Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Numbers in the Titles

Published on by Margaret15 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 Numbers in the Titles.

I did a top ten post in October 2019 on Book Titles with Numbers in Them, using the numbers 1 – 10, so for this week’s topic I decided to use different numbers. These are all books I’ve read.

The numbers are 0, 4.50, 11, 12.30, 13, 17, 39, 70, 100 and 1,000.

Towards Zero by Agatha Christie – an intricately plotted murder mystery featuring Superintendent Battle, in which a group of lawyers discuss a recent case at the Old Bailey. One of them puts forward the idea that murder is not the beginning of a detective story, but the end, that murder is the culmination of causes and events that bring together certain people, converging towards a certain place and time, towards the Zero Hour – ‘towards zero’. A thoroughly puzzling murder mystery.

4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie, another murder mystery, this time featuring Miss Marple. It’s an intriguing puzzle about a murder on a train, because you know there has been a murder, and that the victim was a woman but her identity is not known, until much later in the book. You also know that the murderer is a man and there are plenty of male suspects to consider. 

Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade. In December 1926 Agatha Christie disappeared from her home, Styles, in Berkshire. She was found eleven days later in a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire apparently suffering from amnesia. Jared Cade delves into the mystery of her disappearance and reveals how those eleven days and the events that led up to her disappearance influenced the rest of her life.

The 12.30 from Croydon by Freeman Wills Croft begins with a murder but the identity of the murderer is known before he even thought of committing the crime. Set in the early 1930s when the country is suffering the effects of the ‘slump’, unlike the 4.50 from Paddington, the 12.30 from Croydon is not a train, but a plane. Charles Swinburne is on the edge of bankruptcy, and he is unable to raise the money to keep his business going, so he sets about murdering his uncle, Andrew Crowther, in order to inherit his fortune.

Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer. Moving at a fast pace this book follows the events during the thirteen hours from 05:36 when Rachel, a young American girl is running for her life up the steep slope of Lion’s Head in Capetown.  DI Benny Griessel is mentoring two inexperienced detectives who are investigating these crimes. With a strong sense of location it reflects the racial tension in the ‘new South Africa’ with its mix of white, coloured and black South Africans.It’s tense, taut and utterly enthralling. 

The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth Century England by Adrian Tinniswood is set in a period of political and social upheaval, revolution, war, plague, famine and fire. The book starts with the death of Sir Francis Verney at Messina in 1615 and moves through the seventeenth century to the death of Sir Ralph Verney at Claydon House in 1696. The Verney family history is told through from the family archives and tens of thousands of their letters and placing it within the national context.

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’. 

When the Lights went out: Britain in the Seventies by Andy Beckett, a journalist, a very detailed book, using original material such as diaries, letters, personal memoirs as well as books written about the period. I particularly liked the personal, face-to-face interviews with some of the key figures such as Ted Heath,  and Beckett’s assessments of politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in 1975 when she was a contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party. He described the crises Britain faced then – the economic crises, the floods, food shortages, terrorism, and the destruction of the environment. So, what has changed?

100 Days on Holy Island: a Writer’s Exile by Peter Mortimer, a playwright and a poet. He went to Holy Island with the intention of seeing how he coped with living there for one hundred days and writing about it. His time on Holy Island was from January to April 2001, when foot and mouth disease swept through the UK, and although it never got to Holy Island it was affected by the closure of the countryside. The islanders were hit by the threat to the tourist trade. It was freezing cold, blasted by snow storms and afflicted by power cuts. 

A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry, a sequel to Days Without End this continues the story of Thomas McNulty and John Cole, and Winona, the young Indian girl they had adopted. It’s set in the 1870s, some years after the end of the Civil War in Tennessee, about seven miles from a little town called Paris. The town was still full of rough Union soldiers and vagabonds on every little byway. Dark skin and black hair were enough to get you beaten up – and it wasn’t a crime to beat an Indian. After Winona was brutally attacked she set out for revenge. And in so doing she began to remember more about her early life and about her mother, a strong Lakota woman, full of courage and pride.

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: The Library of the Dead by T L Huchu

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

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. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

This week I’m featuring The Library of the Dead by T L Huchu, the first book in the Edinburgh Nights series. It’s fantasy, set in a future or alternative Edinburgh, with a wealth of dark secrets in its underground. Teenager Ropa, has dropped out of school to become a ghost talker and when a child goes missing in Edinburgh’s darkest streets, Ropa investigates his disappearance.

