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/

The Classics Club Spin Result

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The spin number in The Classics Club Spin is number …

which for me is The Mousetrap and Other Plays by Agatha Christie and I am delighted as this is a book I’ve wanted to read for years!. The rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by 7th August, 2022.

Synopsis from the book:

These four gripping plays by the undisputed Queen of Crime, here published for the first time in book form, provide yet more evidence of her mastery of the domestic thriller. Agatha Christie’s talents as a playwright are equal to her skills as a novelist and reading her plays, with their ingenious plots and colourful cast of characters, is every bit as pleasurable.

The Mousetrap has made history by becoming the longest running play ever. And Then There Were None was another huge theatrical success and was made into a superb film by Rene Clair. The two remaining plays were both adapted by Agatha Christie from her earlier novels: The Hollow, set in the English countryside and Appointment with Death, set among the exotic ruins of Petra in the suffocating heat of the Jordan desert.

Agatha Christie dramatised many of her own stories and frequently devised new twists of plot and character to surprise and enthrall her audience.

The Mousetrap opened in London’s West End in 1952 and ran continuously until 16 March 2020, when the stage performances had to be temporarily discontinued during the COVID-19 pandemic. It then re-opened on 17 May 2021. It’s set in a guest house, Monkswell Manor, wintertime “in the present day”, that is the early 1950s. The play has a twist ending, which the audience are traditionally asked not to reveal after leaving the theatre, so I’ll be limited in what I can write about it.

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

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: The Riddle of the Third Mile by Colin Dexter

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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 Riddle of the Third Mile by Colin Dexter is one of my 20 Books of Summer. It’s an Inspector Morse murder mystery. I have just finished reading it and will write a review soon. But in the meantime I thought I’d do Book Beginnings on Friday and a Friday 56 post about it.

Chapter One: Monday, 7th July

In which a veteran of the El Alamein offensive finds cause to recall the most tragic day of his life.

There had been three of them – the three Gilbert brothers: the twins, Alfred and Albert; and the younger boy, John, who had been killed one day in North Africa.

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: This extract is part of Morse’s memories of his time at Oxford University.

But in the middle of his third year he had met the girl who matched the joy of all his wildest dreams.

Synopsis from Amazon

The thought suddenly occurred to Morse that this would be a marvellous time to murder a few of the doddery old bachelor dons. No wives to worry about their whereabouts; no landladies to whine about the unpaid rents. In fact nobody would miss most of them at all . . .

By the 16th of July the Master of Lonsdale was concerned, but not yet worried.

Dr Browne-Smith had passed through the porter’s lodge at approximately 8.15 a.m. on the morning of Friday, 11th July. And nobody had heard from him since.

Plenty of time to disappear, thought Morse. And plenty of time, too, for someone to commit murder . . .

Classics Club Spin

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

It’s time for another Classics Club Spin.

Before next Sunday, 12 June, create a post that lists twenty books of your choice that remain “to be read” on your Classics Club list. On that day the Classics Club will post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List by 7 August, 2022.

Here’s my list:

  1. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
  2. Another Part of the Wood by Beryl Bainbridge
  3. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
  4. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
  5. The Mousetrap and Selected Plays by Agatha Christie
  6. The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin
  7. The Stars Look Down by A J Cronin
  8. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
  9. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
  10. The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas
  11. The Birds and other short stories by Daphne du Maurier
  12. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
  13. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  14. Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
  15. How Green was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn
  16. A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute
  17. On the Beach by Nevil Shute
  18. Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
  19. The Invisible Man by H G Wells
  20. Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

I don’t mind which one is picked as I’m aiming to read all of them in due course! But which one/s would you recommend?

Edited on June 9, because I’ve just realised I’ve included A Room with a View which I’ve read – it was my Classics Club Spin book from the last Spin! I just copied the previous list (with a few alterations) and didn’t realise it was still on the list. I’ve now removed it and added The Awakening by Kate Chopin instead.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with a Unit of Time in the Title

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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 Books With a Unit of Time In the Title: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, eternity, etc

