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Today is the start of Cathy at 746 Books‘ 20 Books of Summer. I previously listed the books I thought I’d read, but I’m already making a change and substituting Blue Moon by Lee Childs for An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris.

So, these are the 20 books that I’m hoping to read this summer:

1. The Railway Children by E Nesbit
2. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.
3. Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome
4. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.
5. Sing, Jess, Sing by Tricia Coxon
6. An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
7. The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge
8. Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
9. The Killing Kind by Jane Casey
10. The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jónasson
11. True Crime Story by Joseph Knox
12. Just Like the Other Girls by Claire Douglas
13. The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles
14. Coming Up for Air by Sarah Leipciger
15. The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles ** – as Rosemarykay pointed out in the comments I’ve duplicated this one, so I’m changing it to Heresy by S J Parris
16. Loch Down Abbey by Beth Cowan-Erskine
17. A Corruption of Blood by Ambrose Parry
18. The Rose Code by Kate Quinn
19. Katheryn Howard, The Tainted Queen by Alison Weir
20. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

WWW Wednesday is run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

I was reading Jane Casey’s latest book, The Killing Kind until I realised that I was running out of time to read Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, which is my Classics Club Spin book to be read by 31 May. So I switched to Little Dorrit. So far I’ve only read 25% and it’s not a book I can read quickly, but I am enjoying it. The main characters are Amy Dorrit known as Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam, newly returned from China where he had lived for the last 20 years.

It begins with a scene in Marseilles between two prisoners with the murderer Rigaud telling his prison cellmate John Baptist Cavalletto how he killed his wife, just prior to being released from prison. Arthur Clennam is also in Marseilles, detained with other travellers in quarantine.

I’ve recently finished Prophecy, historical fiction set in 1583, the second in S J Parris’ Giordano Bruno series. I’ve not read any of her books before, but I’m certainly going to read more. It’s the 25th year of Elizabeth I’s reign and the Catholics are plotting to remove her from the throne of England in favour of Mary Queen of Scots. I’ll write more about it in a later post.

What to read next? I don’t know …

I’d like to read the first book in the series – Heresy, in which Bruno is on the run from the Roman Inquisition on charges of heresy for his belief that the Earth orbits the sun and that the universe is infinite. This alone could have got him burned at the stake, but he was also a student of occult philosophies and magic.

I’d also like to get back to reading The Killing Kind, so I think I’ll probably read that next. It’s a standalone novel about barrister Ingrid Lewis who is being stalked by a former client, John Webster.

But it could be something completely different – there are so many books I want to read …

Last weekend I planned posts for the week ahead. I managed to stick to the plan, but I did find it a bit stressful. So, this week I’m taking it as it comes. I may do a Top Ten Tuesday post and a review post of The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville, but that is by no means a definite plan. I’ll be busy next week in the garden, now that the grass is growing along with everything else!

And I may pluck up courage and visit Barter Books – that will be exciting!

Do you plan your posts, I’m wondering? Do you find it helps or hinders?

It’s time again for 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.

Shuggie Bain is by Douglas Stuart and it won the Booker Prize in 2020. I haven’t read it.

This is a story of a young boy growing up in poverty in a dysfunctional family in the 1980s. Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, is an alcoholic, and his father, Shug, is a taxi driver who despises his wife’s addiction to ‘the drink’, cheats on her whenever the opportunity arises, and ultimately abandons her to a low-income housing development called Pithead, a depressing colliery where residents survive on government handouts. It’s Douglas Stuart’s first novel.

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My first link is to another Booker Prize winning book, The Gathering by Anne Enright, the winner in 2007. It’s a dark and disturbing novel also about a dysfunctional family. The narrator is Veronica Hegarty and it is through her eyes that the Hegarty family story is told as they gather at her brother’s wake in Dublin. Liam, an alcoholic, had committed suicide by putting rocks into his pockets and walking into the sea at Brighton. 

My second link is from a fictional character who put rocks in his pockets to drown himself to a real person who committed suicide in the same way -Virginia Woolf. In his biography of her, Quentin Bell described how she made her way to the river bank, slipped a large stone into her coat pocket and drowned herself.

My third link is from a suicide to a death that seemed at first to be a suicide but then turned out to be murder, in Gallows Court by Martin Edwards, set in 1930s London. There’s tension and suspicion about who is telling the truth, and who is not who they appear to be. You just cannot believe anything as it’s full of illusions and tricks to baffle and mislead.

Fourth, there’s another apparent suicide in The Serpent Pool, a Lake District Mystery, by Martin Edwards. Bethany Friend drowned in the Serpent Pool, a lonely, isolated place below the Serpent Tower, a folly high on a ridge. DCI Hannah Scarlet, in charge of the Cumbria’s Cold Case Team, investigates her death with the help of historian, Daniel Kind.

Fifth, from the Serpent Tower my chain moves on to the Eiffel Tower in Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claude Izner. It combines crime fiction and historical fiction, as Eugénie Patinot takes her nephews and niece to the newly-opened Eiffel Tower in 1889. They sign the visitors’ book, and then Eugénie collapses and dies, apparently from a bee-sting.

