Category: Weekly Events

Musing Mondays – Currently Reading

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Monday Musings is hosted by Should Be Reading.

This week’s question is:

What are you currently reading? Would you recommend it to others? Is it part of a series (if so, which one)? What are you thinking about it? What book(s) would you compare it to, if any?

Currently I’m reading A Dark Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine. I think it’s the first one Ruth Rendell wrote under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. I’m still in the opening chapters and working out the relationships between the characters. It’s a psychological crime novel about a family with secrets. The blurb reads:

Brilliantly plotted. Vine is not afraid to walk down the mean streets of the mind and can build up an almost tangile atmosphere of menace and unease. (Daily Telegraph)

It’s not part of a series, although the Vine books are all psychological crime novels and from what I’ve read so far I would certainly recommend it if you like that sort of book.

I’m also reading Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, featuring Hercule Poirot. I haven’t read this before, although I’ve seen the film with Peter Ustinov as Poirot and the TV version starring David Suchet, so as I’m reading it I’m remembering what happens and can visualise the setting in Egypt on the Nile alongside the Pyramids. I like the way Christie sets up so many possible suspects and then reveals how each one couldn’t be the murderer. I think I remember who did it, and how – but I could be wrong. As I like Agatha Christie I’d recommend any of her books, and this one is a classic.

I have a third book on the go, although at present it’s lagging behind as I’m enjoying the other two books so much. It’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett, historical fiction set in Tudor England (Henry VIII) with Thomas More’s family. That’s not to say that I’m not enjoying this book, but it’s quite slow to get going – or rather I’m slow at reading it, because it is quite detailed and not a lot happens at first.

It covers the same period as Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, when Henry VIII wants a divorce from Katherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn, but there is little comparison between these two books apart from that. I suppose I’d compare it to Philippa Gregory’s books. And if you like detailed and well-researched historical fiction, then it is for you.

Disappointment: Booking Through Thursday

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

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Today’s question from Deb is:

Name a book or author that you truly wanted to love but left you disappointed. (And, of course, explain why.)

One book that came to mind when I read this question is Haweswater by Sarah Hall. I read it in 2006 before I wrote about books on my blog so my notes on it are brief. It’s a novel about what happened when the Haweswater dam was constructed and the valley of Mardale in Cumbria was flooded. I read it because I was interested in the area and on the cover it said that it had won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2003, so I was expecting it to be good.  I think I’m obviously in the minority here because I thought that it was “Disappointing, verbose, overwritten and detached – characters not described with much empathy.”

Teaser Tuesday

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your ‘teaser’ from €¦ that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

After feasting on Ian Rankin’s Rebus books, I’ve gone back to reading Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett.  After reading Wolf Hall I’m in the mood for more about Thomas More, and this time the spotlight is on his family and in particular his adopted daughter Meg and her involvement with John Clement, the former family tutor and later President of the Royal College of Physicians and Hans Holbein, the German portrait painter.

Here is Hans Holbein’s reaction on meeting Meg:

She stopped a bit breathless, and looked provocatively at him. Hans Holbein had never seen a woman looking provocative in this completely unflirtatious way, any more than he’d ever come across a woman who had read the Imitation of Christ. She was challenging his mind instead of his body. But Erasmus had told him about More’s family school. This must be what happened to women when you taught them Latin and Greek and the skills of argument. (page 97)

Musing Mondays

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

This week’s musing from MizB asks€¦

What do you think of books that receive a lot of hype? (think of the ‘Twilight’ saga, or ‘Harry Potter’, or ‘The Da Vinci Code’). Do you read them? Why, or why not?

I suppose I’m a bit contrary, because I tend to shy away from over-hyped books. I like to make up my own mind about the books I read and often don’t read reviews if they’re about books I already intend to read – such as A Thousand Splendid Suns by by Khaled Hosseini.  Books like the Twilight series have absolutely no appeal for me in any case, but I do like other fantasy books and read the first Harry Potter book soon after it came out and all the ones that followed, although I was happy to wait for the paperback versions.

I don’t know if I’d have read The Da Vinci Code when people were either raving about it or reviling it, but as I’d found it before that, I’d read it without being affected by any of the hype that later surrounded it. I found it entertaining and  interesting, but I think I’d have been disappointed by it if I’d read it expecting to find it really controversial – it is just fiction after all.

Books like The Thirteenth Tale were hyped up too and I thought that book was disappointing, similarly I wasn’t overfond of  The Time-Traveller’s Wife. Another book people have written loads about either loving or criticising it is Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. I was intrigued enough to borrow this from the library when I came across it and was glad I did. It’s a book of many parts – some good, some not so good.

Currently there are a few that I’m avoiding reading such as The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie – the titles alone are enough to put me off, never mind the hype. But if I find them in the library in a few years time I may have a look at them.

So, in the main I avoid hyped books, but I can be tempted to read them sometimes.

Sunday Salon – Books I Haven’t Read

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

I’ve seen others have been writing a sort of meme “confessing up ‘ to the books they haven’t read, so I thought I would too. These are the books that maybe I “should have read” by now but haven’t yet got round to. I don’t actually believe there is any “should” about it, but there seems to be some idea that to be “well read” you have to have read from a “canon of literature”.

I haven’t read:

  • The epic poem Beowulf, and reading about the film doesn’t count (I haven’t seen the film either)
  • Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen has passed me by as though it was never written. Apparently Elizabeth I loved it.
  • Gulliver’s Travels, although I think I “know” the story of his time in Lilliput and Brobdingnan from watching a cartoon version once.
  • Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, although I read extracts when I was taking an Open University course.
  • The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith – it’s one of those books I’ve been meaning to read for years.
  • Anything by Samuel Richardson, although he is considered one of the authors of the first novel in English, but I have read Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, amd Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, other contenders for the title.
  • There are several of Charles Dickens’s books I haven’t read, such as The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby and Barnaby Rudge although I have read some of his books – Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations immediately spring to mind – there many be others.
  • The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, although I have read The Moonstone.
  • The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas – this is on my tbr list.
  • Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome – apparently a classic satire.
  • The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith – a classic British comedy.
  • Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas – one of my school friends (and that’s aeons ago) was forever extolling its praises and I still haven’t read it,
  • Ulysses by James Joyce – need I say anymore?
  • The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. But I did watch both of the TV series of the books.
  • A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell – I did try the first book once.
  • Anything by Salman Rushdie.
  • Ditto Terry Pratchett
  • White Teeth by Zadie Smith, although I have read On Beauty.

This list is getting far too long and depressing in the amount of books I haven’t read and I’ve hardly touched the surface of the 20th century, never mind the 21st. Looking at this list of English Novelists on wikipedia is even more depressing (or exhilarating depending on how you view things) because of so many authors I haven’t tried that I’m stopping now. And there are so many more world wide authors as well!