Mount TBR Challenge 2016

Mount TBR 2017 Final Checkpoint

Published on December 31, 2017December 31, 2017 by Margaret2 Comments

It’s time for the final checkpoint in Bev’s Mount TBR Reading challenge 2017:

My aim was to scale Mt Ararat (ie to read 48 books) but I only made it to the base of Mt Vancouver, reading 25 books, as once again I got side-tracked by reading books that I bought/borrowed during the year. I still have a few reviews to write.

The Words to the Wise According to Mount TBR: Using the titles of the books you read this year, see how many of the familiar proverbs and sayings below you can complete with a book read on your journey up the Mountain.

A stitch in time saves … The Taxidermist’s Daughter
Don’t count your chickens… [on] The Other Side of the Bridge
A penny saved is… The Kill Fee
All good things must come… [to] A Dedicated Man
When in Rome… [go to] The Gathering
All that glitters is not… The Eagle of the Ninth
A picture is worth … All the Light We Cannot See
When the going gets tough, the tough get… Wives and Daughters
Two wrongs don’t make… A Necessary End
The pen is mightier than… Caedmon’s Song
The squeaky wheel gets… [to an] An Uncertain Place
Hope for the best, but prepare for… The Dead of Jericho
Birds of a feather flock… [to] A Death in the Dales

My thanks to Bev for hosting this challenge!

Mount TBR 2016 Final Checkpoint

Published on December 30, 2016 by Margaret5 Comments

It’s time for the final checkpoint in Bev’s Mount TBR Reading challenge 2016:

My aim was to scale Mt Ararat (ie to read 48 books) but I only made it to the base of the mountain, reading 38 books, as I got side-tracked by reading new books that I bought/borrowed during the year – which is the reason I always have a lot of TBRs.

A stitch in time saves … Wycliffe and the Tangled Web
Don’t count your chickens… [at] The Mill on the Floss
A penny saved is… The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle
All good things must come… [to the] People of the Book
When in Rome… Accidents Happen
All that glitters is not… The Sunne in Splendour
A picture is worth a… A Game of Thrones
When the going gets tough, the tough get… The Mysterious Mr Quin
Two wrongs don’t make… Partners in Crime
The pen is mightier than… The Secret Hangman
The squeaky wheel gets… Talking to the Dead
Hope for the best, but prepare for… Bones and Silence
Birds of a feather flock… [to] The Bean Trees

Frost at Christmas by R D Wingfield

Published on December 22, 2016 by Margaret3 Comments

Frost At Christmas (Inspector Frost, #1)

There’s nothing Christmassy about Frost at Christmas apart from the title and the fact that it is set just before Christmas.

Blurb (Amazon):

Ten days to Christmas and Tracey Uphill, aged eight, hasn’t come home from Sunday school. Her mother, a pretty young prostitute, is desperate. Enter Detective Inspector Jack Frost, sloppy, scruffy and insubordinate. To help him investigate the case of the missing child, Frost has been assigned a new sidekick, the Chief Constable’s nephew. Fresh to provincial Denton in an oversmart suit, Detective Constable Clive Barnard is an easy target for Frost’s withering satire.

Assisted and annoyed by Barnard, Frost, complete with a store of tasteless anecdotes to fit every occasion, proceeds with the investigation in typically unorthodox style. After he’s consulted a local witch, Dead Man’s Hollow yields up a skeleton. Frost finds himself drawn into an unsolved crime from the past and risks not only his career, but also his life…

My thoughts:

Frost at Christmas has been on my shelves for over 2 years. It’s the first of R D Wingfield’s DI Jack Frost series. Years ago I’d watched the TV series with David Jason as DI Frost, which I thought were interesting but I wasn’t that keen on Frost as a detective. So I was surprised to find that the book and the character are so much better.

Frost at Christmas was first published in Great Britain in 1989, but Wingfield had written it years earlier, in 1972 and it was first published in Canada in 1984. In his obituary in The Guardian Wingfield is quoted: “I have nothing against David Jason as Frost at all, he just isn’t my Frost.” He liked Jason as a comedy actor in such vehicles as Only Fools and Horses, but felt that along with the choice of actor had gone a softening of the dark humour essential as a safety valve for policemen investigating horrendous cases.