I’m really not supposed to be doing this, but a girl’s gotta get paid. So, here we go.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice. *Grab a book, any book. *Turn to Page 56 or 56% on your  ereader . If you have to improvise, that is okay. *Find a snippet, short and sweet, but no spoilers!

These 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.

Pages 55-56:

‘Please find Oliver quickly. You should see what they’ve done to his friend Mark. The two boys were together when they disappeared. Only one came back.’

‘Okay, I’ll poke my nose around. Sniff the wind. Try to figure out what’s going on,’ I say.

About the Author:

T. L. Huchu is a writer whose short-fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Interzone, AfroSF and elsewhere. He is the winner of a Nommo Award for African SF/F, and has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize and the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. Between projects, he translates fiction from Shona into English and the reverse.

Novellas in November 2021

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

I’m glad to see that Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of BookishBeck are once again co-hosting Novellas in November as a month-long challenge with four weekly prompts. Each week they will take it in turns to host a “buddy read” of a featured book they hope we will join in reading.

They suggest 150–200 pages as the upper limit for a novella, and post-1980 as a definition of “contemporary.”

1–7 November: Contemporary fiction (Cathy)

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson – including a giveaway of a signed copy!

8–14 November: Short nonfiction (Rebecca)

The Story of My Life by Helen Keller (free to download here from Project Gutenberg. Note: only the first 85 pages constitute her memoir; the rest is letters and supplementary material.)

15–21 November: Literature in translation (Cathy)

Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima

22–28 November: Short classics (Rebecca)

