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Teaser Tuesday – Coastliners

Published on August 4, 2009 by Margaret14 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your ‘teaser’ from €¦ that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

And please avoid spoilers!

I’ve started to read Coastliners by Joanne Harris, a novel about life on the tiny Breton island of Le Devin. After the death of her mother Mado has returned to the island to her father’s house. It has been ten years since she lived there and she finds her home threatened both by the tides and a local entrepreneur. Her father is not welcoming. She finds the house looking derelict and deserted. On entering she sees a photograph of her father, GrosJean, her sister Adrienne and herself:

My face had been cut out of the picture – clumsily with scissors – so that only GrosJean and Adrienne remained, she with her arm resting lightly on his. My father was smiling at her over the space where I had been.

My Last 20 Books

Published on August 3, 2009 by Margaret7 Comments

I’ve not been writing my blog or reading many others’ blogs whilst I’ve been away, so there is a lot to catch up with. I’m now behind again with writing about the books I’ve read, and I’ve bought more books whilst I was away – more about those another time. To get me back in the swing of writing again I thought I’d start with this post – not too difficult and I thought it was interesting when I saw it on Cathy’s blog and then on Kerrie’s.

Cathy recently wrote about the last 20 books she read and identified their origins. Thanks go to Cathy for the image.

My books come from a number of sources, some I buy new either from bookshops or online and some are secondhand, either from secondhand bookshops, library sales, or charity shops for example. Some books come from Book Crossing, and some I borrow from family and friends. A few are review copies either direct from the publisher or author and some are via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers’ Program.

I aim to write a review for every book that I read. Sometimes the review is brief, just notes, but I write whether or not it appealed to me and why. Most of my reviews are favourable because if I find a book doesn’t appeal I don’t finish it and I don’t think it’s fair to write about a book when I haven’t read it in full.

So, here are the last 20 books I’ve read, and where I acquired them. (Clicking on the highlighted titles takes you to my posts on the books).

1. A Lost Lady by Willa Cather – library book

2. The Spare Room by Helen Garner – LibraryThing Early Reviewers’ Program

3. Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin – borrowed from my son

4. Doctored Evidence by Donna Leon – library book

5. Beachcombing by Maggie Dana – review copy from the author

6. Peril at End House by Agatha Christie – library book

7. A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell – library book

8. The Birthday Present by Barbara Vine – library book

9. Jane Austen: a Life by Claire Tomalin – a “Giveaway” book from Of Books and Bicycles

10. When the Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett – LibraryThing Early Reviewers’ Program

11. Good Evening Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes – bought from Waterstones bookshop

12. The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie – library book

13. Angels and Demons by Dan Brown – bought but can’t remember where from

14. Company of Liars by Karen Maitland – bought from Waterstones Bookshop

15. The Gardens of the Dead by William Brodrick – library book

16. Hide & Seek by Ian Rankin – borrowed from my son

17. Turbulence by Giles Foden – LibraryThing Early Reviewers’ Program

18. The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn – bought from Waterstones bookshop

19. Tooth and Nail by Ian Rankin – borrowed from my son

20. Strange Affair by Peter Robinson – library book

I was quite surprised to see so many review books in the last 20 I’ve read – this is unusual for me, but I did have a run of luck with “snagging” books on LibraryThing recently, which I don’t suppose will continue. The three books I borrowed from my son were in a omnibus volume of Ian Rankin’s early Rebus books. I’m aiming to read them in the order he wrote them.

Eight of the books are library books, which is about average for me. I like to read those along with my own books.

There are three books I’ve not yet written about – one is Angels and Demons was a re-read as I recently saw the film and wanted to compare it with the book. I found there were many changes, some of which I remembered as I watched the film. The last two on the list I finished reading last week – reviews to follow soon (I hope).

Sunday Salon – Reading The Sixth Wife

Published on July 19, 2009 by Margaret7 Comments

Yesterday I started reading The English by Jeremy Paxman. It’s entertaining but I felt I wanted a story – something to get lost in. So I picked up The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn. I’ve had this book for a long time and I decided it was now time to read it. I’m so glad I did because I have difficulty putting it down. It’s the story of Katherine Parr as told by her friend Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk after the death of Henry VIII, when Katherine had married Thomas Seymour.

Reading one book often leads me on to reading others. I was sure I had a copy of David Starkey’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII but I can’t find it – I wanted to read what he had to say about Katherine, so I must have just borrowed it from the library. I know I’ve read it.