After reading Frost at Christmas I agree: David Jason’s Frost is not my Frost either. He’s a much tougher character, not at all PC. but he is much more than the crude, sexist and insensitive rude person he first appears. Of course he is unorthodox, which doesn’t go down well with his boss, Superintendent Mullett who is the exact opposite of Frost, being always immaculately dressed and supremely oblivious to Frost’s excellent detective skills (as in the TV version). He doesn’t obey orders, goes off at a tangent and doesn’t like experts who rely on precision, whereas he uses his hunches and intuition. Frost is popular with his colleagues, although they are less than happy when he is late handing in their expenses claims.

There are several storylines – the missing schoolgirl, a bank robbery and the discovery of a three decades old murder plus other more minor crimes. It’s a reminder of the time when people smoked and held meetings in blue-fug filled rooms, and when there no mobile phones and people used public telephone boxes.

I liked Frost’s sense of humour and the way his relationship with the new DC, Clive Barnard, the Chief Constable’s nephew develops. Clive after seeing Frost as incompetent and disgusted by his ‘cheap gibes’ eventually sees the other side of his boss as he learns what lies behind Frost’s tough facade and a bit about his history, his wife dying of cancer.

I think Frost at Christmas is so much better than I expected. I really enjoyed it and am going to read the other five Frost books R D Wingfield wrote.

Jack Frost
1. Frost at Christmas (1984)
2. A Touch of Frost (1987)
3. Night Frost (1992)
4. Hard Frost (1995)
5. Winter Frost (1999)
6. A Killing Frost (2008)

‘Rodney David Wingfield (1928 – 2007) was a prolific writer of radio crime plays and comedy scripts, some for the late Kenneth Williams, star of the Carry On films. His crime novels featuring DI Jack Frost have been successfully adapted for television as A Touch of Frost starring David Jason.Wingfield was a modest man, shunning the London publicity scene in favour of a quite life in Basildon, Essex, with his wife of 52 years(died 2004) and only son.’ (Fantastic Fiction)

Reading Challenges: Mount TBR Challenge, Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt – in the Silver Age category of ‘photograph’.

Classic Club Spin: Silas Marner by George Eliot

Published on December 8, 2016 by Margaret5 Comments

The back cover of my Penguin Popular Classics edition of Silas Marner tells me it was George Eliot’s own favourite novel. The story revolves around Silas Marner, a weaver living in Raveloe, a village on the brink of industrialisation. He was wrongly accused of theft and left his home town to live a lonely and embittered life in Raveloe where he became a miser, hoarding his gold and counting it each night. Until one night his life is changed by the theft of his money and a little girl who came to live with him, having been abandoned in the snow.

It took me a while to settle into George Eliot’s style of writing, with her long, long sentences – some so long I had forgotten how they had started, before I got to the end. But once my mind had adjusted to the rhythm of her writing I enjoyed this short book (221 pages in my copy). It’s set in the early years of the 19th century (she was writing the book in 1861) and begins with a description of linen weavers and the superstition that surrounded them. They were:

… pallid undersized men, who by the side of brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. The shepherd’s dog barked fiercely when one of these alien-looking men appeared on the upland, dark against the early winter sunset; for what dog likes a figure bent under a heavy bag? – and these pale men rarely stirred abroad without that mysterious burden.

In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or thing that was at all unwonted … no one knew where wandering men had their homes, or their origin … to peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery … (page 9)

There are two strands to the storyline – one about Silas and the other about Godfrey Cass, two very different men, one poor, a social outcast and the other rich, the son of the local squire. They move in very different social circles, the Cass family life is one of lazy indulgence, but their lives intersect through the arrival of the little girl.

I really enjoyed this short book, bringing to life a world that had disappeared by the time George Eliot was writing it. It has the touch of a fairytale about it, or of a folk myth, and it tells of the consequences of our actions. The characters come to life through Eliot’s descriptions and I could easily picture their appearance and hear their speech. For example

She actually said “mate” for “meat”, “appen” for “perhaps”, and “oss” for “horse”, which, to young ladies living in good Lytherly society, who habitually said ‘orse, even in domestic privacy, and only said ‘appen’ on the right occasions, was necessarily shocking. (page 113)

I wondered whether this would be a sentimental tale, but although it is touching it isn’t sentimental. In the end it’s about a world of uncertainties, of ways of looking at life, of the nature of belief and religion and of the possibilities of change. And it does have a happy ending.