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (free to download here from Project Gutenberg)

~~~

I enjoyed taking part last year so I’m looking forward to this year’s event. I read Ethan Frome in 2014 and loved it, so I think I’ll re-read it. Many years ago (I can’t remember when) I read a biography of Helen Keller, or it may even have been her autobiography, so I’ll have a look at that too. I also have several novellas on my TBR shelves to choose from.

20 Books of Summer 2021

Published on by Margaret13 Comments

At the beginning of the summer I joined Cathy’s 20 Books of Summer Challenge which ended on September 1st, 2021.

I haven’t been reading as many books as usual this summer and I read 19 books in total. And just 13 of them were the books I’d originally chosen. I’ve reviewed 10 of them – linked to my blog posts:

  1. The Railway Children by E Nesbit
  2. A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz
  3. An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
  4. The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge
  5. The Killing Kind by Jane Casey
  6. The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles
  7. Coming Up for Air by Sarah Leipciger
  8. Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch
  9. The Yorkshire Shepherdess by Amanda Owen
  10. The Rose Code by Kate Quinn
  11. Enigma by Robert Harris
  12. Katheryn Howard, The Tainted Queen by Alison Weir
  13. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

So, I still have 7 books of the 20 left to read. I’m currently reading A Corruption of Blood and I hope to read the rest before the end of this year:

  1. Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome
  2. Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
  3. The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jónasson
  4. True Crime Story by Joseph Knox
  5. Just Like the Other Girls by Claire Douglas
  6. Loch Down Abbey by Beth Cowan-Erskine
  7. A Corruption of Blood by Ambrose Parry

Six Degrees of Separation from Second Place to Sons and Lovers

Published on by Margaret26 Comments

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.

This month the chain begins with Second Place by Rachel Cusk, one of the books longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021. I’ve read a couple of books by Rachel Cusk, Arlington Park which I loved and The Bradshaw Variations, which I enjoyed but not as good, in my opinion, as Arlington Park. So I was interested to see what Second Place was like and have just finished reading it .

Blurb: ‘A  woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. Over the course of one hot summer, his provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally between our internal and external worlds. With its examination of the possibility that art can both save and destroy us, Second Place is deeply affirming of the human soul, while grappling with its darkest demons.’

My preliminary comments – this book was inspired by a real set of circumstances. In her Acknowledgement at the end of the book Cusk refers to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir of the time D H Lawrence stayed with her in Taos, New Mexico. She acknowledges that her version of that event is intended as a tribute to her spirit. I’ll write more about Second Place in a later post.

I didn’t find it easy to come up with a chain from Second Place. I started twice, but each time the chain just fizzled out quite quickly. One began with Mabel Luhan’s memoir, Lorenzo in Taos, which is written loosely in the form of letters to and from D. H. Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence, and Robinson Jeffers, the celebrated poet who had been a guest of Mabel’s in Taos, with references to Dorothy Brett and Spud Johnson among others. The second began with A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson, which is also on the longlist for the Booker Prize 2021.

So, I decided to make it very simple!

First link – The Secret River by Kate Grenville – historical fiction following the life of William Thornhill from his childhood in the slums of London to Australia. He was a Thames waterman transported for stealing timber; his wife and child went with him and they made a new life for themselves. It’s about their struggle for survival as William is eventually pardoned and becomes a waterman on the Hawkesbury River and then a settler with his own land and servants.

Second Link – See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt – a novel based on true events. On the 4 August 1892 Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, were brutally murdered in their home at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts and Andrew’s daughter, Lizzie, was charged with the murders. She was tried and was acquitted in June 1893 and speculation about the murders and whether Lizzie was guilty or not continues to the present day.

Third Link – The Serpent Pool by Martin Edwards – a Lake District murder mystery featuring DCI Hannah Scarlet, in charge of the Cumbria’s Cold Case Team, her partner Marc Amos, a rare book dealer and Daniel Kind, a historian and the son of Hannah’s former boss, Ben Kind. It begins with the death of George Saffell, one of Marc’s customers, stabbed and then burnt to death amidst his collection of rare and valuable books.

Fourth Link – The Shining by Stephen King – this tells the story of Jack Torrance and his family as they move into the Overlook Hotel in the Colorada Rockies. The Overlook is closed for the winter and Jack, a recovering alcoholic is the caretaker. Just what impels him towards murder is horrifyingly revealed as the winter weather closes in on the hotel and they are cut off from the rest of the world.

Fifth Link – Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie is Miss Marple’s last case, published posthumously in 1976, although Agatha Christie had written it during the Second World War. Miss Marple investigates a murder that had happened 18 years ago.

Sixth Link – Sons and Lovers by D H Lawrence – a powerful, emotional novel depicting the struggle, strife, and passion of relationships and their intensity, and possessiveness. Throughout the book Lawrence’s vivid descriptions and observation of the English countryside are so beautiful that I couldn’t stop marvelling at his writing.

My chain is made up of books all with titles beginning with the letter ‘S’. The final link, Sons and Lovers makes the chain into a circle as it is also linked to Second Place, which inspired Cusk’s fictionalised version of D H Lawrence’s relationship with Mabel Dodge Luhan – called ‘L’ and ‘M’ in her book.

Next month (October 2, 2021), the chain begins with a (frightening) short story, The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: This Poison Will Remain by Fred Vargas

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

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. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

This week’s extracts are from This Poison Will Remain by Fred Vargas. This is the 9th in the Commissaire Adamsberg series. When three elderly men are poisoned by spider venom, everyone assumes that the deaths are tragic accidents. But at police headquarters in Paris, Inspector Adamsberg begins to suspect that the case is far more complex than first appears.

Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, sitting on a rock at the quayside, watched the Grimsey fishermen return with their daily catch, as they moored their boats and hauled up their nests. Here, on this tiny island off the coast of Iceland, people called him simply ‘Berg’.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice. *Grab a book, any book. *Turn to Page 56 or 56% on your  ereader . If you have to improvise, that is okay. *Find a snippet, short and sweet, but no spoilers!

These 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:

And that very day, a local newspaper reported that a woman, Jeanne Beaujeu, who had just returned from three weeks’ holiday and heard about the deaths, had gone to hospital in Nimes, asking to have her own wound, now healing, to be examined. She stated that she had been bitten by a spider on 8 May, but since the bite had not spread beyond a slight irritation, she had merely taken the medicine prescribed by her doctor. She was forty-five.

Adamsberg stood up and went to gaze at the lime tree outside his window. So it wasn’t just old people.

I’ve read 5 of Fred Vargas’ books. They’re quirky and original and I like Adamsberg, an expert at untangling mysteries, a thinker, who doesn’t like to express his feelings, but mulls things over. I bought this book a couple of years ago and fully intended to read it at that time – but it got buried in my Kindle!