Category: Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday: First Edition Agatha Christie Book Covers

Published on by Margaret13 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog. The topic this week is a Book Cover Freebie.

How it works:

There’s a new topic every Tuesday. You create your own top ten (or 2, 5, 20, etc.) list on that topic or one of your own if you wish and then link back to That Artsy Reader Girl so that others know where to find more information. If a weekly topic is listed as a “freebie”, you are invited to come up with your own topic. Sometimes she will give the freebie topic a theme, such as “love”, a season, or an upcoming holiday. That just means that you can come up with any topic you want that fits under that umbrella.

So today my top ten are twelve –

Twelve First Edition Agatha Christie book covers.

I’ve read all of Agatha Christie’s crime fiction novels and the links are to my posts – although the books I read were not first editions!

Top Ten Tuesday: Series I’m Reading

Published on by Margaret25 Comments

  • Vera Stanhope by Ann Cleeves – I’ve not read books 2 and 3. The latest one, the 9th was published this month – The Darkest Evening.
  • Maeve Kerrigan by Jane Casey – I’ve read 7, with 2 novellas and 2 more books to read.
  • Inspector Rebus by Ian Rankin – I’ve read 22. Book 23 A Song for the Dark Times is out on 1 October.
  • Dalziel and Pascoe by Reginald Hill – 24 books. I started by reading them out of order and am now filling in the gaps. So far I have read 13.
  • Lacey Flint by Sharon Bolton – I’ve read all 4 books and there is a novella, Here Be Dragons, which I haven’t read yet.
  • DCI Banks by Peter Robinson – another series I began reading out of order and am now filling in the gaps. There are 26 books and I’ve read 11 of them
  • Inspector Maigret by Georges Simenon – there are 75 and I’ve read 11 of them.
  • Commissaire Adamsberg by Fred Vargas – 9 books and I’ve read 5 of them.
  • Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear – 15 books and I’ve read just 3 of them.
  • The Greek Detective by Anne Zouroudi – 9 books and I’ve read 3 of them.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books that Make Me Hungry

Published on by Margaret20 Comments

I’ve chosen books that ether have food in their title, or include food/recipes in their content.

  • The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie – Poirot is invited to spend ‘a good old-fashioned Christmas in the English countryside’ .
  • Chocolat by Joanne Harris – descriptions of delicious food – not just chocolate.
  • Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé by Joanne Harris – a diluted version of Chocolat, but it is too long and drawn out for the story line.
  • Cupcake by Mariah Jones – I haven’t read this one, but I like the cover – even better though if it was a chocolate cupcake.
  • Toast by Nigel Slater – a memoir of his childhood remembered through food.
  • Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen – a modern fairy tale/myth – Claire creates dishes from the plants in her garden.
  • The Woman Who Wanted More by Vicky Zimmerman – about a cookery manual, featuring menus for anything life can throw at ‘the easily dismayed’.
  • The Co-Op’s Got Bananas by Hunter Davies – a memoir of the Forties and Fifties… In among the rationing and the bombsites.
  • The Gourmet by Muriel Barber – tantalising glimpses of food that Pierre Arthens, France’s celebrated food critic recalls.
  • Bella Tuscany by Frances Mayes – the follow up book to Under the Tuscan Sun with more details about the restoration of the villa and its garden, plus recipes. 

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Should Be Made into Movies

Published on by Margaret23 Comments

Books That Should Be Made into Movies

The Year Without Summer: 1816 by Guinevere Glasfurd – the story of six people whose lives were affected by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia in 1815. A disaster movie.

The Lost Man by Jane Harper. A murder mystery set in the Queensland outback, a huge and isolated territory, red earth stretching for hundreds of miles, with its unbearable heat, dust and, at times, the threat of flood. A body is found lying at the the base of the headstone of a stockman’s grave – a headstone standing alone, a metre high, facing west, towards the desert, in a land of mirages. A spectacular setting!

The Animals at Lockwood Manor by Jane Healey – this would make an good alternative World War Two movie with a strange story about taxidermy collection moved from London to a country manor house. It struck me as I was reading it that it would make an excellent film or TV drama as one after another, some of the animals go missing or are mysteriously moved from their positions in the long gallery.

The Deep by Alma Katsu – a story of the Titanic in 1912 as it sets sail on its ill-fated voyage and its sister ship the Britannic in 1916, converted to a hospital as it picks up soldiers injured in the battlefields of World War One. I think this would make an eerie, creepy film full of atmosphere of terror and disaster.

The Plague Charmer by Karen Maitland, a fascinating medieval tale full of atmosphere and superstition. It’s set in Porlock Weir in 1361 where a village is isolated by the plague when the Black Death spreads across England. It’s a tale of folklore, black magic, superstition, violence, torture, murder, and an apocalyptic cult – and also of love. There’s a colourful cast of characters from Will, a ‘fake’ dwarf, Sara, a packhorse man’s wife and her family, to Matilda, a religious zealot. It would make a terrific movie.

The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray – A dystopian thriller set in a world which has spun to a halt, bringing civilisation to the brink of collapse. Chaos followed, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and gales swept the earth’s surface.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley – a steampunk novel set in Victorian times, both in London and Japan, with colourful characters including clockwork inventions, in particular Katsu, the clockwork octopus. I’d love to see this as a film.

See What I have Done by Sarah Schmidt – a re-imagining of the unsolved American true crime case of the Lizzie Borden murders, this would make a horror film. So terrifying I don’t know that I bear to watch it though.

The Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor – about the Great Fire of London in 1666, complete with a murder mystery. This would make a spectacular movie as the fire roared through the 17th century streets of Charles II’s London.

Another historical crime fiction series of books I’d like to see as either a TV series or a film is C J Sansom’s Shardlake novels set in the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century. There are seven books, beginning with Dissolution set in 1537 at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Colours in the Titles

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog. This week’s topic is

Books With Colours in the Titles.

These are all books I really enjoyed reading.

  • Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte like Jane Eyre, Agnes is a governess and this is the story of her experiences working for two families in Victorian England.
  • The Black Friar – the second book in the Damian Seeker series, historical crime fiction set in 1655 during the Interregnum under Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector. Damian Seeker is the Captain of Cromwell’s Guard.
  • Blue Heaven by C J Box – set in North Idaho this a story about two children, Annie and William who decide to go fishing without telling their mother, Monica, and witness a murder in the woods. One of the killers sees them and they run for their lives.
  • The Crimson Rooms by Katharine McMahon – set in London in 1924, Evelyn Gifford is one of the few pioneer female lawyers. It’s early days for women to be accepted as lawyers and this novel clearly shows the prejudice these women had to overcome
  • Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L Sayers – a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery in which he investigates the death of a landscape painter and fisherman who was found dead in a burn near Newton Stewart.
  • Greenmantle by John Buchan – this is basically an adventure and spy story with a highly improbable plot. It’s pure escapism.
  • Silver Lies by Ann Parker  – historical crime fiction set in 1879/80 in the silver-mining town of Leadville, Colarado in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. Joe Rose, a silver assayer, is found dead in Tiger Alley propped up behind the Silver Queen saloon.
  • Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, based on the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967 – 70 this focuses on the struggle between the north and the south, the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa people.
  • A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson investigate the murder of Enoch J Drebber, an American found dead in the front room of an empty house at 3 Lauriston Gardens, off the Brixton Road,  with the word “RACHE” scrawled in blood on the wall beside the body. The TV version A Study in Pink in the Sherlock series, which although very different in some respects is surprisingly faithful to the book in others.
  • Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende – Aurora is the narrator and this is the story of her family. After giving details of her birth, in 1880 in San Francisco in the Chinese quarter, she goes back to 1862 beginning her story with details about her grandparents.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’ve Read But Not Reviewed

Published on by Margaret22 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog. This week’s topic is a freebie and I decided to write about – Books I’ve Read But Not Reviewed.

These are all books I read before I began blogging in 2007. I’ve linked them to their pages on the Fantastic Fiction website.

  1. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood – Did Grace kill her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper/lover Nancy Montgomery? I couldn’t decide all the way through the book. I’ve enjoyed all of her books that I’ve read so far – this is one of my favourites.
  2. Arthur and George by Julian Barnes – this is based on the true story of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, a solicitor from Birmingham. I’ve since read a few more of his books.
  3. The Conjuror’s Bird by Martin Davies about an extinct bird from Capt Cook’s second voyage, described on Davies’ website as a ‘novel of two narratives – one of the present day and one of the late 18th Century. As the two stories intertwine, the novel unfolds layer after layer of mystery and suspense.’
  4. The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill – the first book in the Simon Serrailler series. I’ve read seven books in the series – and then decided I’d have enough of them and haven’t read the later books.
  5. The Apothecary’s House by Adrian Mathews – set in Amsterdam about the history of the piece of looted Nazi art, a painting with a disturbing wartime provenance. Archivist, Ruth Braams at the Rijks Museum, enters a series of increasingly lethal adventures as she investigates its secret symbolism.
  6. Dissolution by C J Sansom – the first in his Tudor murder mystery series featuring Matthew Shardlake. This is set in 1537 – Shardlake investigates the death of a Commissioner during the dissolution of the monasteries. I’ve read all of his subsequent Shardlake books.
  7. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields – the story of Daisy Goodwill, from her birth on a kitchen floor in Manitoba, Canada, to her death in a Florida nursing home nearly ninety years later.
  8. A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve – at an inn in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, seven former schoolmates gather for a wedding. It’s an astonishing weekend of revelation and recrimination, forgiveness and redemption. At one time I loved Anita Shreve’s but went off the more recent ones.
  9. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron – The discovery of a forgotten book leads to a hunt for an elusive author who may or may not still be alive.
  10. Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear – this is the first in the Maisie Dobbs series. In 1929 Maisie set herself up as a private investigator, having started as a maid to the London aristocracy, studied her way to Cambridge and served as a nurse in the Great War. I’ve read a few more of the series since I read this one.