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Top Ten Tuesday: The Ten Most Recent Additions to My Bookshelf

Published on January 21, 2020 by Margaret19 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday 2020

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.

The topic this week is: The Ten Most Recent Additions to My Bookshelf. No wonder I have so many TBRs, they just keep on arriving. These are all e-books, except for the one hardback and two paperback books I received at Christmas and the little hardback Wainwright book I bought from Amazon.

Review copies:

Coming Up For Air by Sarah Leipciger – three extraordinary lives intertwine across oceans and time. Taking inspiration from a remarkable true story, this is a novel about the transcendent power of storytelling and the immeasurable impact of every human life.
The Lost Lights of St Kilda by Elisabeth Gifford – a sweeping, powerful novel set on the Scottish island of St Kilda, following the last community to live there before it was evacuated in 1930.
The Sleepwalker by Joseph Knox – the third book in the DC Aidan Waits series, set in Manchester, a dark thriller that begins as Waits is guarding a serial killer on his deathbed in a hospital.
The Mist by Ragnar Jónasson – the third book in the Hidden Iceland trilogy about DI Hulda Hermannsdóttir, told in reverse chronological order.
The Last Protector (James Marwood and Cat Lovett, Book 4) by Andrew Taylor – set in the late 17th century, under Charles II. Oliver Cromwell’s son, Richard, has abandoned his exile and slipped back into England.

Christmas presents:

Peterloo: the English Uprising by Robert Poole – non-fiction about the ‘Peterloo massacre’ on 18 August 1819 at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, when armed cavalry attacked a peaceful rally of some 50,000 pro-democracy reformers.
Oswald: Return of the King by Edoardo Albert – historical fiction, the second book in his Northumbrian Thrones series, set in the 7th century. Oswald has a rightful claim to the throne, but he is sick of bloodshed, and in his heart he longs to lay down his sword and join the monks of Iona.
The Watch House by Bernie McGill – historical fiction set on Rathlin, a remote Irish island, this is a story of infidelity, secrets and murder in a small Irish island community, inspired by Marconi’s experiments in wireless telegraphy in the late nineteenth century.

From Amazon:

The Eastern Fells: A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells by Alfred Wainwright. This is a beautiful little book, illustrated with his intricate pen and ink sketches of the landscape and the views from the summits as well as detailed maps of the footpaths.
That Affair Next Door by Anna Katharine Green – a mystery first published in 1897, focusing on a murder that occurred in the house next door to the home of the curious Miss Butterworth.

Short Stories on Sunday

Published on January 19, 2020 by Margaret8 Comments

Over several years I’ve been reading my way through Agatha Christie’s books and short stories. I’ve read all her detective/mystery novels and some of her short story collections. In an attempt to read more of the short stories I’ve decided to read some each Sunday, beginning with the stories collected in Miss Marple and Mystery.

This collection contains 55 stories, 20 of them featuring Miss Marple. There is an Short Story Chronology in the Appendix with a table aiming to present all Agatha Christie’s short stories published between 1923 and 1971, listed in order of traced first publication date. Counting how many there are in total is a difficult task – some stories that first appeared in weekly or monthly magazines were later re-worked and became chapters in a larger work, some in Partners in Crime were sub-divided into smaller chapters, 13 were re-worked into the episodic novel, The Big Four, and some were rewritten so substantially that they appear separately in different books!

I’ve read some of these in other short story collections but there are still many I haven’t read.

The Girl in the Train is one I haven’t read before. It was first published in Grand Magazine in February 1924 and was adapted as one of the Agatha Christie Hour drama series for by Thames Television in 1982 as part of their ten-part programme. It’s a very short story that also appears in The Listerdale Mystery collection of short stories.

George Rowland is the heir to his Uncle William’s wealth but is left without a job or a home when William throws him out on his heel. On a whim George Rowland decides to catch a train down to Rowland’s Castle, a village which happens to bear his name. A beautiful girl bursts into his compartment, frantically begging to be hidden. She gives him a package saying it is the key to everything and he is to guard it with his life. Jumping out of the train at the first stop she tells him to follow the little man with a small dark beard getting on the train. His life changes dramatically as he follows her instructions.

It’s a bit of nonsense really, in the same vein as Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence stories. A quick easy read, but entertaining nevertheless and possibly the first of books entitled The Girl …

Reading Challenges for 2020

Published on January 18, 2020January 18, 2020 by Margaret12 Comments

I’m trying to keep things simple this year and only take part in a few reading challenges. I have already joined the Calendar of Crime Challenge 2020 and have now decided to join the 2020 Historical Fiction Reading and also the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2020.

