Category: TBRs

My Friday Post: The Seagull by Ann Cleeves

Published on by Margaret22 Comments

Book Beginnings Button

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

The Seagull by Ann Cleeves is one of my TBRs, that I should have read as soon as I got it – but didn’t. It’s the 8th book in her Vera series.

Seagull

Prologue

The woman could see the whole sweep of the bay despite the dark and the absence of street lights where she stood. Sometimes it felt as if her whole life had been spent on the half-light; in her dreams, she was moon-lit or she floated through the first gleam of dawn. Night was the time when she felt most awake.

I like the opening of this prologue and I’m wondering how it fits into the story that follows.

Chapter One

John watched the door from his wheelchair and wondered who’d be dragged in to speak to them today. An orderly carried through a mug of tea and left it on the floor beside him, though he must have realized it would be impossible for John to reach it from his chair.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice.

30879-friday2b56These are the rules:

  1. Grab a book, any book.
  2. Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
  3. Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
  4. Post it.
  5. Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Page 56:

Joe thought all that made sense. He imagined an elderly Robbie Marshall sitting in the sun on the balcony of a Spanish apartment, using a different name, his long nose even redder.

So, three extracts from The Seagull, and I’m wondering how they all fit together? Maybe the blurb will help …

Blurb:

When prison inmate and former police officer John Brace says he’s willing to give up information about a long-dead wheeler dealer in return for protection for his family, Vera knows that she has to look into his claims.

But opening up this cold case strikes much closer to home than Vera anticipates as her investigation takes her back in time to The Seagull, a once decadent and now derelict nightclub where her deceased father and his friends used to congregate.

As Vera’s past collides dangerously with the present, she will have to confront her unwanted memories and face the possibility that her father was involved in what happened. The truth is about to come out but is Vera ready for what it will reveal?

What do you think? Would you keep reading?

Anything You Do Say by Gillian McAllister

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Anything you do say

Penguin |25 January 2018|358 pages|Paperback|3*

This is a very short post about Anything You Do Say, the second of Gillian McAllister’s books. Walking home alone late one night Joanna is sure the man following her is the man who wouldn’t leave her alone in the bar. She turns to face him and panicking she pushes him away. He falls down the steps leading to the towpath alongside a canal and doesn’t move. What should she do? Should she face the consequences – phone the police and ambulance and wait for them to arrive and  or just leave him there, lying in a puddle and walk away?

Both decisions have consequences and from that point on the book explores what would happen if she revealed or concealed her actions.

At first I found it a bit confusing keeping the two stories separate in my mind, but that soon passed as the chapters are clearly headed Reveal or Conceal.  It’s a dilemma and Joanna is an indecisive character who in both scenarios regrets choosing both reveal and conceal. I really wanted to like this book and although I think it’s well written and the characters, although in the main not very likeable, come across as believable, I found Joanna’s lies and deceit became tedious and the stories dragged on too much for my liking. I think the structure of the book made it seem artificial, more an exercise in morality than a tense thriller or a mystery. 

I prefer her other books that I’ve read –  Everything But the Truth, No Further Questions and The Evidence Against You.  They are all standalone books, so can be read in any order. 

This is on of my TBRs and also one of my 20 Books of Summer books.

A Glimpse of my TBRs

Published on by Margaret21 Comments

This post was inspired by FictionFan’s Stroll Around her TBR:

The definition…

My TBR is made up of books I own, both paper and e-books, but haven’t yet read, no matter when I acquired them, whereas the books I record for Bev’s Mount TBR Reading Challenge are books that I have owned prior to January 1 2019.

The current total…

I don’t have an accurate figure of the total. I have 387 books currently listed on LibraryThing as TBRs, but that’s not counting the many e-books I have unread on my Kindle!

The target…

I like having books waiting to be read, having books to choose from, so I’m happy to have some TBRs, but just not as many as at present. The difficulty is that I’m adding books more quickly than I’m reading them – the numbers are going up rather than down.  Maybe I should go through them and decide whether to keep them – or not, always hard when I’ve bought them – but maybe those free e-books could go ….

