WWW Wednesday: 18 September 2024

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

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 Regeneration by Pat Barker, the first in her Regeneration Trilogy, set during the First World War.

Description on Goodreads:

Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, and army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers’s job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients’ minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front. Pat Barker’s Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men.‘One of the strongest and most interesting novelists of her generation’ Guardian Regeneration is the first novel in Pat Barker’s essential trilogy about the First World War. Discover the whole Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road

The last book I read was Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. This is the only book left I didn’t finish reading for my 20 Books of Summer Challenge 2024. It had been on my TBR list for a few years, so I was determined to read it. The reason I haven’t read it before is that I have a paperback copy and I’ve got too used to reading on my Kindle with the ability to enlarge the text.

I had high hopes that this psychological thriller was going to be good as so many people had enthused over it. Could it live up to all the hype? Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno meet on a train. Bruno manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. “Some people are better off dead,” Bruno remarks, “like your wife and my father, for instance.” It began very slowly and I’m sorry to say that I began to get bored, in fact I almost abandoned it. But I persevered and it did improve towards the end. But it didn’t live up to all the hype for me – maybe the wrong book at the wrong time. I’ll be writing more about this book.

What will I read next? At the moment I’m not at all sure. It could be Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it by Michael Rosen.

Description on Amazon:

In our lives, terrible things may happen. Michael Rosen has grieved the loss of a child, lived with debilitating chronic illness, and faced death itself when seriously unwell in hospital. In spite of this he has survived, and has even learned to find joy in life in the aftermath of tragedy.

In Getting Better, he shares his story and the lessons he has learned along the way. Exploring the roles that trauma and grief have played in his own life, Michael investigates the road to recovery, asking how we can find it within ourselves to live well again after – or even during – the darkest times of our lives. Moving and insightful, Getting Better is an essential companion for anyone who has loved and lost, or struggled and survived.

Or it could be something else.

Top 5 Tuesday: Top 5 Books with Bookish Villains

Published on by Margaret5 Comments


This week’s Top 5 Tuesday is top 5 bookish villains!!

Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. Those dastardly villains that are so bad they’re good is our topic for today. Who are your top 5 bad guys (or girls or folx) that make you want to scream?

There are so many villains to choose from, these are just 5 of them:

Villanelle in Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings. She is a young woman who is psychologically invulnerable – a ruthless and successful killer, experiencing neither pain nor horror and totally unaffected by the pain she inflicts on others or the murders she carries out. I read the book after I watched the TV series Killing Eve and this is one of those rare occasions when I preferred the adaptation to the book. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the book, because I did – just not as much as the TV version. 

Drood in Drood by Dan Simmons. It’s a novel imagining that authors Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins join forces to hunt the individual Dickens believes to be responsible for the Staplehurst Rail Disaster in 1865: a spectral figure known only as Drood. He is portrayed in this book as horrific, a half-Egyptian fiend, who, according to Inspector Field is a serial killer.

I think it’s too long, too full of facts described in great length, and too full of hallucinatory nightmares, involving in particular a black beetle scarab.The plus points for Drood are that it does contain some vivid descriptions bringing the period to life for me – the slums of London, the train accident at Staplehurst and the fantastical “Undertown” with its miles of tunnels, catacombs, caverns and sewers are good examples. It also made me keen to read more books by Dickens and Collins and biographies of them. 

Lizzie Borden in See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt. 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. See What I Have Done is a work of fiction based on true events. Lizzie’s account of what happened takes you right inside her mind. She is a disturbed and unstable character to say the least and I had the most unsettling feeling as I read that I was right inside her crazy, demented mind.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Pefume: the Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind. On the trail of an elusive but exquisite smell he tracks it down to a young girl and kills her to possess  her scent for himself.  This puts him in a state of ecstatic happiness. Quite simply this is a horror story, one that made me not want to read it and yet also want to read it to the bitter end. It’s a tale of obsession, the atmosphere Süskind evokes is tremendous, and the detail it contains adds to the realism. Maybe Grenouille is a modern Dracula.

