Author: Margaret

I love reading and write about the books I’ve been reading and those I’m considering reading on my blog, BooksPlease at https://booksplease.org/

Nonfiction November 2025: Week 4 Diverse Perspectives

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

This week’s topic is hosted by Rebekah @ She Seeks Nonfiction.

One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is the way it can open your eyes to the world around you–no plane ticket required. What nonfiction book or books have impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Is there one book that made you rethink everything? Is there a book that, if everyone read it, you think the world would be a better place?

I think that The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB (my review) by Gordon Corera certainly opened my eyes and enlightened me about the extent of corruption, torture and terror within Russia, and the infiltration of Western countries.

It’s about Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to Britain in 1992. Mitrokhin, a quiet, introverted and determined man, was a reluctant defector, because whilst he loved Russia he came to hate the KGB and the Soviet system. It is a remarkable book about a remarkable man, an in-depth account, that is both fascinating and informative.

As the in-house archivist for the KGB, the secrets he was exposed to inside its walls turned him first into a dissident and then a spy, a traitor to his country but a man determined to expose the truth about the dark forces that had subverted Russia, forces still at work in the country today. It is the story of what it was like to live in the Soviet Union, to raise a family and then of one man’s journey from the heart of the Soviet state to disillusion, betrayal and defection. At its heart is Mitrokhin’s determination to take on the most powerful institution in the world by revealing its darkest secrets.

Mitrokhin wanted the documents he had copied to be made public, not just to the world but to open the Russians’ eyes to the corruption, torture and terror that was prevalent. Sadly, despite his determination that his work would reach the Russian people, that has not proved possible

Gordon Corera is the BBC’s security correspondent. He covers terrorism, cyber-security, spying and other related issues in the UK and around the world. Before taking on the role in 2004 he worked for the Today programme on Radio 4 as a foreign reporter. Gordon joined the BBC in 1997. He has presented documentaries and written a number of books relating to espionage and security.

Maigret’s Doubts by Georges Simenon: a Novella

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Maigret’s Doubts by Georges Simenon, translated by Shaun Whiteside is the 52nd Maigret novel (first published as Les scrupules de Maigret in 1957), and published by Penguin in 2018, one of the books in the Maigret Capsule Collection, a selection of twelve of Georges Simenon’s iconic Inspector Maigret titles.

Description from Goodreads

Inspector Maigret finds himself caught in the middle of a husband and wife duo’s case of “he said/she said”—with murderous consequences

An unusually quiet day for Inspector Maigret at the Quai des Orfèvres is disturbed by a visit from mild-mannered toy salesman Xavier Manton. Maigret is taken aback by Manton’s revelation that he suspects his wife of plotting to poison him. And when he receives a visit from Madame Manton expressing her own grave concerns later that day, he finds himself deeply conflicted, unsure of whom to trust. Maigret heeds the advice of his seniors and begins investigating the couple—and with every turn, new complications arise. When the case comes to a boil and a body is discovered, everyone, including Maigret, is shocked.

Maigret’s Doubts is an engrossing mystery of marriage and deceit that forces the reader to question whether our brilliant inspector may be fallible after all.

My review:

I recently reviewed Simenon’s earlier book, The Yellow Dog, which baffled me because I had little idea about what Maigret was thinking or even doing. Maigret’s Doubts is just the opposite as it is very clear what he is thinking as Simenon describes his thoughts in detail.

It begins on the 10th January, after the holidays finding detectives at the Quai des Orfèvre, strangely quiet with little to do except dull administrative tasks, a period of dead calm. Maigret wasn’t in good form, feeling lethargic and wondering if he wasn’t coming down with the flu. And he’s worrying about his wife’s health after their family doctor has told him he’s prescribed her some pills at the same time telling him there was absolutely nothing to worry about. It makes him melancholy as he realises they are both getting to the age of minor ailments that need attention.

A visit from Xavier Marton, the head of the toy department at the Grands Magasins du Louvre, a model train specialist, breaks into Maigret’s melancholy, telling him that he thinks his wife wants to poison him. Later that same day his wife, Gisèle also visits Maigret and tells him that her husband is having delusions, leaving him unsure who is telling him the truth. The next day, Manon visits Maigret again and warns him that if his wife poisons him, he’ll shoot her before he dies. But it soon becomes clear that Manon and Jenny, his wife’s sister are in love, although not actually having an affair and that Gisèle, on the other hand, is having an affair with her employer, Monsieur Harris.

