Category: Top Ten Tuesday

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 Books I’m Worried I Might Not Love as Much the Second Time Around (I love re-reading, but there are some books that hit so perfectly and I loved so much that I worry reading them again wouldn’t be the same. Or maybe the books I read when I was younger wouldn’t be favorites anymore. Or maybe some books just don’t age well?)

But as I don’t re-read very often I’m focusing on Books with the Word ‘Death’ in the Titles.

1. Death at the President’s Lodging by Michael Innes – What struck me most about this Inspector Appleby mystery is that it is essentially a ‘locked room’ mystery. Dr Umpleby, the unpopular president of St Anthony’s College (a fictional college similar to an Oxford college) is found in his study, shot through the head.
2. Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie is set on the West bank of the Nile at Thebes in about 2000 BC. She based her characters and plot on some letters from a Ka priest in the 11th Dynasty.
3. Death at Wentwater Court by Carola Dunn, the first book in her Daisy Dalrymple series. It’s a quick and easy read, a mix of Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse, set in 1923 at the Earl of Wentwater’s country mansion, Wentwater Court.
4. Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds, a kind of locked room mystery, only this time the ‘locked room’ is a plane on a flight from Paris to Croydon.
5.  Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong, his first book featuring Chief Inspector Chen. It won the Anthony Award for Best First Crime Novel in 2001.
6. Death Has Deep Roots: a Second World War Mystery by Michael Gilbert. Set in 1950 this is a mix of a courtroom drama, a spy novel and an adventure thriller. 
7. Death in the Tunnel by Miles Burton, a British Library Crime Classic, first published in 1936, about the death of Sir Wilfred Saxonby who was found in a first class compartment of the 5 pm train from London to Stourford.
8.  The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz. Divorce lawyer Richard Pryce was found dead in his home, having been hit on the head by a wine bottle, a 1982 Chateau Lafite worth £3,000, and then stabbed to death with the broken bottle.
9. A Death in the Dales is the 7th book in Frances Brody’s Kate Shackleton series of historical crime fiction books set in 1920s Yorkshire. 
10. Death Under Sail by C P Snow This is a classic mystery, a type of ‘country house’ mystery, but set on a wherry (a sailing boat) on the Norfolk Broads, where Roger Mills, a Harley Street specialist, is taking a group of six friends on a sailing holiday. When they find him at the tiller with a smile on his face and a gunshot through his heart, all six fall under suspicion.

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 Love Freebie (in honour of Valentine’s Day tomorrow). I usually find it a bit difficult with this freebie as I don’t read many romantic novels, but love is not just romance. These ten books all demonstrate some sort of loving relationship. I’ve listed them in alphabetical author order. The links take you either to my post, or if I haven’t written about them either to Amazon or Goodreads (marked *).

The Girl in a Swing* by Richard Adams. A shy young man meets a beautiful woman in the company of a young girl. He finds himself swept off of his feet and married to her, bringing her with him to live in his family home. She is his erotic dream come true; she does everything she can to bind him to her and join him in his comfortable life.

Soon, however, odd things begin to happen. Things in the house are strangely damp with what looks like seawater, bodies appear under the water that aren’t really there. It all winds up to a horrifying conclusion. I read this many years ago, after reading Watership Down, which I loved.

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry – Thomas McNulty is a young Irish immigrant, aged 17, who had left Sligo, starved and destitute, for Canada and then made his way to America where he met John Cole under a hedge in a downpour and they became friends and secretly lovers for life. After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, they, fought in the Indian Wars and then in the Civil War.

Midnight in St Petersburg by Vanora Bennett beginning in 1911 in pre-revolutionary Russia with Inna Feldman travelling by train to St Petersburg to escape the pogroms in Kiev hoping to stay with her distant cousin, Yasha Kagan. She is welcomed into the Leman family where she and Yasha are apprentices in their violin-making workshop. Inna is a talented, albeit shy, violinist and she falls in love with Yasha through their shared love of music.