Sword in Sword by Bogdan Teodorescu. A serial killer, nicknamed Sword, is on the loose, in this complex novel, a political thriller focusing on the political and social dimensions of the racial conflict between the Romanians and the Roma or ‘gypsies’. The killer is hunting down his victims from the minority Roma community. The book opens with a scene in Bucharest’s Obor Market as The Fly, a con man, playing his card and shell games, is killed by a person who suddenly appeared, brandishing a sword which he then plunged into his throat. This is followed by more killings – all of them of gypsies. I throughly enjoyed Sword, especially the setting and the unique (for me at least) focus on the political and cultural scene in Romania – and the murder mystery.

The Grave Tattoo: Book Beginnings & The Friday 56

Published on by Margaret6 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 featuring The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid, a book I’m currently reading.

The Prelude

All landscapes hold their own secrets.

Chapter One:

Jane Gresham stared at what she had written, then with an impatient stroke of her pen crossed it through so firmly the paper tore and split in the wake of a nib. Bloody Jake, she thought angrily.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

‘The black tattoos. They’re the sort that sailors used to get in the South Seas back in the old days when sailing ships put in at the islands to take on stores and trade with the natives,’ Jake explained.

Description

The award-winning and Number One bestselling Val McDermid crafts an electrifying psychological suspense thriller that mixes history, heritage and heinous crimes.

A 200 year-old-secret is now a matter of life and death.And it could be worth a fortune.

It’s summer in the Lake District and heavy rain over the fells has uncovered a bizarrely tattooed body. Could it be linked to the old rumour that Fletcher Christian, mutinous First Mate on the Bounty, had secretly returned to England?

Scholar Jane Gresham wants to find out. She believes that the Lakeland poet William Wordsworth, a friend of Christian’s, may have sheltered the fugitive and turned his tale into an epic poem – which has since disappeared.

But as she follows each lead, death is hard on her heels. The centuries-old mystery is putting lives at risk. And it isn’t just the truth that is waiting to be discovered, but a bounty worth millions …

My favourite genres are crime fiction and historical fiction. So, the combination of the two really appeals to me. What do you think, does this book appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Hemlock Bay by Martin Edwards

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Head of Zeus — an Aries Book| 12 September 2024 | 372 pages|e-book | Review copy| 4*

Description from Amazon UK:

Basil Palmer has decided to murder a man called Louis Carson. There’s only one he doesn’t know anything about his intended victim, not who he is or where he lives.

Basil learns that Carson owns Hemlock Bay, a resort for the wealthy and privileged. Knowing that his plan will only work if he covers his tracks, he invents a false identity and, posing as Dr Seamus Doyle, journeys to the coast plotting murder along the way.

Meanwhile Rachel Savernake buys an intriguing painting of a place called Hemlock Bay, one that she cannot get out of her head. Macabre and strange, the image shows a shape that seems to represent a dead body lying on the beach.

Convinced that there is something sinister lurking amongst the glamour of the bay, Rachel books a cottage there – where she meets a mysterious doctor called Seamus Doyle…

My thoughts:

This is the 5th Rachel Savernack book, written in the style of the golden age of crime. I loved the first two books in the series but somehow managed to miss the next two. I had high expectations for Hemlock Bay and certainly wasn’t disappointed as I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Like the other two Rachel Savernack books this is also a complex mystery, with several strands and plenty of twists and misdirections. It begins with a Prologue. It is July 1930 as an unnamed couple in a basement room in Temple, London hear a newspaper vendor announce the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They are discussing death, ending as the man lifts a revolver and squeezes the trigger. Then in January 1931 Basil Palmer makes a New Year resolution – to murder a man he has never met, Louis Carson. But he doesn’t know where he lives, nor what he looks like. This sets in motion a sequence of events, involving numerous people, all with their own agendas, all gathered together in Hemlock Bay.

