Classics Club Spin

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

It’s time for another Classics Club Spin.

Before next Sunday, 21July 2024 create a post that lists twenty books of your choice that remain “to be read” on your Classics Club list. On that day the Classics Club will post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List by 22nd September, 2024. March, 2024.

Here’s my list:

  1. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
  2. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
  3. The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin
  4. The Stars Look Down by A J Cronin
  5. Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
  6. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
  7. The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
  8. The Birds and other short stories by Daphne du Maurier
  9. I’ll Never be Young Again by Daphne du Maurier
  10. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
  11. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
  12. The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
  13. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
  14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  15. Daisy Miller by Henry James
  16. Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
  17. How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn
  18. Friends and Heroes by Olivia Manning
  19. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
  20. Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault

I hope it’s one of the shorter books! Which one/s would you recommend?

Spell the Month in Books July 2024

Published on by Margaret2 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 is Stars/Sky. All these book covers include the sky in different weather conditions, and one also has stars.

J is for The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths, crime fiction

Forensics expert Ruth Galloway is called in to investigate when builders, demolishing a large old house in Norwich, uncover the skeleton of a child – minus the skull – beneath a doorway. Is it some ritual sacrifice of just plain straightforward murder?

I like the mix of archaeology, mystery and crime fiction in Elly Griffiths’s books. This one has a double dose, with mythology and Catholicism running through the narrative as well as the police procedures.  Ruth is an interesting character, not your usual detective, she’s overweight, self-reliant but also feisty and tough. She has to be with everything that’s thrown at her and as her investigations lead her into great danger. 

U is for Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes

In this book the author describes how she bought and renovated an abandoned villa. It’s full of the pleasures of living in Tuscany – the sun, the food, the wine and the local people. It makes me want to do the same! It’s nothing like the film they made of it – the book is much better. Bella Tuscany is the follow up book with more details about the restoration of the villa and its garden, plus recipes.

I used this book in June’s Spell the Month in Books, but I’m using it again because it’s perfect for the theme of Sky/Stars this month!

L is for The Light Between Oceans by M L Stedman

This is the story of Tom, a lighthouse keeper on an isolated island, Janus Rock, and his wife Isabel. Janus Rock )a fictional island) is nearly half a day’s journey from the coast of Australia, where the Indian Ocean washes into the Great Southern Ocean. When a boat washes up on the shore of the island it holds a dead man – and a crying baby. Tom and his wife have a devastating decision to make.

Y is for The Yorkshire Vet by Peter

I’ve watched the TV series and loved it. This book is one of four books by Peter Wright, telling his life story, charting his working relationship with the famous ‘James Herriot’, from work experience with him as a lad, to taking over his practice in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales.

Packed full of laugh-out loud moments, heartbreaking stories and transporting tales of his love for the animals and people of this breathtaking part of the country. Covering his bucolic childhood growing up on a farm right through to the heady days of his successful Channel 5 TV series, Peter’s warm nature and professional attitude shine through every page.

The next link up will be on August 3, 2024 when the optional theme will be Water.

Top5Tuesday: Books set in a Big City 

Published on by Margaret9 Comments


Welcome to this week’s Top 5 Tuesday post. Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for July to September, see Meeghan’s post here.

This week’s theme is books that are set in a big city, think crowds and tall buildings.

The Last Rose of Shanghai by Weina Dai Randell – historical fiction set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, this is a World War Two romance, the story of Aiyi Shao, a young heiress and the owner of a glamorous Shanghai nightclub and Ernest Reismann, a penniless Jewish refugee who had fled from Germany. I loved the beginning of this book but the rest of the book was not so good – too much ‘telling’ and I’d have liked less focus on the romance, which to me was barely believable.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote book is a quick read and very entertaining. The narrator is not named, although Holly Golightly calls him ‘Fred’ after her brother. He’s a writer and at the beginning of the book he is reminiscing about Holly with Joe Bell, who ran a bar around the corner on Lexington Avenue. They hadn’t seen or heard from Holly for over two years. She used to live in the apartment below Fred’s in a brownstone in the East Seventies in New York. Her past is almost as unknown as her present whereabouts.