Oscar and Lucinda* by Peter Carey. Peter Carey’s Booker Prize winning novel imagines Australia’s youth, before its dynamic passions became dangerous habits. It is also a startling and unusual love story. Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling. A country girl of singular ambition, Lucinda moves to Sydney, driven by dreams of self-reliance and the building of an industrial Utopia. Together this unlikely pair create and are created by the spectacle of mid-nineteenth century Australia.

I Love the Bones of You by Christopher Eccleston about his love for his father. This is not the usual celebrity autobiography that is just all about him and his work. It is a really vivid portrait of his relationship with his family and particularly with his father who had dementia at the end of his life. 

The Glass Guardian by Linda Gillard a ghost story and a love story, with a bit of a mystery thrown in too. It’s a ‘supernatural love story‘. When Ruth prepares to put her Aunt’s old house up for sale, she’s astonished to find she’s not the only occupant. Worse, she suspects she might be falling in love again. With a man who died almost a hundred years ago.

The Remains of the Day* by Kazuo Ishiguro – I love the pathos of this novel about Stevens, an English butler, reminiscing about his service to Lord Darlington, looking back on what he regards as England’s golden age and his relationship with Miss Kenton who had been the housekeeper at Darlington Hall. This was the first of Ishiguro’s books I read.

The Four Loves* by C S Lewis. This summarises four kinds of human love–affection, friendship, erotic love, and the love of God. Masterful without being magisterial, this book’s wise, gentle, candid reflections on the virtues and dangers of love draw on sources from Jane Austen to St. Augustine. I read this along with several other books by Lewis many years ago

Atonement by Ian McEwan. As well as being a love story and a war novel this is also a mystery and a reflection on society and writing and writers. It begins on a hot day in the summer of 1935 when Briony, then aged thirteen witnesses an event between her older sister Cecelia and her childhood friend Robbie that changed all three of their lives. Most of all, though, it’s a book about love.

Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky, an intense story of life and death, love and burning passion. It’s about families and their relationships – husbands and wives, young women married to old men,  lovers, mothers, daughters and stepdaughters. It’s set in a small village based on Issy-l’Eveque between the two world wars. The narrator is Silvio looking back on his life and gradually secrets that have long been hidden rise to the surface, disrupting the lives of the small community. The people are insular, concerned only with their own lives, distrusting their neighbours

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 Top Ten Quick Reads/Books to Read When Time is Short (Books under 150 pages.)

The first five are fiction.

The Black Mountain by Kate Mosse 136 pages - based on a real historical event, this is historical fiction set in May 1706 on the northern part of the island of Tenerife, where Ana and her family live in the shadow of a volcano, known locally as the Black Mountain.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway 71 pages – this is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. 

The Guest Cat by by Takashi Hiraide 146 pages – a story of how a cat made itself at home with a couple in their thirties who lived in a small rented house in a quiet part of Tokyo.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett 124 pages, telling the story of Her Majesty, not named, but she had dogs, took her summer holiday at Balmoral and was married to a duke. She came across the travelling library outside the palace and borrowed a book to save the driver/librarian’s embarrassment. 

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton 128 pages – a tragedy, signalled right from the beginning of the book, when the unnamed narrator first saw Ethan Frome and was told he had been disfigured and crippled in a ‘smash up’, twenty four years earlier. Life had not been good to him.

The second five are all nonfiction.

Ink in the Blood by Hilary Mantel 31 pages – a short memoir about how she had surgery to remove an intestinal obstruction that ended up in a marathon operation, followed by intense pain, nightmares and hallucinations. Writing was Hilary Mantel’s lifeline – it was the ink, as she wrote in her diary, that reassured her she was alive.

Blue Tits in My Nest Box by David Gains 76 pages – I read this because we had a new blue tit box in our garden – one with a camera and waited to see whether it would be occupied. I wanted to find out more about their nesting habits. After checking several bird websites, I found this little book, a mine of information.

Painting as a Pastime by Winston S Churchill 96 pages – Churchill was forty when he first started to paint and art became his passion and an ‘astonishing and enriching experience‘. He talks about the fun of painting, the colours and the pleasure he found in not only in painting a picture, but also the pleasure he discovered in a heightened sense of observation, finding objects in  the landscape, he had never noticed before.

