Category: Books

Sunday Salon

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Not much reading here today as D and I are off out with the family this afternoon.

This morning I’ll be reading more from Griff Rhys Jones’s memoir Semi-Detached, which is coming on nicely. I’m now up to the part where Griff is in his final year at school. I loved his description of cricket that I read yesterday.

I hate and abhor cricket. I loathe cricket. I abominate cricket. There is only one thing more boring than the abysmal English habit of watching a game of cricket and that is an afternoon playing the wretched game. It is sport for the indolently paralysed. Only three people out of twenty two are engaged in any proper activity. The rest simply sit and wait their turn.

The excruciating tedium of ‘fielding’ – standing about, like a man in a queue with nothing to read, in case a sequence of repetitive events, ponderously unfolding in front of you, should suddenly require your direct intervention … (page 179)

Football is a game. Tiddly-winks is a game. A sack race involves energy and fun. Cricket is like a cucumber sandwich: indulged in for reasons of tradition, despite being totally eclipsed by every other alternative on offer. (page 181)

I can well imagine that fielding would be much more pleasurable if one could read at the same time. One of my fond memories of childhood is going with my parents to watch cricket, but then I did used to lie in the grass making daisy chains.

I’d like to finish reading Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig this evening, if I have time before I fall asleep. I have very mixed ideas about it right now, varying from liking it to wishing I’d never bothered to pick it up. It’s a tough read – from a subject point of view, that is. This is by no means a ‘comfy’ read, more of a rollercoaster to batter and bruise. But I must finish it before writing about it properly.

Coming up next week I’m looking forward to reading one of these books:

At the moment it’s King Arthur’s Bones that is calling out to me. It’s five interlinked mysteries from Michael Jecks, Susanna Gregory, Bernard Knight, Ian Morson and Philip Gooden.

Library Loot

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

I’ve been reading lots of library books  recently and still have quite a pile left unread. Here are just some of the books I’ve borrowed that I haven’t started to read yet.

From top to bottom:

  • Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore. I haven’t read any of her books. The title of this drew my attention – Zennor is a village in Cornwall just north of Penzance, one of the places we used to go to years ago when Dave used to go rock climbing. But this book is different – it’s set in 1917 and U-boats are attacking ships on the Cornish coastline. D H Lawrence and his wife Frieda come into this novel, which won the McKitterick Prize in 1994.
  • Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie. I’m steadily reading Christie’s books, just in the order I find them. This is one of her later books and was written in 1970, published to mark her eightieth birthday. It’s a spy novel.
  • The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith. I picked this one because I’d enjoyed The Careful Use of Compliments so much. This is the previous Isabel Dalhousie Novel in his Sunday Philosophy Club series and the third one in the series.  I’m looking forward to reading Isabel’s thoughts on moral and ethical dilemmas.
  • The Vicar of Sorrows by A N Wilson. I have a mixed reaction to Wilson’s books, some I like and some just turn me off. I liked A Jealous Ghost and Incline Our Hearts, but shied away from My Name is Legion. I also like his non-fiction – After the Victorians and some of his biographies. The Vicar of Sorrows is about a clergyman who does not believe in God and does not love his wife. It remains to be seen if I’ll like it.

Plotting

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

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Plots? Or Stream-of-Consciousness? Which would you rather read?

 It all depends on my mood! I like both at different times.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf springs to mind as a good example of stream-of-consciousness writing and is a book to cogitate over and I could read it again and again. Plot driven books, in contrast, are full of action and are page-turners, making me read quickly to find out what happens next, but once read I usually feel less inclined to re-read them.

Cozy Mysteries

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

When I saw the Cozy Mystery Challenge I wondered just would could possibly be ‘”cozy” about murder, after all “cosy” (as I prefer to spell it) means snug, warm and comfortable – a teacosy is meant to keep the teapot warm, a cosy cottage is small and welcoming. “Cozy” is not really the right word then for crime fiction.

Nevertheless there is a category of crime fiction with that label and I rather like reading them every now and then, along with police procedurals and historical crime fiction. As I found on the Cozy Mystery website cozy mysteries are those without  rough language, sex scenes, or gruesome details about the killing, and where the main character is normally an amateur detective. I like the puzzle-solving elements of that type of crime fiction rather than the noir realism of murder.

Sometimes I like to use reading challenges  to find new authors to read, but for this one I’m aiming to stick to books I already own and have been saving to read (in other words my to-be-read piles). The following are all on my shelves:

  1. Faithful Unto Death by Caroline Graham (Midsomer Murders)
  2. Asimov’s Mysteries
  3. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier
  4. An Agatha Christie – I have a few to choose from
  5. One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
  6. The Private Patient by P D James
  7. A Ruth Rendell – also a few to choose from

But then again, I shall be going to the library over the next six months (the period of this challenge) and could easily find other books to read.

I think I’ll start with Azimov’s Mysteries.

Is there a category of crime fiction labelled science fiction mysteries? I expect there is. Years ago my husband and I both read a number of science fiction books – Frank Herbert’s Dune series and E E ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensmen  and Skylark books for example. And hidden amongst them on the shelves I came across one I haven’t read –  Asimov’sMysteries, which I think fits into this category and may very well be a cozy mystery too. It is described on the back cover as:

… thirteen fiendishly ingenious stories of crime, murder, puzzlement and detection in the far reaches of space and centuries in the future … a superb showcase of Dr Asimov’s brilliant storytelling talent.

Sunday Salon – Today’s Reading

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Today I’ve been reading Semi-Detached by Griff Rhys Jones (a book I borrowed from the library). This is his memoir of his childhood and adolescence and I’m enjoying reading it. I had a look at what people have written about it on Amazon and found it has some very disparaging comments. I completely disagree – this is not boring or dull, and not at all a ‘celebrity’ memoir. I’ll leave writing about it until I’ve finished it, apart from this little bit about swimming and diving in his local swimming pool. I can identify so much with his account of the diving boards. The diving boards were made up of a lower board and a high dive. And it was scary on the high board. It was best to jump off it first before attempting a dive. Griff describes the experience of his first jump, that ‘sinking, sick-making descent’:

I must have stood there taking counsel and advice for ten minutes before I finally went off for the first time, in a sudden fit of bravado: still talking, without anybody having the chance to advise me, I stepped straight off the edge and fell … arrgh: my internal organs apparently losing their adhesion to my lower abdomen.

I bobbed up quickly and swam frantically, over-energised, to the side and went straight back up. (page 80)

That was me too! I loved it, but how times have changed. My last experience in a swimming pool last year at Center Parcs in Nottingham was terrifying when I went down the flume. It was a rapid descent and I was pushed along by people behind me, ending up underwater, certain that I was going to be drowned and hating the whole thing.

My other reading this morning was The Widow’s Tale by Mick Jackson, a book I received from the publishers via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers’ Program. This a gentle account of a newly-widowed woman who is coming to terms with her husband’s death after 40 years of marriage. It’s about her thoughts and feelings as she flees  from her London home to rent a cottage in a small Norfolk village.  I have my doubts about the narrator’s voice – at times it comes across as male rather than female, but I’m waiting until I’ve finished it to pass judgement.

April Fool – Booking Through Thursday

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

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Deb has asked a variety of questions for today.

  • Who’s your favorite ‘fool’ of a character, and why?
  • What authors have fooled you? By a trick plot twist? By making you think their book was any good when it wasn’t?
  • What covers have fooled you into reading books you hated €¦ even though the covers were wonderful?
  • What’s the best April Fool’s Day trick you’ve ever seen/heard about/done?

Choose the one you like best. Or answer all of them! Or make up your own.

I was fooled by Margaret Forster’s book, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, or rather I fooled my self.

Even though it is clear from the front cover that this is a novel I started reading it thinking it really was the diary of Millicent King, a woman born in 1901 who had kept a diary from the age of 13 until she was 94. I think the fact that it has an ‘Introduction’ was partly to blame where the narrator explained how she had come across the diaries and was intrigued enough by them to ‘make something of them’ and how she had met Millicent just before her death. The ‘diary’ records the events of the Great War as it touched her family, on through the 20s and 30s in London and then to the Second World War where Millicent drove an ambulance through the bombed streets of London.

It’s written in diary format with added information from the ‘editor’. It was only when I came to read the later part of Millicent’s ‘life’ that I began to wonder if this woman could possibly be real and have been involved in so many of the great social upheavals and dramas of the times and I began to suspect that this was fiction.  That should teach me to read book titles more closely and look at the front covers properly!

Nevertheless this is very good book and I enjoyed it enormously, although I did feel a little sad that Millicent wasn’t a real person.

As for covers I don’t think I’ve ever been fooled by one – as I don’t really look at them very carefully.