I find this period of English history so fascinating and most of what I know has come from reading novels or books like Starkey’s because we only touched on it at school and my later historical study was all a lot later. I’d like to visit Sudeley Castle where Katherine lived with Thomas – he renovated it in 1547/8. And I’d also like to read more about both Katherine and her friend, Catherine. So much from one book.

Note: See my final thoughts here. My enthusiasm for this book waned.

Friday Finds

Published on July 17, 2009 by Margaret5 Comments

This week I came across these books:

Love All by Elizabeth Jane Howard. This is her first new novel in nine years! I’m a bit late “discovering” it as it was published in hardback last October, but the paperback is due out on 7 August. It’s set in the West Country in the 1960s with a group of people orgainsing an arts festival. I loved her Cazalet books and have her memoir Slipstream (tbr), so I’ll be looking for Love All in the bookshops.

We Are All Made of Glue by Monica Lewycka was published a couple of weeks ago. I heard her talking about the book with Mariella Frostrup last Sunday on Open Book. It sounds good, covering some serious issues with added comedy and romance. Georgie, a failed novelist becomes a contributor to an adhesives publication. Her husband has left her and she meets her elderly Jewish neighbour Mrs Shapiro. Mrs Shapiro lives in a crumbling, filthy house along with a load of incontinent cats. We Are All Made of Glue combines together such disparate strands as the Arab-Israeli conflict, care for the elderly and different types of glue that binds us all together.

TBR – Booking Through Thursday

Published on July 16, 2009 by Margaret15 Comments

Follow-up to last week’s question:

Do you keep all your unread books together, like books in a waiting room? Or are they scattered throughout your shelves, mingling like party-goers waiting for the host to come along?

I have a bookcase where a lot of my unread books are shelved – that’s the waiting room. I also have unread books in piles in various rooms because I don’t have enough shelves – these are on the waiting list for places to come available. But now I come to think of it the unread bookcase also holds books I’ve read as well because there’s nowhere else left to move the unread books to once I’ve read them. And I have a feeling that there are some unread books mingled in amongst the other bookcases too.

The only place I’ve found to keep them under some form of order is in LibraryThing. But now LT has a category of Books To Read I see that I have 285 books in that category, whereas I’ve tagged 275 of them as TBR. I’m so inconsistent! Anyway that’s a lot of unread books.

Library Loot

Published on July 14, 2009 by Margaret5 Comments

I came back from the library today with this pile of books.

I’ve been thinking about how I choose books since writing my last Weekly Geeks post – am I influenced by the cover, just what is it about a book that makes me want to read it? Here are my reasons for choosing this pile:

The English: a Portrait of a People by Jeremy Paxman. I like to vary reading fiction with non-fiction, so I browsed in the non-fiction section and this caught my eye because of its title and author. I haven’t read anything by Jeremy Paxman but his TV programmes are always interesting and often controversial. I thought I’d like to find out how he defines Englishness. The chapter headings look interesting such as “The Land of the Lost Content”, “Funny Foreigners” and “The Ideal Englishman”. It also looks as though no one else has borrowed this book and it’s always nice reading a brand new book.
Strange Affair by Peter Robinson. I looked for a book by this author based on Roberta’s recommendations in her blog Books To the Ceiling.
My Invented Country by Isabel Allende. South America is largely unexplored by my reading and I have two of Allende’s books waiting to be read. She was on my mind since writing the Weekly Geeks post and so I looked in the Biography section and found this memoir. It promises to be a ‘highly personal tour through Chile.’
Little Monsters by Charles Lambert. I’ve not read anything at all about this book or its author. It’s from the New Books section and its cover was on full display. I don’t like the cover and I don’t like the title, but what attracted me initially is this quote from Beryl Bainbridge on the front cover: ‘Charles Lambert is a seriously good writer.’ I like her books, so I picked it up and on the back cover this quote from Griff Rhys Jones (why him, I wondered) made me curious enough to look further: ‘Sharp like sherbet, poignant and gripping.’ I opened the book and the first pages looked interesting.
Small Gardens – a Royal Horticultural Society Guide. This was in the library sale. We have a small garden, sadly not too flourishing, so I thought it would be useful.
The Riddle of the River by Catherine Shaw – another author I’ve never come across before and in this case it was the title on the spine that drew my eye. The cover is OK, but it was the sub-title and the subject matter that made me decide to borrow the book – ‘Murder and mystery in Victorian Cambridge’. The book summary on the back helped plus the opening pages.