A Short Book about Drawing by Andrew Marr 144 pages – this is also a book about being happy and the importance of drawing and making, for a happy life. It’s not an instruction book, but it’s full of insight into what happens when you draw and it’s dotted throughout with personal information.

A Short History of Scotland by Richard Killeen There are 31 short chapters covering the period from Prehistoric Scotland up to the Twentieth Century – all in 69 pages, including coloured illustrations of people and places.

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 New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2023. These are all books I read and reviewed in 2023. I enjoyed all of them, some more than others (marked with an asterisk*).

• Bonnie Garmus - Lessons in Chemistry 
• Weina Dai Randel – The Last Rose of Shanghai 
• Francis Faviell – The Dancing Bear *
• Michele Giuttari – A Death in Tuscany
• Barbara Pym – Excellent Women *

•  M L Stedman – The Light Between the Oceans 
• Corinne Demas –The Road Towards Home *
• Beth Cowan-Erskine – Loch Down Abbey 
• Cat Jarman – The Bone Chests
• H E Bates – Fair Stood the Wind for France

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 Books I Meant to Read in 2023 but Didn’t. I have an enormous pile of books I’d love to read this year.

These are just ten of them, books I was so keen to read when I first got them, but for one reason or another I just never got round to actually reading them. And simply saying that I will read a book this year almost guarantees that I won’t. They’re listed in no particular order, because if I try to prioritise them that would be fatal:

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith – Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno meet on a train. Bruno manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. “Some people are better off dead,” Bruno remarks, “like your wife and my father, for instance.” 

Recalled to Life by Reginald Hill – Set in 1963, Dalziel and Pascoe re-investigate a crime of passion in one of England’s great houses, an open-and-shut case. But thirty years later, when the convicted nanny is freed, then spirited off to America before she can talk, Dalzeil wonders did the wrong aristocrat hang?

How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn – a story of life in a mining community in rural South Wales as Huw Morgan is preparing to leave the valley where he had grown up. He tells of life before the First World War.

Here Be Dragons by Sharon Penman – set in 13th century Wales this is the story of Llewelyn, the Prince of North Wales, and his rise to power and fame and his love for Joanna, the illegitimate daughter of King John.

The Secret of Annexe 3 by Colin Dexter – Much too early on New Year’s Day, a grumpy Inspector Morse is summoned to investigate a murder at the Haworth Hotel. The victim is still wearing the Rastafarian costume that won him first prize at the hotel’s New Year’s Eve party; his female companion and the other guests in the annexe have vanished. It’s a mystery that’s a stretch even for Morse. But with pit-bull fervor he grabs the truth by the throat and shakes loose the bizarre secrets of a cold-blooded crime of passion. . . .

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – on the day of Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary, Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy’s friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn’t true.

 Birthright by Nora Roberts – a novel about an archaeological dig when five-thousand-year-old human bones are found, this has a sense of death and misfortune combined with a mystery about the archaeologist Callie Dunbrook’s past. 

 Earth and Heaven by Sue Gee – In the aftermath of the First World War, a young painter Walter Cox and the wood-engraver Sarah Lewis meet at the Slade, then set up home and a studio together. With their newfound happiness, and the birth of Meredith, then Geoffrey, the grief of war recedes. But children are unpredictable and have their own inner lives: events on a summer afternoon change everything …

 Tangerine by Christine Mangan – Set in Morocco in the 1950s, this is described as a psychological literary thriller and the perfect read for fans of Daphne du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith. The last person Alice Shipley expected to see since arriving in Tangier with her new husband was Lucy Mason. After the horrific accident at Bennington, the two friends – once inseparable roommates – haven’t spoken in over a year. But Lucy is standing there, trying to make things right.

When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Penman – the first book in the Eleanor of Aquitaine trilogy. Historical fiction about Stephen and his cousin, the Empress Maude, and the long fight to win the English throne.