And the final link is to bees in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Lives of Bees, (I’ve had this book for 6 years and it’s been hidden in my Kindle ever since – unread!). It’s a coming of age tale set in 1960s South Carolina’. It tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. This book also links back to Shuggie Bain as both are their authors’ debut novels.

My chain began in Glasgow, moved to Dublin, various places in England and then Paris before ending up in South Carolina. The links include Booker Prize winners, dysfunctional families, suicide, murder and bees.

Next month’s chain (May 1, 2021) will begin with Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary, a book I’ve never come across before.

Wishing you all a happy and healthy 2021!

It’s the final week of Novellas in November and the focus is on classic literature.

Animal Farm by George Orwell, first published in 1945, is an allegorical novella, of the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. It tells the story of a farm where the animals rebel against the farmer, Mr Jones, and throw him off the land. They hope to create a society where they are all equal, free and happy. Ultimately, the farm ends up in a state that is as bad, if not worse than it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon. It begins as the old boar Major tells the animals about his dream of overthrowing the human race when the produce of their labour would then be their own and he incites them to rebel. In the story that follows the Major is based on Marx, Farmer Jones on the Tsar, the pigs Napoleon and Snowball are based on Stalin and Trotsky respectively. Their revolution began by declaring that all animals are equal and ended with the added phrase but some animals are more equal than others.

This is one of those classics that I knew the story roughly, but had not read the book, until this month. I was surprised, although I shouldn’t have been, at the violence of the deaths in it and the pathos of Boxer’s story. Boxer, a cart horse is described as an enormous beast. He is hardworking, but naive and ignorant, struggling to learn the alphabet, representing the Russian working class who helped oust the Tsar. He is shown as the farm’s most dedicated and loyal worker – convinced that ‘Napoleon is always right‘, but eventually he is betrayed by him.

It is a deceptively easy read that can be read on two levels either as a simple fairy tale style story – initially Animal Farm had a subtitle, A Fairy Story – or as a satire against Stalin. It is thought provoking and moving.

I’ve read several short classics since I began writing this blog. These are some of my favourites:

Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon by Jane Austen. Lady Susan is a finished novella, whereas The Watsons and Sanditon are two unfinished fragments. I loved these stories. Told in a series of letters, Lady Susan is the  story of an unscrupulous widow who plans to force her daughter into a marriage against her wishes. Lady Susan is an attractive and entertaining and totally wicked character, who nevertheless almost manages to fool people for some of the time at least. She is also trying to captivate her sister-in-law’s brother, whilst still holding on to the affections of a previous lover.

The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan, a fast moving action-story, beginning with an international conspiracy, involving anarchists, financiers and German spies. Richard Hannay, having found Scudder, murdered in his London flat, fears for his life and goes on the run, chased by villains in a series of exciting episodes, culminating in the discovery of the location of the ‘thirty-nine steps’. Hannay is a remarkable character, resourceful, and a master of disguise. As well as fleeing for his life he is searching for Scudder’s notebook, which contains clues to the international conspiracy.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote, a quick read and very entertaining. The narrator is not named, although Holly Golightly calls him ‘Fred’ after her brother. He’s a writer and at the beginning of the book he is reminiscing about Holly with Joe Bell, who ran a bar around the corner on Lexington Avenue. They hadn’t seen or heard from Holly  for over two years. She used to live in the apartment below Fred’s in a brownstone in the East Seventies in New York. Her past is almost as unknown as her present whereabouts. She’s a free spirit, charming and carefree, but craves attention.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. Even though Ethan Frome is a tragedy there is light to contrast the darkness, and there is love and hope set against repression and misery. It’s a book where I hoped the ending would be a happy one, although I knew it couldn’t be. Trapped in an unhappy marriage, Ethan’s life had changed when his father died and he had had to give up his studies to work on the farm. His wife Zeena had always been ill and needing help in the house, which was why her cousin Mattie came to live with them. At first it worked out quite well, but Ethan couldn’t shrug off a sense of dread.

It’s time for another Classics Club Spin You create a post that lists twenty books of your choice that remain “to be read” on your Classics Club list. This is your Spin List. You have to read one of these twenty books by the end of the spin period. On Sunday 22 November, the Classics Club will post a number from 1 through 20. I’ve just made it as the result hasn’t been posted yet! The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that numb er on your Spin List by 30th January, 2021.

I have just 7 books left on my list, so I’ve repeated the list twice (minus the 7th book for second repeat).

1. The Riddle of the Third Mile by Colin Dexter
2. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
3. Parade’s End by Ford Maddox Ford
4. The Big Sleep by Raymond Challoner
5. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
6. Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope
7. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
8. The Riddle of the Third Mile by Colin Dexter
9. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
10. Parade’s End by Ford Maddox Ford
11. The Big Sleep by Raymond Challoner
12. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
13. Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope
14. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
15. The Riddle of the Third Mile by Colin Dexter
16. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
17. Parade’s End by Ford Maddox Ford
18. The Big Sleep by Raymond Challoner
19. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
20. Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollop