Today I’m linking up with Davida @ The Chocolate Lady’s Book Review Blogfor Throwback Thursday. It takes place on the Thursday before the first Saturday of every month (i.e., the Thursday before the monthly #6Degrees post). The idea is to highlight one of your previously published book reviews and then link back to Davida’s blog.
Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve. I first reviewed it on February 5, 2008.
My review begins:
This was one of the best books I read in 2007. Philip Reeve is a new author to me. Here Lies Arthur is an adventure story, set in Britain in AD 500. I have always been fascinated by the legend of King Arthur and this book tells his story, casting a new and original slant on the ‘facts’. Very little historical evidence has survived to give concrete information about life in Britain from the fifth to the sixth centuries. The picture Reeve paints is of a turbulent and harsh world, with Arthur as a war-leader in a land where opposing war-bands fight for supremacy. Arthur is not the romantic hero of legend but a dangerous, quick-tempered man, ‘solid, big-boned with a thick neck and a fleshy face. ‘A bear of a man.’
What are you currently reading? What did you recently finish reading? What do you think you’ll read next?
Currently I’m reading The Women of Troy by Pat Barker. this is the second book on The Women of Troy trilogy, a retelling of the classic Greek myth. I’ve recently read the first book, The Silence of the Girls (my review will follow shortly) which I loved. So far this second book looks as though it will be just as good. Troy has fallen but high winds are keeping the Greeks from sailing home.
Description from Goodreads:
Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war—including the women of Troy themselves. They await a fair wind for the Aegean.
It does not come, because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated, and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed as the coalition that held them together begins to unravel. Old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester.
Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles’s slave, now belonging to his companion Alcimus, quietly takes in these developments. She forges alliances when she can, with Priam’s aged wife the defiant Hecuba and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.
I’m also reading Into the Tangled Bank by Lev Parikian, non fiction about nature. It’s easy reading, Parikian writes with humour, in a chatty style, but also richly descriptive. I’m loving it, it is compulsive reading. He is a storyteller, so there are lots of anecdotes and stories, plus his thoughts on nature and how we view it. Amongst many other topics he ponders about the ethics of zoos – something that puzzles me too – and wonders if the definition of a nature lover is becoming that of one who loves nature programmes. There’s a lot packed into this book.
The last book I read was Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson, a review copy. My review will follow after the book is published on 22 August 2024. I have very mixed feelings about this book from loving parts of it to frustration at other parts.
Synopsis from Amazon:
The stage is set. The players are ready. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed. Ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off a bad case of midlife malaise when he is called to a sleepy Yorkshire town, and the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But one theft leads to another, including the disappearance of a valuable Turner from Burton Makepeace, home to Lady Milton and her family. Once a magnificent country house, Burton Makepeace has now partially been converted into a hotel, hosting Murder Mystery weekends.
As paying guests, a vicar, an ex-army officer, impecunious aristocrats, and old friends converge, we are treated a fiendishly clever mystery; one that pays homage to the masters of the genre—from Agatha Christie to Dorothy Sayers.
What will I read next? At the moment I have no idea.
‘No sign of foul play,’ says Dr Carr after the post-mortem on Agatha Dawson. The case is closed. But Lord Peter Wimsey is not satisfied.
With no clues to work on, he begins is own investigation. No clues, that is, until the sudden, senseless murder of Agatha’s maid.
What is going on in the mysterious Mrs Forrest’s Mayfair flat? And can Wimsey catch a desperate murderer before he himself becomes one of the victims?
This is the third book in the LordPeter Wimsey series by Dorothy L Sayers, first published in 1927. My copy was reprinted in 2016 and I bought it secondhand five years ago. I’ve been reading this series totally out of order – I’ve already read the first two and several of the later books too. I think they each read well on their own.
Miss Climpson makes her first appearance in Unnatural Death, helping Lord Peter, working undercover. She is an elderly spinster, who runs what Wimsey calls ‘My Cattery’, ostensibly a typing bureau, but actually an amateur detective/enquiry agency. As in the first two books he works with his friend, Inspector Charles Parker, who is a Scotland Yard detective. Bunter, his manservant, only has a very minor role in this book. I think it’s an interesting mystery, not so much about discovering who killed Agatha Dawson and her maid, Bertha, but more about how the murders were committed.
Uncertain Death is most definitely a book of its time – that is the early 20th century. There is much banter, wit and humour, and plenty of snobbery of all types, clearly showing the class distinctions between the working and upper classes. Racism is prevalent and also lesbianism, although that is not directly stated. It is a clever story, well told, with colourful characters. There is a biographical note at the end of the book that reveals much about Lord Peter’s background, about his early years, school and university, and his experiences during the First World War.
