It’s almost time for Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. It’s now in it’s sixth year. I took part in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
There are no categories this year, although participants are invited to start the month with a My Year in Novellas retrospective looking at any novellas read since last NovNov, and finish it with a New to My TBR list based on the novellas that others have tempted them with over the course of the month.
There are also two buddy reads this year – Seascraper by Benjamin Wood and Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde.
These are some of the novellas from my TBR shelves:
Women and Writing by Virginia Woolf – 198 pages
Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark – 172 pages
The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald – 167 pages
Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner – 184 pages
The Case of the Canterell Codicil by PJ Fitzsimmons – 177 pages
Anty Boisjoly, nineteen-twenty-never Wodehousian gadabout and clubman , takes on his first case when his old Oxford chum and coxswain is facing the gallows, accused of the murder of his wealthy uncle.
Not one but two locked-room murders later, Anty’s pitting his wits and witticisms against a subversive butler, a senile footman, a single-minded detective-inspector, an irascible goat, and the eccentric conventions of the pastoral Sussex countryside to untangle a multi-layered mystery of secret bequests, ancient writs, love triangles, and revenge, and with a twist in the end that you’ll never see coming.
What are you currently reading? What did you recently finish reading? What do you think you’ll read next?
I haven’t done a WWW Wednesday post since July! Where has the time gone? We’re now in October and it’s definitely Autumn – colder but stil some bright sunny days. The leaves are now falling, soon our garden will be covered by them – we have a lot of trees.
Currently I’m reading one of Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti novels – Blood from a Stone, which I’m thoroughly enjoying. I’m not surprised by that as I’ve enjoyed all of the Brunetti books I’ve read. He is one of my favourite detectives, maybe even the favourite.
In this one Brunetti is investigating the death of one of the vu cumprà, illegal immigrants selling fake designer handbags from sheets on the ground. He was killed one cold night near Christmas when two men entered Venice’s Campo Santo Stefano and shot him five times. The only witnesses are some American tourists.
I’m also reading Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), which I think is such a strange book, definitely not a children’s book as I had thought. First published in 1726, it’s a satire on human nature and the imaginary travellers’ tale literary subgenre about Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon who travels to four strange and distant lands. I’ve nearly finished it and I’ll write more about it in a later post.
The last book I read was West with Giraffes by Linda Rutledge, a novel based on a true story which I loved.
Description from Goodreads
Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave.
It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. Inspired by true events, the tale weaves real-life figures with fictional ones, including the world’s first female zoo director, a crusty old man with a past, a young female photographer with a secret, and assorted reprobates as spotty as the giraffes.
What will I read next? It could be The Case of the Canterfell CodicilAnty Boisjoly Mysteries Book 1) by P.J. Fitzsimmons, a locked room mystery.
Description from Goodreads
In The Case of the Canterfell Codicil, Wodehousian gadabout and clubman Anty Boisjoly takes on his first case when his old Oxford chum and coxswain is facing the gallows, accused of the murder of his wealthy uncle. Not one but two locked-room mysteries later, Boisjoly’s pitting his wits and witticisms against a subversive butler, a senile footman, a single-minded detective-inspector, an irascible goat, and the eccentric conventions of the pastoral Sussex countryside to untangle a multi-layered mystery of secret bequests, ancient writs, love triangles, revenge, and a teasing twist in the final paragraph.
But when the time comes to start another book it could be something completely different.
Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Readerwhere 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 Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie caught my eye one day as I was browsing the bookshelves in Barter Books in Alnwick, one of my favourite secondhand bookshops. It’s the first of the Flavia de Luce Mystery novels.
The book begins:
It was as black in the closet as old blood. They had shoved me in and locked the door.
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:
Daphne had described to me the effects of tetanus: one scratch from an old auto wheel and I’d be foaming at the mouth, barking like a dog and falling to the ground in convulsions at the sight of water.