The breakdown…

It’s a mix of mainly fiction with some non-fiction. I like to vary my reading so it’s a mix of genres too. My records aren’t detailed enough to break the numbers down into genres.

The oldest book…

There are two books listed on my LibraryThing catalogue that I’ve owned since 4 February 2007 – A Dead Language by Peter Rushforth and Thomas Hardy: The Time-torn Man by Claire Tomalin. I did start to read both of them years ago, but put them aside for a while – and that’s where they both are.

I bought the Rushforth book as I’d loved his first book, Pinkerton’s Sister, but A Dead Language doesn’t have the same appeal, although I can’t bring myself to the point of actually abandoning it. Whereas I really want to read the Hardy biography …

The newest book…

The Good Daughter by Karen Slaughter

Good Daughter

I haven’t read any of Karin Slaughter’s books, but have wondered if I would like them. After reading Jules’ review of her latest novel, The Last Widow on her blog onemoreword  I decided to try one of her standalone books and bought The Good Daughter. 

The review copies…

Currently standing at 18. The oldest review copy is Blood on the Tracks by Martin Edwards which I acquired from NetGalley on 10 April 2018. It’s a collection of short stories subtitled Railway Mysteries. I’ll be reading it soon as I have included it in my 20 Books of Summer list.

Blood on the tracks

The newest review copy, also from NetGalley, is The House by the Loch by Kristy Wark, due to be published 13 June. It’s a family drama set in Scotland on remote Loch Doon.

House by the loch

The 200th book on the list…

According to LibraryThing that is The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a book I thought I’d like to read after reading The Brothers Karamazov years ago. I don’t know when I’ll get round to reading it though as it’s nearly 600 pages of small font – an e-book might be more manageable.

The Idiot Wordsworth Classic

Blurb from the back cover:

Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from an asylum in Switzerland. As he becomes embroiled in the frantic amatory and financial intrigues which centre around a cast of brilliantly realised characters and which ultimately lead to tragedy, he emerges as a unique combination of the Christian ideal of perfection and Dostoevsky’s own views, afflictions and manners. His serene selflessness is contrasted with the worldly qualities of every other character in the novel. Dostoevsky supplies a harsh indictment of the Russian ruling class of his day who have created a world which cannot accommodate the goodness of this idiot.

A Selection of the books I most want to read and can’t understand why I don’t just do it…

In no particular order:

(not counting the books on my 20 Books of Summer list or my NetGalley review books)

 

I’d love to look around your TBRs if you fancy having a go too.

 

My Friday Post: Snowblind by Ragnar Jónasson

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Book Beginnings Button

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

The book I’m featuring this week is Snowblind by Ragnar Jónasson, one of my TBRs.

Snowblind

The red stain was like a scream in the silence.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice.

30879-friday2b56These are the rules:

  1. Grab a book, any book.
  2. Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
  3. Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
  4. Post it.
  5. Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Page 56:

Ari Thor picked up the book he had bought, in spite of the promise he’d made to himself to save it until after dinner. He was eking out his small pleasures to keep the boredom at bay. Only a few pages into the book, he realised that he hadn’t taken anything in.

Blurb:

Siglufjörður: an idyllically quiet fishing village in Northern Iceland, where no one locks their doors – accessible only via a small mountain tunnel.

Ari Thór Arason: a rookie policeman on his first posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavik – with a past that he’s unable to leave behind. When a young woman is found lying half-naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious, and a highly esteemed, elderly writer falls to his death in the local theatre, Ari is dragged straight into the heart of a community where he can trust no one, and secrets and lies are a way of life.

