BooksPlease

I saw the Do I have that Book? challenge on Janette’s blog, Wicked Witch, who saw it on Alli the Book Giraffe. It was originally created way back in August 2018 by Tabby, a booktuber.

I liked the idea and thought I’d have a go too. Here are my answers:

1. Do you have a book with deckled edges?

Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, a three book set published by Nelson Doubleday has deckled edges. A note with the books explained that deckled edges are formed at an early stage as pulp is allowed to flow against rubber deckle straps between the frame and the edges of a paper makers mould.

2. Do you have a book with 3 or more people on the cover?

An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge

This is set in 1950, as a Liverpool repertory theatre company is rehearsing its Christmas production of Peter Pan. The story centres around Stella, a teenager and an aspiring actress who has been taken on as the assistant stage manager.

It’s semi-autobiographical based on Beryl Bainbridge’s own experience as an assistant stage manager in a Liverpool theatre. On the face of it this is a straight forward story of the theatre company but underneath it’s packed with emotion, pathos and drama. And it’s firmly grounded in a grim post-war 1950s England, food rationing still in operation and bombed buildings still in ruins overgrown with weeds. It really is an awfully good book.

3. Do you have a book based on another fictional story?

Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy trilogy.

I loved the first two books, The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy both of which are based on Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, so I was very keen to read The Voyage Home. I wasn’t disappointed but it is slightly different in that this third book is loosely based on the first part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. 

4. Do you have a book with a title 10 letters long?

Blacklands by Belinda Bauer

It’s told mainly from Stephen Lamb’s perspective. Stephen is twelve years old. Nineteen years earlier Billy, Stephen’s uncle then aged eleven had disappeared. It was assumed that he had fallen victim to the notorious serial killer Arnold Avery, but his body had never been found. Stephen is determined to find where Arnold had buried his body and writes to him in prison.

5. Do you have a book with a title that starts and ends with the same letter?

Seven White Gates by Malcolm Saville, the second in his Lone Pine series, first published in 1944, an exciting adventure story. The Lone Pine books are about a group of children who formed a secret society in wartime Shropshire. I particularly like the setting of Seven White Gates, in Shropshire not far from the border with Wales, an area rich in folklore and legend.

6. Do you have a Mass Market Paperback book?

Wycliffe and How to Kill a Cat by W J Burley

Set in the late 1960s in Cornwall, Superintendent Wycliffe, despite being on holiday can’t help getting involved when a young woman is found murdered in her seedy hotel bedroom. She’d been strangled and her face had been savagely smashed in. A thousand pounds was still in a drawer, hidden beneath her clothes, so the motive wasn’t theft.

I wondered about the title as there are no details in it about how to kill a cat!

7. Do you have a book written by an author using a pen name?

Fell Murder by E C R Lorac E C R Lorac was a pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett (1894-1958) who was a prolific writer of crime fiction from the 1930s to the 1950s. It’s the 25th book featuring Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald, set in Lunesdale in Lancashire towards the end of the Second World War. The mystery begins with the discovery of the body of old Robert Garth – found dead–’dead as mutton‘–in the trampled mud of an ancient outhouse. 

8. Do you have a book with a character’s name in the title?

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, an outstanding book! It’s fascinating, but harrowing to read in parts, from all the details of Henrietta’s life, how she was treated for cervical cancer in 1951, when she was just 30, to her death nine months later. Cancer treatment in 1951 with radium was brutal, but what made it worse was that Henrietta was a black woman, living in near-poverty in Baltimore. It is a remarkable and personal record of the Lacks family based on an impressive amount of research using legal documents and medical records, personal journals and interviews with Henrietta’s family and friends, and lawyers, ethicists, scientists and journalists.

9. Do you have a book with 2 maps in it?

Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin. Both the endpapers in my hardback copy of the book are copies of OS maps of the area, showing the route along the A9 in Scotland that Rebus took whilst investing a cold case as a retired police officer.

10. Do you have a book that was turned into a TV show?

The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter, the last book in his Inspector Morse series. Chief Inspector Morse is one of my favourite fictional detectives. I first came across him watching the ITV series Inspector Morse. I enjoyed both the books and the TV adaptations.

11. Do you have a book written by someone who is originally famous for something else? (celebrity/athlete/politician/tv personality…)

The Marches Border Walks with My Father by Rory Stewart. He is a British academic, broadcaster, writer, and former diplomat and politician. He has taught at Harvard University and at Yale University.

But the reason I read his book is because of the subject – walking in the borderlands between England and Scotland, in the place where I live. And it’s not just about walking – he also muses on history, memory and landscape, all topics that interest me immensely.

12. Do you have a book with a clock on the cover?

Timekeepers by Simon Garfield

Timekeepers is a book about our obsession with time and our desire to measure it, control it, sell it, film it, perform it, immortalise it and make it meaningful. It has two simple intentions: to tell some illuminating stories, and to ask whether we have all gone completely nuts.

The story that interested me most was Movie Time, with an account of how the silent film, Safety Last! was made in 1923.

