Category: Fiction

My Sunday Selection – Reading Today

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I probably won’t be reading very much today as the sun is shining, the sky is a cloudless blue – and the garden needs lots of attention. At the moment I’m having a rest from mowing the lawn.

But there will be time to look at newbooks magazine – the latest copy of newbooks magazine arrived here a couple of days ago. This issue is full of interesting articles and a Crime Supplement, with short extracts from a number of books and author interviews.

Some that look interesting from the Crime Supplement are:

  • The Whispers of Nemesis by Anne Zouroudi – Hermes Diaktoros, ‘the inimitable Greek Detective’ in a story of long-kept secrets and of pride coming before the steepest of falls.
  • The House at Seas End by Elly Griffiths – the third Ruth Galloway investigation. In this one the mystery goes back to the Second World War with Britain threatened with invasion.
  • 1222 by Anne Holt – ‘a snowbound mountain pass, a derailed train, a mysterious carriage, an apocalyptic storm, an ancient hotel, murder and state secrets.’ Phew!!

The main magazine has as usual longer extracts from the free books (you have to pay the postage though) on offer. The one that takes my fancy is:

  • Death Instinct by Jed Rubenfeld, about a deadly attack on Wall Street in 1920. this begins: ‘Death is only the beginning; afterward comes the hard part.’

Weekend Cooking – from The Long Song

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

One of the books I’m currently reading is The Long Song, a novel about slavery set in 19th century Jamaica, by Andrea Levy. The narrator is July, now an old woman born as a slave, writing her memoirs.

This morning I read about the preparations for the Yuletide dinner of 1831. There were to be twelve people at the plantation owner’s table.  Caroline, the owner’s sister is giving Hannah, the cook, her orders for the food to be provided.

There was to be both turtle and vegetable soups, mutton, pigeon pies and guinea fowl, a boiled ham and a turkey or two, turtle served in the shell (but she would prefer beef), four stewed ducks, cheese, as many hogsheads as they could get and roasted pig.

There was also to be:

… malt liquor, wine, porter, cider, brandy and rum, watermelon, mango, pawpaw, naseberry, soursop, grandilla fruit. ‘And make sure the preserve has come from England. Strawberry or damson. Do not serve guava, ginger or that ghastly sorrel jelly. I’m so tired of Jamaican jams.’

Hannah had stopped listening, for the need to shout ‘And me to fix-up all this? You  a gut-fatty, cha!’ at her misssus was becoming overpowering in her. (pages 74 – 75)

And in case they were still hungry after this obscene amount of food, Hannah was told to make plum pudding. Hannah remembered how to make it –

A little fruit, a little molasses, some cornmeal, eggs, plenty rum. Mash it up a bit. Put this mess in that silly round mould the missus did give her the first Christmas she arrived, and boil it until the water does run dry. And when the thing is hard then it is done. (pages 75 – 76)

So far I think this book is beautifully written, vivid, lively and enthralling.

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – Letter N

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

This week we’ve reached the letter N in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet. My choice is a medley of ‘N‘s.

  • I had thought I would review Peter James’s Not Dead Enough, and I started it a while back but put it down to read other books. Not because I didn’t like it, but it’s a very long book – 610 pages of very small font, which is difficult for me to read, especially late at night when my eyes get tired quickly. From the back cover:

On the night Brian Bishop murdered his wife he was sixty miles away, asleep in bed at the time. At least that’s the way it looks to Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who is called to investigate the kinky slaying of beautiful young Brighton socialite, Katie Bishop.

  • Another choice for the letter N that I considered is A Necessary End, an Inspector Banks mystery by Peter Robinson but I haven’t finished that book either. From the back cover:

In the usually peaceful town of Eastvale, a simmering tension has now reached breaking point. An anti-nuclear demonstration has ended in violence, leaving one policeman stabbed to death. Fired by professional outrage, Superintendent ‘Dirty Dick’ Burgess descends with vengeful fury on the inhabitants of ‘Maggie’s Farm’, an isolated house high on the daleside.