An avalanche and unremitting snowstorms close the mountain pass, and the 24-hour darkness threatens to push Ari over the edge, as curtains begin to twitch, and his investigation becomes increasingly complex, chilling and personal. Past plays tag with the present and the claustrophobic tension mounts, while Ari is thrust ever deeper into his own darkness – blinded by snow, and with a killer on the loose.

~~~

What do you think? Would you keep reading?

 

New Additions

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

May bks 2019

These are my latest additions to my TBR books from Barter Books in Alnwick. From top to bottom:

  • Anything You Do Say by Gillian McAllister – because I’ve loved other books by her. This is a psychological thriller that has two separate storylines following two paths that Joanna’s future might take.
  • Fire from Heaven: a novel of Alexander the Great by Mary Renault – because this book caught my eye in the historical fiction section and I remember enjoying some of her books years ago. This is the first in her Alexandrian Trilogy.
  • The Dark Angel by Elly Griffiths, a Dr Ruth Galloway Mystery – because I like Ruth and enjoy these books, even though they are written in the present tense, which I can find irritating. This one is set in Italy.
  • The Sleeping and the Dead by Ann Cleeves – because I love her books. This is one of her earlier books, first published in 2001. It’s a standalone murder mystery featuring Detective Peter Porteous.
  • Christine Falls by Benjamin Black -because I’ve been on the lookout for this book ever since I read Vengeance, the 5th book in his Quirke Mysteries series. This is the 1st book in the series, a murder mystery set in the 1950s in Dublin where Quirke is a pathologist. Benjamin Black is the pen name of John Banville.

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Dry to The Song of Troy

Published on by Margaret22 Comments

I love doing Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books 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. But for this chain the books are all connected in that they are all books on my TBR shelves.

The Dry

This month the chain begins with The Dry by Jane Harper, crime fiction set in a small country town in Australia, where the Hadler family were brutally murdered. I have had this book on my TBR shelves for quite some time now and I really want to read it as I loved Force of Nature and The Lost Man. I was thinking of linking to one of these books but decided to go for another book, one that I bought on the same day as The Dry. It’s Longbourn by Jo Baker, a story about the Bennet’s servants in a re-imagining of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Another book that is a re-imagining is Rebecca’s Tale by Sally Beauman, a companion novel to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. It is set 20 years after the death of Rebecca and the burning of Manderley. I’m hoping I’ll  love it as much as I loved Rebecca and Hitchcock’s 1940 film of the book. Sally Beauman was a journalist before she became an author. She wrote Rebecca’s Tale after writing an article about the work of Daphne du Maurier in The New Yorker magazine.

My next link is through the author’s first name – Sally – to  another author called Sally,  Sally Gunning and her book, The Widow’s War. It’s historical fiction set in Cape Cod, Massachusetts during the years prior to the War of Independence. After Lyddie Berry’s husband of 20 years dies in a whaling accident she has to fight a ‘war’ for control of her own destiny. Under the laws of the colony widows had the use of only one third of their husbands’ real estate, and did not inherit the ownership.

A different type of war is the subject of Small Wars by Sadie Jones. This is historical fiction set in  Cyprus in the 1950s as the EOKA terrorists are fighting for independence from Britain and union with Greece.

Another book set on an island is The Island by Victoria Hislop.  Alexis Fielding discovers the story of her mother’s family on the island of Spinalonga, a tiny, deserted island off the coast of Crete – Greece’s former leper colony.  Victoria Hislop was also a journalist before she became an author.

As was Colleen McCullough, the author of numerous books including the Masters of Rome series. So, my final link is to one of her books – The Song of Troy in  which she recounts the tale of Helen and Paris, sparking the Trojan War. Colleen McCullough was also an Australian author so it links back to the first book, The Dry by Jane Harper, also an Australian author, who I’m delighted to see was also a journalist before becoming an author!

In addition to all the books being TBRs, four of the authors were journalists before becoming authors and two are Australian authors.

The chain moves through time from the present day back to late classical Antiquity, beginning in Australia and passing through England, America, Cyprus, Crete to Anatolia in modern Turkey.

Next month (June 1, 2019), the chain will begin with the winner of the 2019 Wellcome Prize, Murmur by Will Eaves.