Maigret is puzzled by what Manon and his wife have told him and asks Dr Pardon his family doctor for his opinion and consults books about psychiatry, making this book more of a psychological study than a police investigation. Maigret isn’t faced with a crime that has been committed but one that could be committed. But it was just as possible that it wouldn’t be committed at all.

What he had to do this time was not to reconstruct the actions and gestures of a human being, but to predict his behaviour, which was difficult in a different way.(page 114)

But Maigret doesn’t find the books of much help:

In the end he got up, as a man who has had enough threw the book on the table and, opening the sideboard in the dining room picked up the bottle of plum brandy and filled one of the little gold-rimmed glasses.

It was like a protestation of common sense against all that scientific gobbledygook, a way of getting back to earth.

I really enjoyed this book, although not a lot actually happens. Maigret fears that there is going to be a murder but who will be the victim and how can he make an arrest when no crime has been committed? The narrative moves at a slow pace as the tension steadily rises culminating in a murder as the book moves to its end.

Novellas in November is hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Bookish Beck.

Top Ten Tuesday:Books set in World War One or World War Two

Published on 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.

The rules are simple:

Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want. Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to Jana in your own Top Ten Tuesday post. Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists. Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

The topic today is Books I Enjoyed that Were Outside My Comfort Zone. But because it is Remembrance Day marking the anniversary of the end of the First World War in 1918 I’m sharing books set in either World War One or World War Two, or about the wars.

  1. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. This is Vera Brittain’s autobiography. She was 21 in 1914.
  2. The Monocled Mutineer: The First World War’s Best Kept Secret: The Etaples Mutiny  by John Fairley & William Allison
  3. Highlanders’ Revenge by Paul Tors
  4. Our Longest Days: a People’s History of the Second World War by the Writers of Mass Observation.
  5. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
  6. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
  7. White Rose, Black Forest by Eoin Dempsey
  8. Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II by Ben Macintyre
  9. The Spoilt City by Olivia Manning
  10. Good Evening, Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes

Nonfiction November 2025: Week 3: Book Pairings

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

Week 3 (11/10-11/16) is hosted by Liz, an ex-librarian, a freelance editor and transcriber, a runner and a volunteer. She blogs about everything from social justice and geology nonfiction to YA romance and literary fiction at Adventures in reading, Running and Working from Home

This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or maybe it’s just two books you feel have a link, whatever they might be. You can be as creative as you like!

My nonfiction book is The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble. I’ve always enjoyed doing jigsaws. So when I saw this book about jigsaw puzzles, their history and their place in her life I wanted to read it. They were a big part in my childhood and I still enjoy doing them.

Margaret Drabble describes her book thus:

This book is not a memoir, although parts of it may look like a memoir. Nor is it a history of the jigsaw puzzle, although that it was what it was once meant to be. It is a hybrid. … This book started off as small history of the jigsaw, but it has spiralled off in other directions and now I am not sure what it is.

I think is a memoir because what she does in this book is to weave her own story into a history of games, in particular jigsaws, which have offered her and many others relief from melancholy and depression. She writes about the importance of play and notes the way that doing a jigsaw is like creating order out of chaos, and because they have no verbal content they exercise a different part of the brain, bringing different neurons and dendrites into play. 

I enjoyed parts of immensely – those parts about her childhood, and life at Bryn, her grandparents’ house in Long Bennington and about her beloved Aunt Phyl (Phyllis Boor) and of course those parts about jigsaws, both personal and historical, about mosaics (looking at them as a form of jigsaw), the history of children’s games and puzzles and amusements. She does ‘spiral off in other directions’ which meant in parts it lacks a clear structure in a sort of ‘stream of consciousness’ style, particularly in her reminiscences and nostalgia about life (reproduced in some jigsaws) in a rural community that no longer exists.

I’m pairing it with The Jigsaw Maker by Adrienne Dines, another book that appealed to me because it’s about jigsaws.

The Jigsaw Maker is a beautifully written novel, one with pace and tension in just the right places. Lizzie Flynn has a shop in a village near Kilkenny, a sort of knick-knack shop selling a variety of goods, cards, flower arrangements, and home-made sweets. The ‘Jigsaw Maker’ is Jim Nealon, a stranger who walks into her shop one morning and asks her to sell his beautiful jigsaws.

But these are no ordinary jigsaws. Jim makes wooden jigsaws, tiny intricately shaped pieces ‘finely cut so that they were more like buttons than jigsaw pieces’  And each one is individual showing a photograph of a real place accompanied by a personalised history of the scene.