The spin number in The Classics Club Spin is number …
17
which for me is How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn. The rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by 22 September 2024.
Synopsis from Goodreads
A poignant coming-of-age novel set in a Welsh mining town, Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley is a paean to a more innocent age, published in Penguin Modern Classics
Growing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan is taught many harsh lessons – at the kitchen table, at Chapel and around the pit-head. Looking back on the hardships of his early life, where difficult days are faced with courage but the valleys swell with the sound of Welsh voices, it becomes clear that there is nowhere so green as the landscape of his own memory. An immediate bestseller on publication in 1939, How Green Was My Valley quickly became one of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century. Poetic and nostalgic, it is an elegy to a lost world.
This is good as How Green Was My Valley is also on my 20 Books of Summer list. I’m looking forward to reading it. It’s been on my To Be Read list for so long!
Did you take part in the Classics Spin? What will you be reading?
Little, Brown Book Group UK| 18 July 2024 | 495 pages|e-book |Review copy| 3*
Description from the publishers
FORGET WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW THIS IS NOT THAT CRIME NOVEL
You know Penny Coyne. The little old lady who has solved multiple murders in her otherwise sleepy village, despite bumbling local police. A razor-sharp mind in a twinset and tweed.
You know Johnny Hawke. Hard-bitten LAPD homicide detective. Always in trouble with his captain, always losing partners, but always battling for the truth, whatever it takes.
Against all the odds, against the usual story, their worlds are about to collide. It starts with a dead writer and a mysterious wedding invitation. It will end with a rabbit hole that goes so deep, Johnny and Penny might come to question not just whodunnit, but whether they want to know the answer.
A cross-genre hybrid of Agatha Christie and Michael Connelly, The Cracked Mirror is the most imaginative and entertaining crime novel of the year, a genre-splicing rollercoaster with a poignantly emotional heart.
My thoughts:
I’ve read several books by Chris Brookmyre and those he’s co-written with his wife, Marisa Haetzman under the pseudonym Ambrose Parry and thoroughly enjoyed each one. The Cracked Mirror is not like any of his other books and it took me quite a while to get into it.
First of all there’s the title – as the publishers’ description alludes to, it’s not another version of Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, but it is a cross-genre hybrid of Agatha Christie and Michael Connelly. I’ve read all of Christie’s crime fiction novels and none of Michael Connelly’s books, so I didn’t know quite what to expect. Maybe a mash-up of British/American crime fiction/thriller, and that is what it is, with plenty of twists and turns, complications and rollercoaster fast action chases, most of it unbelievable. It’s brutal, violent, with quite a bit of dark humour thrown in. It’s also tense and full of suspense.
At first I was happily reading about Penny Coyne – think a sort of Miss Marple like character, a Scottish elderly spinster with a successful record of solving murder mysteries in her home village. The book begins as a body is found in the confessional booth of the chapel of Saint Bride’s in Glen Cluthar, where Ms Penelope Coyle lives. And then I was suddenly confused when I came to read a completely different story about Johnny Hawke, an LAPD homicide detective, not bothered about sticking to the rules. He’s investigating an apparent suicide of a screen writer in LA. But, as their cases came together I settled into this bizarre book and it became a unified whole. It has a very clever plot (maybe just too clever for me) that kept me guessing right to the end.
My thanks to Little, Brown Book Group UK and NetGalley for the ARC.
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.
I’m featuring The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmyre, which was published yesterday. My full review will follow shortly.
ChapterOne:
There was a body in the chapel of Saint Bride’s.
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.
‘Does your being an LAPD office help us here?’ ‘Not up the coast. And not while I’m under suspension. So I need you to understand that we might have to break a few rules. This could involve theft, fraud, trespass, or all three.’
Description
FORGET WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW THIS IS NOT THAT CRIME NOVEL
You know Penny Coyne. The little old lady who has solved multiple murders in her otherwise sleepy village, despite bumbling local police. A razor-sharp mind in a twinset and tweed.
You know Johnny Hawke. Hard-bitten LAPD homicide detective. Always in trouble with his captain, always losing partners, but always battling for the truth, whatever it takes.
Against all the odds, against the usual story, their worlds are about to collide. It starts with a dead writer and a mysterious wedding invitation. It will end with a rabbit hole that goes so deep, Johnny and Penny might come to question not just whodunnit, but whether they want to know the answer.
A cross-genre hybrid of Agatha Christie and Michael Connelly, The Cracked Mirror is the most imaginative and entertaining crime novel of the year, a genre-splicing rollercoaster with a poignantly emotional heart.
~~~
What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?
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