Hemlock Bay is a seaside resort on the north-west coast of Lancashire. It was originally just ‘a small bay with a splendid beach, flanked by a stretch of sheer cliffs on one side and a tiny secluded cove on the other side of the steep headland‘ and on ‘a treacherous outcrop of rock was an old lighthouse‘. J M W Turner had visited the Bay on a sketching trip and said it was ‘as pretty as Paradise‘. In the past, ships were often wrecked on the shore and contraband was smuggled through a maze of underground passages. But after the end of the First World War it had been developed into a small and select seaside resort. Pleasure Grounds had been built on Hemlock Head, with provision for dancing and all sorts of amusements, known as Paradise, adopting Turner’s description. Jackson, a speculator, and his wife had bought the resort and then opened a new venture, the Hemlock Sun and Air Garden, a nudist club.

Rachel Savernack is intrigued by a surrealist painting of Hemlock Bay depicting a body stretched out below the lighthouse. She and Jacob Flint go to Hemlock Bay, where among others, she meets Virginia Penrhos, the woman who painted the picture, a reclusive doctor named Seamus Doyle, a man named Louis Carson and Basil Palmer under an assumed name. It’s a well plotted novel with interesting characters in a beautiful setting.

Martin Edwards’ Author’s Note at the end of the book is interesting, explaining that although Hemlock Bay is a fictional place it is based on Heysham in Lancashire, overlooking Morecombe Bay (where I enjoyed several holidays as a child). The information in the Heritage Centre in Heysham helped him with the description of Paradise. And the ‘Cluefinder’ at the back of the book listing hints and clues is most enlightening. But I resisted the temptation to read it before I read the book. It is a baffling and most enjoyable murder mystery.

My thanks to NetGalley and Head of Zeus — Aries Fiction, the publishers for the ARC.

Spell the Month in Books – September 2024

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

The optional theme this month, which is Back to School. I’ve chosen books featuring students, teachers and governesses. I found it very difficult – especially with three Es to find.

The links in the titles of each book go to Amazon UK and the descriptions are from my own posts or Amazon UK, Goodreads, or LibraryThing.

S is for South Riding by Winifred Holtby, a wonderful book, portraying life in the 1930s, this is an intensely detailed story, involving many sub-plots as the lives of all the characters unfold. One of the main characters is Sarah Burton, the new headmistress of Kiplington High School for Girls, a fiercely passionate and dedicated teacher.

E is for Engleby by Sebastian Faulks (one of my TBRs).

Welcome to Mike Engleby’s world. Deep in the hallowed halls of an esteemed English university, Mike is one of the only working-class boys, amongst the privileged masses. He’s also different, starkly so, but able to observe it all. But observation soon tips into obsession when his fixation, fellow student Jennifer, goes missing. What has Mike Engleby overlooked?

A cult classic and an exemplar of the campus novel, Engleby is a beguiling portrait of an outsider, told in an unforgettable voice.


P is for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark is set in 1936 in Edinburgh in the Marcia Blaine school, where schoolteacher Miss Brodie has groomed a group of young girls, known as the Brodie Set, to be the ‘creme de la creme‘. Marcia Blaine school is a traditional school where Miss Brodie’s ideas and methods of teaching are viewed with dislike and distrust. The Head Teacher is looking for ways to discredit and get rid of her. I enjoyed both the book and the film with Maggie Smith in the title role. The story is told in flashbacks from 1930 –1939 and quite early on in the book we are told who ‘betrayed’ Miss Brodie.

T is for The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

This is the story of two children and their governess. She has been employed by their uncle who wants nothing to do with them. Their previous governess had died under mysterious circumstances (was it in childbirth?).  The older child, Miles, was away at school and soon after the new governess arrives Miles returns home, expelled from school for some terrible unexplained offence.

E is for Educated by Tara Westover, a memoir, which I haven’t read.

Tara Westover grew up preparing for the end of the world. She was never put in school, never taken to the doctor. She did not even have a birth certificate until she was nine years old.