  1. Casey Cep tells three stories in Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee – the crimes of Willie Maxwell, the trials of his lawyer Tom Radney and Harper Lee’s failed attempt to write about them.
  2. Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer (translated from Afrikaans by K L Seegers) – crime fiction set in South Africa, DI Benny Griessel has just 13 hours to crack open a conspiracy which threatens the whole country.
  3. The Day Gone By the autobiography of Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down.
  4. Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade delves into the mystery of her disappearance in 1926.
  5. The Shortest Day by Colm Toibin – During the winter solstice, on the shortest day and longest night of the year, the ancient burial chamber at Newgrange is empowered. Its mystifying source is a haunting tale told by locals.
  6. The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart’s sequel to Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy, telling the story of Mordred, King Arthur’s illegitimate son, who was foretold by Merlin as Arthur’s bane.
  7. J L Carr’s A Month in the Country is a beautifully written book, set in the aftermath of World War I. Tom, his ‘nerves shot to pieces, wife gone, dead broke‘,  is still suffering from shell shock after the battle of Passchendaele. 
  8. The Year Without Summer by Guinevere Glasfurd telling how the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia in 1815 had a profound and far reaching impact on the world.
  9. The Year of Miracle and Grief by Leonid Borodin – a twelve-year-old boy, finds magic, mystery, romance, and sadness at beautiful Lake Baikal in Siberia.
  10. Yesterday’s Papers by Martin Edwards – solicitor Harry Devlin is investigating a crime dating back thirty years to the 1960s, the period of Beatlemania, with the focus on the sixties music scene.

Six Degrees of Separation from Sorrow and Bliss to Casino Royale

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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.

The starting point is a book by an Australian author shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction  Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason. It’s about a woman called Martha. She knows there is something wrong with her but she doesn’t know what it is.

I haven’t read Sorrow and Bliss and so my first link is to the word ‘sorrow’ in the title – A Game of Sorrows by Shona MacLean set in 1628 in Ulster, in which Alexander Seaton seeks to find the author of the curse on his dead mother’s family and is confronted by a murder.

Again, using a word in the title my second link is – A Game of Thrones by George R R Martin, set on the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos, in a grim a nd violent world full of tragedy, betrayals and battles; a tale of good versus evil in which family, duty, and honour are in conflict.

Moving on from there my third link is to a book by another author with the initials ‘R R’ – Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien, an epic fantasy set in Middle-earth, telling of the quest to destroy the one, ruling Ring of power before it falls into the hands of its maker, Sauron, the dark lord of the title.

From the dark lord my fourth link is to another lord in The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L Sayers. When his sexton finds a corpse in the wrong grave, the rector of Fenchurch St Paul asks Lord Peter Wimsey to find out who the dead man was and how he came to be there. There is a lot of detail about bell-ringing, which is essential to the plot

My fifth link is to another book with the word ‘tailor’ in the title, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre, in which George Smiley uncovers a Soviet spy within MI6. To find him he has to spy on the spies. Smiley is an enigmatic character, a lonely man, who is self-effacing and apparently meek, a small, podgy man who has a habit of polishing his spectacles on the end of his tie. People underestimate him.

Smiley is a complete contrast to the spy, James Bond, 007, which brings me to the final link in my chain, Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, the first James Bond book, in which Bond has to outplay Le Chiffre in a high-stakes poker game at the Casino Royale and shatter his Soviet cell.

My chain has travelled in and out of this world from Ireland to Westeros and Essos, Middle-earth, the English Fens, London and France. The books are from different genres, crime fiction, fantasy, and spy thrillers.

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: Death in Berlin by M M Kaye

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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.

Death in Berlin by M M Kaye is one of the 20 Books of Summer that I’m aiming to read this summer. It is crime fiction set in war-scarred Berlin in the early 1950s. Miranda is on the night train when she discovers a dead body. Years ago I read The Far Pavilions and it is only in recent years that I discovered she wrote the Death in … series. This is the 2nd book in the series first published in 1955.

It begins with a Prologue:

With nightfall the uneasy wind that had sighed all day through the grass and the gorse bushes at the cliff edge died away, and a cold fog crawls in from the sea, obliterating the darkening coastline and muting the drag of waves on shingle to a rhythmic murmur barely louder than the unrelenting and monotomous mutter of gunfire to the east.

followed by Chapter 1

Miranda Brand knelt on the floor of a bedroom in the Families’ Hostel in Bad Oeynhausen in Berlin, searching her suitcase for a cake of soap, and regretting that she had ever accepted her cousin Robert Melville’s invitation to spend a month with him and his family in Berlin.

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:

Miranda’s eyes widened suddenly and she caught her breath in a little gasp. ‘Yes. There was something else. I heard a door being opened and then I heard someone moving about in there. I thought it was funny – “funny peculiar”, I mean.’

Synopsis from Amazon

Miranda Brand is visiting Germany for what is supposed to be a month’s vacation. But from the moment that Brigadier Brindley relates the story about a fortune in lost diamonds–a story in which Miranda herself figures in an unusual way–the vacation atmosphere becomes transformed into something more ominous. And when murder strikes on the night train to Berlin, Miranda finds herself unwillingly involved in a complex chain of events that will soon throw her own life into peril.

What are you planning to read this summer?