Six Degrees of Separation from Rodham to …

Published on by Margaret35 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.

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The chain begins this month with Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld, a partly fictional account of Hillary Clinton’s life, imagining what would have happened if she hadn’t married Bill Clinton. As I’m not keen on fictionalising a real person’s life, especially when that person is still alive, this book doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t much like ‘what if …’ novels either.

I’d rather read a biography or an autobiography.

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And as it happens I do have Hillary Rodham Clinton’s book, What Happened, in which she reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history. I haven’t read it yet.

But I have read the next book in my chain. It’s another autobiography – Agatha Christie’s, simply called An Autobiography.

As well as being a record of her life as she remembered it and wanted to relate it, it’s also full of her thoughts on life and writing. She wrote quite a lot about her writing methods, writing criticism, hearing your own voice, economy in wording, writing detective stories, adapting plays and writing them herself, and about the joy of creation.

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The one book that satisfied Agatha Christie completely is not one of her detective books but one she wrote under the name of Mary Westmacott – Absent in the Spring. I loved this novel and I was thoroughly absorbed in the story of Joan Scudamore who was stranded in the desert, after visiting her daughter in Baghdad. It is a complex and in-depth character study, with a growing sense of tension. 

Cards on the Table

But of course what she is most famous for are her crime fiction novels. Cards on the Table is one of my favourites. Mr Shaitana is murdered whilst his guests are playing bridge. Two games were set up – one made up of the four people he considered were murderers and the other in a separate room made up of the four detectives or investigators of crime, including Hercule Poirot. Poirot, of course was the only one who worked out who the murderer was.

Agatha Christie was writing her books right up until her eighties when she wrote her last novel, Postern of Fate. It was published in 1973, and it’s rambling and repetitive, with very little in the way of mystery. It’s the fourth of the Tommy and Tuppence Beresford mysteries and it begins with the ageing couple, now retired and living in a new home. Tuppence is bemoaning the fact that they have so many books and there isn’t enough room to shelve them. She reminisces about the books she/Agatha had read as a child. If you haven’t read any of Agatha Christie’s books please don’t start with this one. It’s not one of her best!

Which brings me to the last book in my chain with one of Agatha’s/Tuppence’s favourites – Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, which was also one of my favourites when I read it at school.

On a stormy night off the coast of Scotland, young David Balfour faces his most terrifying test yet. He’s been double-crossed by his wicked uncle, tricked into a sea voyage and sold into slavery. When the dashing Alan Breck Stewart comes aboard, he finds a brave friend at least, and the pair fight back against their treacherous, black-hearted shipmates. But then the ship hits a reef, it’s every man for himself, and David must battle against the raging sea itself!

My chain is not very varied this month! Beginning with a fictional biography I moved on to a couple of real autobiographies which lead me to one of my favourite genres – crime fiction – with three of Agatha Christie’s novels, finishing the chain with one of her favourite childhood books.

Next month (October 3, 2020), we’ll start with The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

My Friday Post: Dead Man’s Footsteps

Published on by Margaret16 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.

I’m currently reading Dead Man’s Footsteps by Peter James.

It begins:

If Ronnie Wilson had known, as he woke up, that in a couple of hours he would be dead, he would have planned his day, somewhat differently.

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.
  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 another part of his brain was telling him that while one plane hitting the Twin Towers was an accident, two was something else.

Dead Man’s Footsteps is the fourth Roy Grace novel, a fast paced police procedural. There’s a woman in hiding, a skeleton discovered in a storm drain, a man believed to have died in the 9/11 disaster, and a body found in the boot of a car submerged in a river in Australia. And there is the continuing story about Sandy, Grace’s wife, who had disappeared 9 years earlier.

Blue Tits in Our Nest Box

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Our garden is visited by many birds and each year we’ve enjoyed watching them on the bird feeders. House martins have nested in the gable ends of the house and given us splendid aerial displays. Pheasants are regular visitors, Other birds have also made nests, some in bird boxes and this year we got a new blue tit box – one with a camera and waited to see whether it would be occupied.

We were lucky, as one blue tit spotted it and she started to occupy it, flying in and out and pecking the edges of the hole. For a while she was on her own. She spent quite a lot of time knocking with her beak on the walls of the box and then a male came flying in and joined her hopping around the box to inspect it. They looked so funny as their feet skidded on the smooth floor of the box, but then they began to bring in bits of plant material, scattering it around, then re-arranging it haphazardly. And then they removed all of it and I thought they’d decided to go elsewhere – but no, they came back and more material appeared and then they took it all out. This went on for a while.

I wondered if this was normal and decided I needed to find out more about their nesting habits. After checking several bird websites, I found this little book – Blue Tits in My Nest Box by David Gains, a mine of information.

And I was relieved to read that this was exactly what the blue tits in his bird box did too. I breathed a sigh of relief and waited to see what would happen next. It’s the female that does most of the nest building And she kept on bringing in more plant material and feathers, tossing it all around, then sitting in the middle of the mass, holding out her wings and shuffling round and round, she made a hollow with her body.

This doesn’t look like the nests you see on TV wildlife programmes, but eventually she was satisfied with it and laid her eggs. We were so excited as one by one five little featherless chicks hatched. Sadly one of them died and we had to remove it from the nest. In the photo below you can see their open mouths as they waved the heads around when the adult birds came in to feed them. The fourth bird was smaller than the others – you can just see its little mouth behind the others. I’m sure it didn’t get as much as the others as they jumped on top of it to get fed!