At sixteen, to escape her father’s radicalism and a violent older brother, Tara left home. What followed was a struggle for self-invention, a journey that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it.

M is for Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey. Miss Pym had been a French teacher at a girls’ High School until she inherited some money, left teaching and wrote a best-selling psychology book. She was invited to Leys Physical Training College to give a lecture on psychology. by her old school friend, Henrietta Hodge, the college Principal. She stayed there for a few days, that extended into two weeks as she got to know and like the students and the staff. But then there was a’nasty accident‘.

B is for Bunny by Mona Awad

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

E is for Emma by Jane Austen. I read this book many years ago, so I haven’t reviewed it. It’s another book featuring a governess. The book begins as Anna Taylor, who had been Emma’s governess for sixteen years leaves Hartfield when she marries Mr Weston. They had become friends, and even like sisters and Emma misses her. Nothing, however, delights Emma more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protegee Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected.

R is for The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean. Alexander Seaton is a schoolteacher in Banff. It’s set in 17th century Scotland, mainly in the town of Banff, where on a stormy night Patrick Davidson, the local apothecary’s assistant collapses in the street. The next morning he is found dead in the school house of Alexander Seaton, a failed minister, now a schoolteacher.

The next link up will be on October 5, 2024 when the theme will be: Your Favorite Genre

Six Degrees of Separation from  After Story by Larissa Behrendt to The Butterfly Room by Lucinda Riley

Published on by Margaret9 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 starts  After Story by Larissa Behrendt. This is the description on Amazon UK:

When Indigenous lawyer Jasmine decides to take her mother, Della, on a tour of England’s most revered literary sites, Jasmine hopes it will bring them closer together and help them reconcile the past. Twenty-five years earlier the disappearance of Jasmine’s older sister devastated their tight-knit community. This tragedy returns to haunt Jasmine and Della when another child mysteriously goes missing on Hampstead Heath. As Jasmine immerses herself in the world of her literary idols – including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf – Della is inspired to rediscover the wisdom of her own culture and storytelling. But sometimes the stories that are not told can become too great to bear. Ambitious and engrossing, After Story celebrates the extraordinary power of words and the quiet spaces between. We can be ready to listen, but are we ready to hear?

My first link is using the word Story, in the title, and it’s also a book about storytelling – The Story Keeper, set on the Isle of Skye in 1857, by Anna Mazzola. It stresses the importance of folk tales – stories that have been told to make sense of the world and reflect people’s strengths, flaws, hopes and fears. 

My second link is The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton, a story moving between time periods from 2011, back to the 1960s and also to the 1940s. It begins in 1961 in Suffolk when sixteen-year old Laurel is shocked when she sees her mother stabbing a stranger who had come to their farm. 

In my third link another sixteen year old girl, Nouf ash-Shrawi, disappears from her home in Jeddah, in The Night of the Mi’raj by Zoë Ferraris, just before her arranged marriage. Her body is eventually found in a desert wadi. It appears that her death was an accident and that she died by drowning in the wadi after a sudden storm.

My fourth link is Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday about a project to introduce salmon fishing in the waters of the Wadi Aleyn in the heart of the mountains of Heraz, in Yemen.

My fifth link takes the chain from the mountains of Heraz to the Appalachian Mountains in Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver in which a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature: the monarch butterflies have not migrated south for the winter that year.

My final link is to The Butterfly Room by Lucinda Riley. The story revolves around Posy Montague and her family home, Admiral House in the Suffolk countryside. Her father encouraged her to draw plants and showed her how to catch butterflies. As a child Posy thought The Butterfly Room in the Folly in the grounds of Admiral House  looked like a fairy-tale castle with its turret made of yellow sandy brick. But the Folly was not the wonderful place she imagined – and there is a dark secret hidden behind its locked door.

The books in my chain are all fiction including historical fiction, mysteries and crime fiction. The chain travels through Australia, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the USA,

Next month (October 5, 2024), we’ll start with Colm Tóibín’s Long Island.