The Historical Fiction Reading Challenge is hosted by Amy at Passages to the Past,

Here are the details of the challenge:

The challenge runs from January 1st to December 31st, 2020.
Each month, a new post dedicated to the HF Challenge will be created.
Everyone can participate! If you don’t have a blog you can post a link to your review if it’s posted on Goodreads, Facebook, or Amazon, or you can add your book title and thoughts in the comment section if you wish.
Add the link(s) of your review(s) including your name and book title to the Mister Linky we’ll be adding to our monthly post (please use the direct URL that will guide us directly to your review)
Any sub-genre of historical fiction is accepted (Historical Romance, Historical Mystery, Historical Fantasy, Young Adult, History/Non-Fiction, etc.)

Also there are the following different reading levels to choose from:

20th Century Reader – 2 books
Victorian Reader – 5 books
Renaissance Reader – 10 books
Medieval – 15 books
Ancient History – 25 books
Prehistoric – 50+ books

I will be aiming for the Ancient History level, because last year I read 23 historical fiction novels, so I think that should be manageable.

The Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2020. is hosted by Bev at My Reader’s Block.

Here are the details:

Books must be owned by you prior to January 1, 2020. No library books. Any reread may count, regardless of how long you’ve owned it prior to 2020, provided you have not counted it for a previous Mount TBR Challenge. Audiobooks and E-books may count if they are yours and they are one of your primary sources of backlogged books. You may count “Did Not Finish” books provided they meet your own standard for such things, you do not plan to ever finish it, and you move it off your mountain [give it away, sell it, etc. OR remove it from your e-resources]

For the full rules please visit Bev’s sign-up post here.

There are a number of different levels to choose from:

Pike’s Peak: Read 12 books from your TBR pile/s
Mount Blanc: Read 24 books from your TBR pile/s
Mt. Vancouver: Read 36 books from your TBR pile/s
Mt. Ararat: Read 48 books from your TBR pile/s
Mt. Kilimanjaro: Read 60 books from your TBR pile/s
El Toro*: Read 75 books from your TBR pile/s (*aka Cerro El Toro in South America)
Mt. Everest: Read 100 books from your TBR pile/s
Mount Olympus (Mars): Read 150+ books from your TBR pile/s

and for now I’m going for Mt Vancouver, which is to read 36 books and hope to move up to the higher levels if I can.

For now, that is all, although I may be tempted by other challenges as well …

My Friday Post: A Killing Kindness by Reginald Hill

Published on January 17, 2020 by Margaret9 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, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

A Killing Kindness by Reginald Hill is one of the books I’m thinking I’ll read next. It’s the 6th Dalziel and Pascoe novel

A killing kindness

… it was green, all green, all over me, choking, the water, then boiling at first, and roaring, and seething, till all settled down, cooling, clearing, and my sight up drifting with the last few bubbles, till through the glassy water I see the sky clearly, and the sun bright as a lemon, and birds with wings wide as a windmill’s sails slowly drifting round it, and over the bank’s rim small dark faces peering, timid as beasts at their watering, nostrils sniffing danger and shy eyes bright and wary, till a current turns me over, and I drift, and am still drifting …

What the hell’s going on here! Stop it! This is sick …

I wasn’t sure what was going on either …

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice.

30879-friday2b56 These are the rules:

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Page 56: it’s becoming clearer now what was going on –

… all over me, choking, the water all boiling at first, and roaring, and seething …. Pascoe shook the medium’s taped words out of his mind and went on with his reading.

There was a degree of lividity down the left side which was unusual for a corpse taken from the water, but could be explained by the fact that the body seemed to have been wedged in the debris by the canal bank rather than rolling free in the current.

Blurb:

When Mary Dinwoodie is found choked in a ditch following a night out with her boyfriend, a mysterious caller phones the local paper with a quotation from Hamlet. The career of the Yorkshire Choker is underway.

If Superintendent Dalziel is unimpressed by the literary phone calls, he is downright angry when Sergeant Wield calls in a clairvoyant.

Linguists, psychiatrists, mediums – it’s all a load of nonsense as far as he is concerned, designed to make a fool of him.