As they got bigger they began to flatten the nest, jumping up and down, trying out their wings. Eventually the day came when one by one they left the nest until there was just the smallest one left. It kept trying to jump up to the hole and I didn’t think it was big enough to survive outside, but it made it. And we next saw them in the garden on the bird feeders and trees, fluttering their wings and opening their beaks as the parents continued to feed them.

I began writing this post earlier this year when the blue tits were hatching and never finished it. I spent so much time watching what was going on in the nest I got so behind with everything. It was fascinating.


20 Books of Summer

Published on by Margaret16 Comments

At the beginning of the summer I joined Cathy’s 20 Books of Summer Challenge which ran from June 1st until September 1st, 2020.

I revised my original my list on 19 July because after reading six of the books on my original list I began reading The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, a book that was NOT on my original list and I realised that as it has 853 pages there was no way I could read the rest of the books before 1 September.

Although I read 20 books during the period, only 13 of them are books from my list – they are:

  1. The Deep by Alma Katsu 3*
  2. How to Disappear by Gillian McAllister 2*
  3. The Mist by Ragnar Jonasson 4*
  4. Maigret’s Holiday by Georges Simenon 5*
  5. Deadheads by Reginald Hill 5*
  6. Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz 5*
  7. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton 4* – review to follow
  8. The Power-House by John Buchan 5*
  9. How to Kill a Cat by W J Burley 5* – review to follow
  10. Thin Air by Michelle Paver 4* – review to follow
  11. Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert 4*
  12. A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry 5*
  13. Mortmain Hall by Martin Edward 4*

So, I still have 7 books left to read and I hope to read them soon :

  1. The Inheritance by Louisa May Alcott
  2. Bilgewater by Jane Gardam
  3. The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin
  4. The Silence Between Breaths by Cath Staincliffe
  5. Giant’s Breath by Mary Westmacott (Agatha Christie)
  6. A Moment of Silence by Anna Dean
  7. The Dry by Jane Harper

Top Ten Tuesday: Books that Make Me Hungry

Published on by Margaret20 Comments

I’ve chosen books that ether have food in their title, or include food/recipes in their content.

  • The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie – Poirot is invited to spend ‘a good old-fashioned Christmas in the English countryside’ .
  • Chocolat by Joanne Harris – descriptions of delicious food – not just chocolate.
  • Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé by Joanne Harris – a diluted version of Chocolat, but it is too long and drawn out for the story line.
  • Cupcake by Mariah Jones – I haven’t read this one, but I like the cover – even better though if it was a chocolate cupcake.
  • Toast by Nigel Slater – a memoir of his childhood remembered through food.
  • Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen – a modern fairy tale/myth – Claire creates dishes from the plants in her garden.
  • The Woman Who Wanted More by Vicky Zimmerman – about a cookery manual, featuring menus for anything life can throw at ‘the easily dismayed’.
  • The Co-Op’s Got Bananas by Hunter Davies – a memoir of the Forties and Fifties… In among the rationing and the bombsites.
  • The Gourmet by Muriel Barber – tantalising glimpses of food that Pierre Arthens, France’s celebrated food critic recalls.
  • Bella Tuscany by Frances Mayes – the follow up book to Under the Tuscan Sun with more details about the restoration of the villa and its garden, plus recipes. 

Bookshelf Travelling

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Katrina of Pining for the West is currently hosting Bookshelf Travelling in Insane Times originally hosted by Judith at Reader in the Wilderness. This week my ‘bookshelf’ holds some recent additions on my Kindle. I haven’t been to a bookshop since January but I have been acquiring e-books, some presents, some free books and some I’ve bought, mostly when they’ve been on offer at 99p.

These are just some of them:

I’ve read two of these – The Luminaries and Still Life. As there are too many here to write about all of the others today I’ve focused on these:

On the top row:

The Virus in the Age of Madness by Bernard-Henri Levy – I bought this book because I saw him talking about it on a TV programme recently. I think it’s time I read something about the pandemic. It’s just a short book – 128 pages.

Adventures of the Yorkshire Shepherdess by Amanda Owen – I bought this as we’ve been watching Our Yorkshire Farm on Channel 5. It is a documentary series following life on a remote sheep farm in Yorkshire for Clive and Amanda Owen and their nine children. I love it, so I wanted to read Amanda’s books. She’s written two more – The Yorkshire Shepherdess and A Year in the Life of a Yorkshire Shepherdess.

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks – a book I’ve been wondering about reading for ages. I‘ve read some of her books and enjoyed them. This one is a novel set in 1666, when plague suddenly struck the small village of Eyam in Derbyshire.

On the bottom row:

Forensics: the Anatomy of Crime by Val McDermid. I love her Karen Pirie books and after reading Still Life, I saw she’s written this non-fiction book and I thought it looked interesting. She traces the history of forensics from its earliest beginnings to the cutting-edge science of the modern day.

Fludd by Hilary Mantel – another author whose books I love. This is one of her earlier novels, described on Amazon as a dark fable of lost faith and awakening love amidst the moors, set in Fetherhoughton is a drab, dreary town somewhere in a magical, half-real 1950s north England, a preserve of ignorance and superstition.