  • My third choice is Not the End of the World by Christopher Brookmyre. I started reading this after enjoying Quite Ugly One Morning. The bookmark shows I’m up to page 30. I think I didn’t finish this book because I was expecting it to be set in Scotland like Quite Ugly One Morning and was put off by it being in Los Angeles – silly I know!

 

  • Then there is Agatha Christie’s Nemesis, which is the last Miss Marple mystery. I only bought it recently and I’m itching to read it soon. Mr Rafiel, an old acquaintance (see A Caribbean Mystery), has died and left Miss Marple instructions for her to investigate a crime after his death.

 

  • And finally the book I’m currently reading is Janet Neel’s Ticket to Ride, which so far is making very interesting reading. But I don’t want to write much about it before I’ve finished it. Ticket to Ride features Jules Carlisle a newly qualified solicitor. She takes on the case of Mirko Dragunoviç, an illegal immigrant who claims that one of the eight dead bodies, found on the beach west of King’s Lynn, is that of his brother.

Janet Neel is the nom de plume of Baroness Cohen of Pimlico who sits as a Labour peer in the House of Lords. She started out as a solicitor, then went to the Board of Trade and then to Charterhouse Bank. She has written several crime fiction novels. The first, Death’s Bright Angel won the John Creasey Prize and both Death of a Partner and Death Among the Dons were shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger.

ABC Wednesday – K is for …

Published on by Margaret16 Comments

… Kingsolver

For my ABC Wednesday posts I’ve been highlighting either authors or artists whose work I enjoy. This week it’s the letter K and there was no doubt about who that brought to mind – Barbara Kingsolver, who is the author of one of my very favourite books – The Poisonwood Bible.

I bought this book in an airport bookshop just before boarding a plane to go on holiday to Cyprus; that gave me plenty of time to read a good chunk of the book before we landed. I remember being very amused by the description of how the Price family got round the forty-four pound per person luggage limit on their flight to the Congo. I’d just struggled to get our luggage allowance down to the required limit for our holiday, but I hadn’t thought of doing what they did – each of them wearing multiple layers of clothing and other goods, such as tools and cake-mix boxes tucked out of sight in their pockets and under their waistbands. Cake-mixes were an essential item as Mrs Price said, ‘they won’t have Betty Crocker in the Congo.’

I soon read the rest of the book by the side of the pool, my hands covered in sun cream removing the gold lettering of Barbara Kingsolver’s name.

This is the book’s description from the back cover:

Told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959, The Poisonwood Bible is the story of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. They carry with them all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it – from garden seeds to Scripture – is calamitously transformed on African soil.

It is a brilliant book – one that I’ve read at least twice and would eagerly read again. The setting and historical figures and events are real, even though the characters and story are fictional. Barbara Kingsolver writes in her author’s introduction to the book that she relied on her memory, travel in other parts of Africa and many people’s accounts of the natural, cultural and social history of the Congo/Zaire to write the novel.

She wrote that her parents, who were different in every way from the parents in the book, were

… medical and public-health workers, whose compassion and curiosity led then to the Congo. They brought me to a place of wonders, taught me to pay attention, and set me early on a path of exploring the great, shifting terrain between righteousness and what’s right. (page x)

It’s a book that has stuck long in my memory, maybe because it paints such a remarkable picture based on reality and truth.

I’ve read some of her other books, namely The Bean Trees, Homeland and Other Stories, and Prodigal Summer,and whilst I enjoyed them, none of them were, I thought, as good as The Poisonwood Bible. I have The Lacuna, waiting to be read.

For more information see Barbara Kingsolver’s own website.