13. Do you have a poetry book?

I have a few. One of my favourites is Robert Frost (The Illustrated Poets series) – a slim little book with a selection of Frost’s verse illustrated by American, English and French painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Frost’s poems are written in deceptively simple language but they convey great depth of meaning. They are compact and powerful. And the illustrations are beautiful.

The beauty of poetry is the way that so much meaning is condensed into such few words.

14. Do you have a book with an award stamp on it?

All that Matters by Sir Chris Hoy, the Winner of the Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Award Autobiography of the Year 2025. Chris Hoy is a former track cyclist and racing driver from Scotland who represented Great Britain at the Olympic and World Championships and Scotland at the Commonwealth Games. Hoy is an 11-time world champion and a six-time Olympic champion. 

In 2023 he was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. Chris shares the next phase of his extraordinary life with exceptional bravery. He looks over the challenges he has faced thus far, and the ways he has taken them on. With his wife Sarra and their young children by his side, he shares how he has used these experiences to find ways to focus on the moments that matter, showing us how to do the same.

I haven’t read it yet.

15. Do you have a book written by an author with the same initials as you?

The Madonna of the Almonds by Marina Fiorato

A love story set in Italy in the 16th century, about a young widow, Simonetta di Saronno, struggling to save her home, who meets the artist Bernadino, a protege of Leonardo da Vinci. Bernardino was so captivated by Simonetta’s beauty that her face is the face of every female Saint, every Magdalene and every Madonna that he painted. Simonetta at first resists Bernardino’s advances but of course eventually falls in love with him, causing scandal in the local community.

16. Do you have a book of short stories?

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher & Other Stories by Hilary Mantel

I enjoyed this collection of stories,  which are brooding, somewhat melancholic, dark, disturbing and full of sharp and penetrating observations – brilliant! The title story is the last one in the book and is the only new story, the others having first appeared in other publications. Waiting for the plumber to arrive, a woman lets a man into her flat, only to find out he has a gun and wants to shoot Margaret Thatcher from the flat window, as she leaves the hospital behind the flats. 

17. Do you have a book that is between 500-510 pages long?

The Potter’s Hand by A N Wilson 505 pages.

Beginning in 1768 this roughly follows the fortunes of the Wedgwood family until 1805, 10 years after the death of Josiah Wedgwood, an English potter and the founder of the Wedgwood company. It’s the story of a remarkable family, their lives, loves, work, illnesses, depressions, addictions and deaths. I found it fascinating throughout, whether it was set in America during the fight for independence, or in England in Wedgwood’s factories, or in Josiah’s grand new house Etruria Hall, or travelling through England on the new canals.

18. Do you have a book that was turned into a movie?

Atonement by Ian McEwan, one of my favourite novels was made into a 2007 romantic war film starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, and Vanessa Redgrave. The film is mostly faithful to the book, with minor alterations, except for the ending. I prefer the book’s ending. I think the book is superior overall to the film. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001. As well as being a love story and a war novel it’s also a mystery and a reflection on society and writing and writers. 

19. Do you have a graphic novel?

No, although I have looked at them in the library – and decided not to borrow one.

20. Do you have a book written by 2 or more authors?

The Floating Admiral by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and ten other crime writers from the Detection Club, with a prologue by G K Chesterton, first published in 1931. In a literary game of consequences, each author wrote one chapter, leaving G.K. Chesterton to write a typically paradoxical prologue and Anthony Berkeley to tie up all the loose ends. In addition, each of the authors provided their own solution in a sealed envelope, all of which appeared at the end of the book, with Agatha Christie’s ingenious conclusion acknowledged at the time to be ‘enough to make the book worth buying on its own’. I haven’t read it yet.

I have 19 books out of the 20 prompts. It took me several days (on and off) to compile this post, but I enjoyed doing it immensely, reminding me of books I’ve read years ago and some more recently – and some I haven’t read yet!

How many of these 20 book categories do you have on your bookshelves?

If you fancy having a go at the challenge, here’s a list of the 20 prompts

1. Do you have a book with deckled edges?
2. DO you have a book with 3 or more people on the cover?
3. Do you have a book based on another fictional story?
4. Do you have a book with a title 10 letters long?
5. Do you have a book with a title that starts and ends with the same letter?
6. Do you have a Mass Market Paperback book?
7. Do you have a book written by an author using a pen name?
8. Do you have a book with a character’s name in the title?
9. Do you have a book with 2 maps in it?
10. Do you have a book that was turned into a TV show?
11. Do you have a book written by someone who is originally famous for something else? (celebrity/athlete/politician/tv personality…)
12. Do you have a book with a clock on the cover?
13. Do you have a poetry book?
14. Do you have a book with an award stamp on it?
15. Do you have a book written by an author with the same initials as you?
16. Do you have a book of short stories?
17. Do you have a book that is between 500-510 pages long?
18. Do you have a book that was turned into a movie?
19. Do you have a graphic novel?
20. Do you have a book written by 2 or more authors?