Description from Amazon:
England 1950. At Buckshaw, the crumbling country seat of the de Luce family, very-nearly-eleven-year-old Flavia is plotting revenge on her older sisters.
Then a dead bird is left on the doorstep, which has an extraordinary effect on Flavia’s eccentric father, and a body is found in the garden. As the police descend on Buckshaw, Flavia decides to do some investigating of her own.
It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate atBooks 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.
Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has beenrelying entirely on Google Translate for his work.
How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed – then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art?
Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino.
My First link is a book by Italo Calvino – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, which I borrowed from the library a few years ago. It’s composed of stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition—with explorations of how and why we choose to read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. It has an excellent beginning but as I read on all the stops and starts became disjointed. I renewed it a few times but eventually I decided to abandon it and returned it unfinished.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is my second link because it is a book I abandoned three times before trying it again, after watching the movie, which is fantastic – a kaleidoscope of visual delights, the scenery, the settings and the costumes are blazes of colour and drama. Cloud Atlas covers a time period from the 19th century to a post apocalyptic future. It is an amazing creation (‘amazing‘ is a very overused word, but in this instance very apt), at times confusing and at times brilliant.
My Third link is also by David Mitchell. It’s Slade House, a book I loved as soon as I started reading it. It’s a mixture of a ghost story, science fiction and horror. Something nasty happens every nine years at the end of October at Slade House. I read it as a fantasy, something that I couldn’t believe could ever happen (or at least, I hope not). People are invited or are drawn into Slade House and find themselves in a strange and dangerous situation, and there is no way out.
Which brings me to my fourth linkHouse of Silence by Linda Gillard, a novel about families and their secrets – in particular one family, the Donovans. When Gwen Rowland meets Alfie Donovan she becomes interested in his family and persuades him to let her spend Christmas with them at the family home, Creake Hall, an old Elizabethan manor house. It raises issues of memory and identity, mental illness, loss and love.
Mental illness is my Fifth link in The Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell, one of her best standalone books. When Benet was about fourteen, she and Mopsa, her psychologically disturbed mother had been alone in a train carriage, when Mopsa, had tried to stab her with a carving knife. It’s a psychological thriller, full of suspense, with several twists and turns that made me unsure how it would end. I was delighted by the final twist!
Agatha Christie wrote several books featuring trains. My sixth link is one of those books, 4.50 from Paddington. 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.
My chain is made up of books I abandoned books and books I loved. It’s taken me from a book about megacities in China to a murder mystery on a London train.
What is in your chain?
Next month (October 4, 2025), we’ll start with Dominic Amerena’s novel about authors and publishing, I Want Everything.
Normal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson – Eleven interconnected stories, where everything is changing, where nothing is quite as it seems.
Six Stories and an Essay by Andrea Levy – This collection opens with an essay about how writing has helped Andrea Levy to explore and understand her heritage. She explains the context of each piece within the chronology of her career and finishes with a new story, written to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.
I also borrowed two other books:
The Gardener by Salley Vickers – Previously I’ve read five books by Vickers, and enjoyed them, especially Miss Garnet’s Angel and Mr Golightly’s Holiday. The last one I read was The Librarian, which I thought was rather underwhelming. I hope this one is better.
Nine Lives by Peter Swanson – I haven’t read any of Swanson’s books, but keep seeing them on book blogs and thought I’d see if I like this one.
The Accordionist by Fred Vargas – quirky crime fiction, set in Paris
The Craftsman by Sharon Bolton – creepy crime fiction about a coffin-maker
The Sea Detective by Mark Douglas-Home – oceanographer, Cal McGill, more of an investigative story than crime fiction
The Hangman’s Song by James Oswald – the third Inspector McLean series set in Edinburgh, crime fiction with elements of the supernatural and parapsychology thrown in
The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge – a wartime tale of life in Liverpool in 1944, with an under current of psychological suspense.
The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton – historical fiction set in the summer of 1862, a story of murder, mystery and thievery, of art, love and loss
BooksPlease 