And meanwhile the Choker strikes again – and again…

~~~

Have you read this book? What did you think?

WWW Wednesday: 15 January 2020

Published on January 15, 2020 by Margaret10 Comments

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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?

Currently I’m reading three books:

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, my Classics Club Spin book. It’s one of those books that I think I know the story from watching TV adaptations, but I have never read it. I’ve discovered that I only ‘know’ the beginning of the book up to the part where Oliver is rescued by Mr Brownlow from Fagin’s clutches, only to be snatched back by Nancy. After that the story is totally new to me.

I’m also reading The John Lennon Letters edited by Hunter Davies. It includes a brief biography and using almost three hundred of Lennon’s letters and postcards, to relations, friends, fans, strangers, and lovers follows his life more or less chronologically. It’s a large, heavy hardback book, illustrated with photos and reproductions of the letters etc. This is going to be a long-term read for me.

The third book is one I’ve only just started – I’ve been struck by some of the parallels between Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936 in order to marry Wallis Simpson and the current situation of Prince Harry and Meghan in wanting to step back as senior royals, and I remembered I have The Windsor Story by J Bryan III and Charles V Murphy. It looks remarkably comprehensive and is another book that I think will take me a long time to read.

The last book I finished reading is The Lady of the Ravens by Joanna Hickson, historical fiction about about the early years of Henry’s reign as seen through the eyes of Joan Vaux, a lady in waiting to Elizabeth of York, whose marriage in 1486 to Henry united the Houses of Lancaster and York after the end of the Wars of the Roses. I found this a fascinating book and posted my review a few days ago.

I have several books lined up to read next including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré because over the Christmas period I watched the film starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley, along with Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt and others. I began reading the book years ago and have a bookmark at page 88, but I’ll have to go back to the beginning now.

But I’d also like to start A Killing Kindness, the next Dalziel and Pascoe novel, the 6th one in Reginald Hill’s series. It looks good – about Mary Dinwoodie whose body is found choked in a ditch following a night out with her boyfriend, and a mysterious caller phones the local paper with a quotation from Hamlet.

But knowing how long it could be until I start the next book, it could be something completely different!

Have you read any of these books? Do any of them tempt you?

A Pinch of Snuff by Reginald Hill

Published on January 11, 2020 by Margaret2 Comments

A Pinch of Snuff

A Pinch of Snuff is Reginald Hill’s fifth Dalziel and Pascoe novel, first published in 1978. It was televised in 1994 by Yorkshire Television, two years before the BBC series began. The characters of Dalziel and Pascoe were played by comedians Gareth Hale and Norman Pace, with Christopher Fairbank as Sergeant Edgar Wield. It was not a success and Reginald Hill was said to have been unhappy with the series. Subsequently the Dalziel and Pascoe books were adapted for BBC television from 1996 to 2007 with the actors Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan in the lead roles.

I finished reading A Pinch of Snuff just before Christmas and didn’t have time to review it then, so these are just a few notes of what I thought about it. It is better than the earlier books, almost as good as the later books and I enjoyed it very much. It begins as Jack Shorter, Pascoe’s dentist, tells him that he thinks that in one of the blue movies shown at the Calliope Club, an actress wasn’t acting but that she really was beaten up and that her teeth were actually broken. However, when Pascoe begins to investigate his dentist’s allegations it seems that the dentist’s fears were unfounded as the actress in question assures Pascoe that she was acting and certainly wasn’t hurt. But then the cinema is wrecked and its owner killed. Shorter, meanwhile, is accused of molesting an underage patient and is allegedly responsible for getting her pregnant.

All in all, this is a complicated book involving child abuse, pornography, violence towards women and snuff films. It starts slowly, but as the various twists and turns crop up the pace quickens. The events are shown through Pascoe’s eyes and we see his relationships with Dalziel and Sergeant Wield develop. Elly, Pascoe’s wife, still doesn’t get on with Dalziel, and her feminism comes to the fore in her antagonism against him.

The 6th book in the series is A Killing Kindness and I shall be reading that very soon.

These are the Dalziel and Pascoe books I’ve read so far:

1. A Clubbable Woman (1970)
2. An Advancement of Learning (1971)
3. Ruling Passion (1973)
4. An April Shroud (1975)
8. Exit Lines (1984)
11. Bones and Silence (1990)
14. Pictures of Perfection (1993) – read, no post
17.On Beulah Height (1998)
20. Death’s Jest Book (2002)
21. The Death of Dalziel (2007)