, chasing a killer driven by the force of one man’s greed and another man’s fury.

Although the Roy Grace novels can be read in any order, Dead Man’s Time is the ninth gripping title in the bestselling series. Enjoy more of the Brighton detective’s investigations with Want You Dead and You Are Dead.

The Classics Club Spin Result

Published on October 23, 2024 by Margaret3 Comments

The spin number in The Classics Club Spin is number …

3

which for me is The Stars Look Down by A J Cronin. The rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by 18th December, 2024. I added The Stars Look Down by A J Cronin because I enjoyed The Citadel many years ago. So, I’m looking forward to reading it but I hadn’t realised that it is 712 pages long!

Synopsis from Amazon

The Stars Look Down was A.J. Cronin’s fourth novel, published in 1935, and this tale of a North country mining family was a great favourite with his readers.

Robert Fenwick is a miner, and so are his three sons. His wife is proud that all her four men go down the mines. But David, the youngest, is determined that somehow he will educate himself and work to ameliorate the lives of his comrades who ruin their health to dig the nation’s coal. It is, perhaps, a typical tale of the era in which it was written – there were many novels about coal mining, but Cronin, a doctor turned author, had a gift for storytelling, and in his time wrote several very popular and successful novels

In the magnificent narrative tradition of The Citadel, Hatter’s Castle and Cronin’s other novels, The Stars Look Down is deservedly remembered as a classic of its age.

Did you take part in the Classics Spin? What will you be reading?

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Trains, Boats & Planes on the Covers

Published on October 22, 2024 by Margaret19 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.

This week’s topic is How My Reading Habits Have Changed Over Time, but I don’t think they have, I’ve always loved reading and read a wide variety of genres. So, instead I am doing a topic I missed in August when I was on holiday. It’s books Featuring Modes of Transportation on the Cover, Planes, Trains & Automobiles.

The books I’ve chosen show trains, boats and planes on their covers:

Trains

The Christmas Train by David Baldacci – Basically this is a love story. Tom, a world-weary journalist is travelling from Washington DC to spend Christmas with his girlfriend who lives in Los Angeles. It’s also a detective story as there is a thief on the train.

Blood on the Tracks: Railway Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards, fifteen railway themed stories in this collection and an introduction on classic railway mysteries. Train travel provides several scenarios for a mystery – the restriction of space on trains, with or without a corridor, means that there are a limited number of suspects and they can also provide an ideal place for a ‘locked room’ crime or an ‘impossible crime’ story. This collection also includes a couple of crimes with a supernatural element.

The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie – Ruth Kettering, the daughter of millionaire Rufus Van Aldin is found strangled in her compartment in the Paris-Nice train, known as the train bleu, on its arrival in Nice and the fabulous ruby, the Heart of Fire that Van Aldin had given her, has been stolen. Fortunately Hercule Poirot is also travelling on the train and he of course unravels the mystery.

4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie – this begins when Mrs McGillicuddy was going home from Christmas shopping in London when she saw from the window of her train a murder being committed in a train travelling on a parallel line. But nobody believes her because there is no trace of a body and no one is reported missing. Nobody, that is except for her friend Miss Marple. But she is getting older and more feeble and she hasn’t got the physical strength to get about and do things as she would like. So, she enlists the help of Lucy Eyelesbarrow.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie – Poirot is on the Orient Express, on a three-days journey across Europe. But after midnight the train comes to a halt, stuck in a snowdrift. In the morning the millionaire Simon Ratchett is found dead in his compartment his body stabbed a dozen times and his door locked from the inside. It is obvious from the lack of tracks in the snow that no-one has left the train and by a process of elimination Poirot establishes that one of the passengers in the Athens to Paris coach is the murderer.

Boats and Planes

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie – Poirot is on the river-steamer SS Karnak, cruising on the Nile. Linnet Doyle, a wealthy American heiress is murdered, shot through the head. The motive seems straightforward, looking at who gains from Linnet’s death, but this is a complicated plot (when is one of Christie’s books not complicated?) and following on from Linnet’s murder, her maid is also found dead, Linnet’s pearls are missing, several characters are not what them seem and with the arrival of Colonel Race, a member of the British Secret Service, it seems there is also an international murderer and agitator on board.

Death Under Sail by C P Snow – This is a classic mystery, a type of ‘country house’ mystery, but set on a wherry (a sailing boat) on the Norfolk Broads, where Roger Mills, a Harley Street specialist, is taking a group of six friends on a sailing holiday. When they find him at the tiller with a smile on his face and a gunshot through his heart, all six fall under suspicion. It’s ingenious!

Planes

The 12.30 from Croydon by Freeman Wills Crofts – this begins with a murder but the identity of the murderer is known before he even thought of committing the crime. It’s set in the early 1930s when the country is suffering the effects of the ‘slump’ and Charles Swinburne’s business is on the edge of bankruptcy, and he is unable to raise the money to keep it going. So, he decided to murder his uncle, Andrew Crowther, in order to inherit his fortune. Consequently Andrew died on the 12.30 plane from Croydon. What I found most interesting is the description of the thrill of the early passenger flights.

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie – a kind of locked room mystery, only this time the ‘locked room’ is a plane on a flight from Paris to Croydon, in which Hercule Poirot is one of the passengers. In mid-air, Madame Giselle, is found dead in her seat. It appears at first that she has died as a result of a wasp sting (a wasp was flying around in the cabin) but when Poirot discovers a thorn with a discoloured tip it seems that she was killed by a poisoned dart, aimed by a blowpipe. A most enjoyable book!

Fair Stood the Wind for France by H E Bates – I was totally gripped by the first part of the book describing Franklin’s flight, with his crew of four sergeants, over France then the Alps and on to Italy. On his return flight when they were over France, they began to dive, rapidly losing height and he knew that the port engine had gone. The air screw (that’s a propeller) had broken, meaning they wouldn’t make it back to England and they crash landed somewhere in the countryside. They thought they were about west-north-west of the Vosges. From then onwards the story covers the period when Franklin whose arm had been very badly injured was cared for by Francoise and her family, hidden in their farmhouse. He falls in love with Francoise and she agrees to help him escape and marry him when they reach England.