He proposes to take photos of places, not the tourist attractions, but the places their ancestors might have lived and worked. He asks Lizzie to help him by writing about the scenes. To begin with he shows her a photo of the local school and asks her to picture herself back there in 1969 and write what she remembers – what it was like to be a pupil there.

It just so happens that 1969 had been quite an eventful year. This opens up the floodgates of memory for Lizzie as painful and puzzling events from that year almost over power her. Looking back at the child she was she realises that not everything was as it had appeared to her then.

It is just like a jigsaw – all the pieces are there and both the reader and Lizzie have to put them together correctly to get the correct picture. I could visualise the scenes and the characters and I became anxious for Lizzie as she realised the truth not only about the events she had seen, but also about her place in those events. There are plenty of repressed secrets that come to the surface and an added mystery too – who is Jim? Why has he come to the village and why did he ask Lizzie in particular to help him?

The Yellow Dog by Georges Simenon

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

The Maigret books are also a good choice for Novellas in November, they’re all under 200 pages. I’ve been a Maigret fan for a long time, ever since I was in my teens, watching the TV series with Rupert Davies in the title role. And I’ve been reading the Maigret series as I’ve come across the books in libraries, bookshops, and more recently as e-books, so not in the order they were originally published.

Penguin| 2014| 164 pages| My own copy| 3*

This is a short review because, once more I’m behind with writing reviews. The Yellow Dog is the 5th book in the new Penguin Maigret series, translated by Linda Asher. It was first published in 1931 and also published in a previous translation as A Face for a Clue. It’s a tale of small town suspicion and revenge.

In the windswept seaside town of Concarneau, a local wine merchant is shot. In fact, someone is out to kill all the influential men and the entire town is soon sent into a state of panic. For Maigret, the answers lie with the pale, downtrodden waitress Emma, and a strange yellow dog lurking in the shadows…

It’s only 134 pages but with a slow start it did seem longer than that. It begins with the shooting of Monsieur Mostaguen, a local wine merchant, followed by the appearance of the yellow dog, a big, snarling yellow animal, and then an attempt at poisoning for Maigret to investigate. I wondered what the significance of the yellow dog was and who it belonged to; no one seems to know. The locals had never seen it before and they all viewed it with fear and suspicion. I’ve read some of the earlier Maigret and have noted before that I’ve been confused and baffled, with little idea of what was going on and it was just the same with this book. Maigret doesn’t seem to be very concerned about the man who was shot and seriously injured, nor about the attempted poisoning until there’s a murder and another man disappears. He walks around the town, observing but not actively investigating.

Simenon is good at conveying atmosphere and skilled at setting the scene and drawing convincing characters in a few paragraphs.  As the book begins there’s a south-westerly gale slamming the boats together in the harbour in Concarneau and the wind surges through the streets. Contrast the weather at the beginning of the book with the change by the time Maigret is getting close to clearing up the mystery – the weather turned fine, with a vibrant blue sky, the sea sparkled, and ‘the Old Town’s walls, so gloomy in the rain, turn a joyful, dazzling white.‘

I don’t think this is one of the best Maigret book, but it is puzzling with Maigret keeping his thoughts to himself until the end of the book, when like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, he explains it all.

The Black Loch by Peter May: Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56

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.

The book I’m currently reading is The Black Loch by Peter May, the fourth book in May’s Lewis Trilogy. I’ve read and loved the first three books. So I was keen to read it, and so far (I’ve read 45%) it’s living up to my expectations.

The book begins with a Prologue:

The sun set some time ago. Although it is not yet dark enough, somehow for murder.

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.

Page 56:

‘Did I ever tell you about the whaling boy?’

He never had.

‘You know what a whale is, Finn?’

‘Of course!’

‘Well there was a time when we killed them all over the planet. Hundreds and thousands of them.’

Description from Amazon:

A MURDER

The body of eighteen-year-old TV personality Caitlin is found abandoned on a remote beach at the head of An Loch Dubh – the Black Loch – on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis. A swimmer and canoeist, it is inconceivable that she could have drowned.

A SECRET

Fin Macleod left the island ten years earlier to escape its memories. When he learns that his married son Fionnlagh had been having a clandestine affair with the dead girl and is suspected of her murder, he and Marsaili return to try and clear his name.

A RECKONING

But nothing is as it seems, and the truth of the murder lies in a past that Fin would rather forget, and a tragedy at the cages of a salmon farm on East Loch Roag, where the tense climax of the story finds its resolution.

If you have read this book, what did you think?