Library Loot

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

This is a sign that I’m a hopeless bookaholic. Despite listing books I’ve had for ages and still haven’t read – not mentioning all the to-be-read books all around the house – yesterday I went to the library and came home with these books:

  • The Fanatic by James Robertson is historical crime fiction, described on the back cover as ‘an extraordinary history of Scotland: a tale of betrayals, stolen meetings, lost memories, smuggled journeys and disguised identities.‘ I’d enjoyed his second book The Testament of Gideon Mack a few years ago. And how could I resist bringing this book home when I saw it began in Bass Rock, which is just up the coast from us – see my photo here.
  • Stories of the Railway by V L Whitechurch. From the book cover I learnt that V L Whitechurch was a celebrated crime writer and an expert railway enthusiast. He wrote a large number of crime short stories set in the golden age of Britain’s railways – this selection was originally published in 1912 as ‘Thrilling Stories of the the Railway‘. I’d read about him on Martin Edward’s blog and was pleased to find a copy on the library shelves.
  • The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez. I’d read about this book, a mix of murder and maths and wondered whether my elementary grasp of maths would be enough for me to follow the equations  and cryptic symbols involved in solving this mystery.
  • The London Train by Tessa Hadley. There seems to be a theme here in my choice, following on from the Stories of the Railway. In this book, the London train between Wales and London, connects two stories that are interlinked through ‘a single moment concerning two lives stretched between two cities’.

And last but by no means least two books on watercolour painting, because this is now taking up some of my reading time. On Thursdays I go to a local art group and dabble in paint. I mentioned this a while ago on my blog and people asked to see some of my paintings. Here are two I don’t feel too embarrassed to show:

Top Ten Unread Books

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

Top Ten Books I Absolutely Had To Have – But Still Haven’t Read. I saw this on Litlove’s blog and thought it was a great idea. You never know it might just spur me on to read some of these.

They are all books I was driven to buy but the impulse to read them had passed by after I bought them, replaced by the urge to read other books. I still would love to read them.

They are:

  • The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning. I’ve read and was deeply engrossed in the first two of these – The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City as separate books, three years ago! At the time I wanted to read the final book as soon as possible, but I couldn’t find it published as a separate book and so a year later I bought the Trilogy including all three books. I still haven’t read the third one Friends and Heroes. The three books are a portrait of Guy and Harriet Pringle’s marriage during the Second World War.
  • The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson. I bought this three years ago after I’d read and loved Crow Lake by Mary Lawson. Like Crow Lake, The Other Side of the Bridge is set in Canada, this time about two brothers in the 1930s, when their uneasy relationship is driven to breaking point.
  • The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favourite books, so I just had to get this book. It’s so long though and I read several indifferent reviews which made me less inclined to start it – but I do intend to read it, just not yet.
  • Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham. I’d read a few of Maugham’s books a while ago and full of enthusiasm wanted to read this one, said to be the most autobiographical of his masterpieces. I got it for a Christmas present in 2008 andI’m still anticipating it will be very good.
  • The Children’s Book by A S Byatt. I have this in hardback as I couldn’t wait for it to come out in paperback. I’ve read many conflicting reviews about how good or otherwise it is and have actually read some of it. But it’s got such a huge cast of characters and I wanted to read Wolf Hall at the same time and couldn’t cope with two such long and complicated books, so I temporarily put down The Children’s Book to read later – then other books got in the way. I’ll need to go back to the beginning when I do get back to it.
  • The Shadows in the Street by Susan Hill – another book I wanted to have before it was available in paperback. This one is the fifth in her Simon Serrailler novels.
  • People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. I loved March by Geraldine Brooks, which prompted me to look for more by her. This one has had good reviews all round and I have absolutely no idea why I didn’t read it straight away.
  • The Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bowyer. I seem to have had this book for ages, spurred on to read it by so many good blog reviews a few years ago and it’s still sitting here unread, a novel about the women who created the Bayeux Tapestry.
  • The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. Well, I love Margaret Atwood’s books, so how could I not buy this one? It covers the same time period as Oryx and Crake,  a book which I’d read some time ago and remembered as being one I had to concentrate on – not a book to skip through. So I thought I’d better wait for a suitable frame of mind to read this – it hasn’t arrived yet. But I do want to read this.
  • The Secret River by Kate Grenville – another book I’ve had for nearly three years, inspired by other bloggers to buy it I still haven’t started it. I love books about the settlers/convicts lives in 19th century Australia. I really must read this soon.