As well as being my Classics Club Spin book it’s also one of my TBRs, qualifying for the Mount TBR Reading challenge.

Accidents Happen by Louise Millar

Published on October 12, 2016 by Margaret1 Comment

Accidents Happen is one of my TBR e-books that I’ve had for a couple of years. It’s described as a ‘gripping psychological thriller where one woman’s streak of bad luck may be something far more sinister’, so I thought it would be just the right sort of book to read for this year’s R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril XI.

It begins well with a strange, scary episode about a child waking up to the sight of something slithering, full of threat, not sure what it was but terrified as it was angry with a gaping mouth revealing a tiny white spot, where the poison came from.

Episodes like this are interspersed between the chapters of the story, each one more terrifying than the rest. These are actually much more scary than the main story, which is about Kate, a widow and her young son Jack.

Blurb:

Kate Parker has had so much bad luck in her life, she’s convinced she’s cursed. But when she tries to do her best to keep herself and her son safe, people tell her she’s being anxious and obsessive.

Just when her life starts to spin completely out of control, an Oxford professor she meets offers to help. But his methods are not conventional. If she wants to live her life again, he will expect her to take risks.

When a mysterious neighbour starts to take more than a passing interest in her, Kate tries to stay rational and ignore it.

Maybe this, however, is the one time Kate should be worried.

My thoughts:

Kate’s husband had died 5 years before the book starts and Kate is obsessed with statistics, so much so that they are now ruling her life – statistics about all the things that go wrong, or could go wrong. And this is preventing her from living a normal life – the lengths she goes to are extreme and they are affecting her Jack, her son. As readers we know that some of Kate’s fears are real, but she doesn’t focus on those, although they do bother her. I began to feel something was wrong. And when she met Jago, an Oxford professor my feelings intensified – there was definitely something suspicious going on. Why was he getting her to take such risks and putting herself into such strange situations?

At first I was enjoying this book – it’s very readable, although the concentration on Kate’s fears got a bit repetitive – but increasingly as I read on I just couldn’t believe what was happening. For me the tension that had been building up just disappeared. I didn’t think it was plausible and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief.

I think I’m in the minority about this book as it has more favourable reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads.

Reading Challenges: Mount TBR Reading Challenge and R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril XI.

Mount TBR: Checkpoint #3

Published on October 7, 2016September 30, 2017 by Margaret8 Comments

It’s time for the third quarterly checkpoint for Bev’s Mount TBR Reading Challenge. Bev says:

1.Tell us how many miles you’ve made it up your mountain (# of books read).

I’m nearly at the top of Mt Vancouver, having read 35 books. So it’s looking doubtful that I’ll reach my target of getting to the top of Mt Ararat (48 books)!

2. Complete ONE (or more if you like) of the following:

A. Who has been your favorite character so far? And tell us why, if you like.
B. Pair up two of your reads. But this time we’re going for opposites. One book with a male protagonist and one with a female protagonist. One book with “Good” in the title and one with “Evil.” Get creative and show off a couple of your books.
C. Which book (read so far) has been on your TBR mountain the longest? Was it worth the wait? Or is it possible you should have tackled it back when you first put it on the pile? Or tossed it off the edge without reading it all?
D. Choose 1-4 titles from your stacks and using a word from the title, do an image search. Post the first all-eyes-friendly picture associated with that word.

I think my favourite character has to be Richard III in The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Penman, one of the best historical novels that I’ve read. It is full of detail, but her research sits very lightly in this book, none of it feels like a history lesson, and it all brings Richard’s world to life. Penman portrays a very likeable Richard, from his childhood onwards he comes across as a kind, generous and brave man, a skilled leader on the battlefield, a loving husband to his wife, Anne, and devoted and loyal to his brother, Edward IV, who was by no means a saint.

For book pairs I’ve picked In Bitter Chill by Sarah Ward and Heat Wave by Penelope Lively – opposite weather conditions!

The book that has been on my TBR mountain the longest is still The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf as I said in the last Checkpoint post. I’m not sure when I bought it, but it was one of the books I listed when I first joined LibraryThing in 2007. I do wish I’d read it before this year but I enjoyed it so it was worth the wait.