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, set in Victorian London, has a cast of wonderful characters and numerous subplots. The setting is superb, beginning with the opening chapter revealing a darkly atmospheric scene on the River Thames, a modern scene for its first readers, with a macabre story of a boatman, Gaffer Hexham and his daughter, Lizzie, searching the Thames for human corpses. Dickens highlights social injustices, the class system, the importance of money, property, greed and materialism and also highlights family relationships – in particular that of fathers and daughters and the position of women. He also concentrates on instances of violence, through drownings and physical assaults.

he Dancing Bear by Francis Faviell – a moving memoir of the Occupation. Set in Berlin it covers the years from autumn 1946 to autumn 1949 and is mainly about her friendship with the Altmann family. Frances is horrified by the conditions she found. There were deaths from hunger and cold as the winter approached and queues for bread, milk, cigarettes, cinemas, buses and trams. I was fascinated by it all – the people, their situations, and their morale and attitudes as well as the condition of Berlin in the aftermath of World War Two. The realities of living under occupation are clearly shown, as well as the will to survive despite all the devastation and deprivation.

The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles. historical fiction, based on the true Second World War story of the librarians at the American Library in Paris. It was established in 1920 by the American Library Association with books and periodicals donated by American libraries to US soldiers serving their allies in World War I. Since then it has developed into the largest English language lending library in Europe. I liked the details about the Library, and about the work the library staff did during the War, including delivering books by hand to their Jewish subscribers in Paris after they were not allowed to enter the Library. The author had worked in the American Library in 2010 and her colleagues had told her the story of the Library during the Second World War and had given her access to documents, correspondence and contacts. 

Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

I’ve read Alice Feeney’s debut novel, Sometimes I Lie and His and Hers and loved them. So I had high hopes for Daisy Darker, her fifth book.  Sadly, I was disappointed and I have to say that I didn’t enjoy it. I’ll even go as far as admitting, which I really don’t want to say because I don’t like being negative about a book, I think it is dire. But there are plenty of other readers who enjoyed it, even loved it, so I’m in the minority here. Don’t let me put you off reading it, if it appeals to you. This is just my opinion.

Description (Goodreads)

After years of avoiding each other, Daisy Darker’s entire family is assembling for Nana’s 80th birthday party in Nana’s crumbling gothic house on a tiny tidal island. Finally back together one last time, when the tide comes in, they will be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours.
The family arrives, each of them harboring secrets. Then at the stroke of midnight, as a storm rages, Nana is found dead. And an hour later, the next family member follows… Trapped on an island where someone is killing them one by one, the Darkers must reckon with their present mystery as well as their past secrets, before the tide comes in and all is revealed.

With a wicked wink to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Daisy Darker’s unforgettable twists will leave readers reeling.

My thoughts:

I’m going to be brief. The beginning, was promising and made me interested enough to read on as the Darker family reunited for their Nana’s 80th birthday party at Halloween. They all arrive, Daisy, her father Frank, her mother Nancy, her siblings Rose and Lily and her niece, Trixie. Nana lives on a tidal island, which means that when the tide was in they couldn’t leave, making this a variation on the ‘locked room murder’ mystery, which I generally like. So, I read on, as hour by hour, one by one they’re all found dead. There’s a poem written in chalk on the back wall of the kitchen about the Darker family. As each death occurs the lines about each person are struck through. The poem is pure doggerel and painful to read.

The story quickly began to drag for me and I got fed up with the repetition of how many hours were left until low tide. I got tired of the unlikable characters in this dysfunctional family, the platitudes scattered throughout the book and the increasingly stupid plot, culminating in a surreal supernatural conclusion. I was glad to get to the end.

Six in Six: The 2024 Edition

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

I’m pleased to see that Jo at The Book Jotter  is running this meme again this year to summarise the first six months of reading, sorting the books into six categories – you can choose from the ones Jo suggests or come up with your own. Or if you want to do a shorter version, then just post something about six books you have read in the first six months of 2024.

I think it’s a good way to look back over the last six months’ reading. As I’ve been reading less than usual this year (30 books in the first six months) I’ve had to use some of the books in more than one category. And as I’ve been reviewing less I haven’t written posts about all the books. Where they exist the links take you to my posts on the books, and some are just short posts, not reviews.

Six Crime Fiction

  1. The Hog’s Back Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts
  2. I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh
  3. Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes
  4. The Flower Arranger at All Saints by Lis Howell
  5. Indefensible by James Woolf
  6. The Hunter by Tana French

Six Authors New to me

  1. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
  2. Maiden Voyages by Sian Evans
  3. Everything is Everything by Clive Myrie
  4. A Murder of Crows by Sarah Yarwood-Lovett
  5. Great Meadow by Dirk Bogarde
  6. Black Roses by Jane Thynne

Six books set in a country other than my own

  1. The Hunter by Tana French
  2. Nero by Conn Iggulden
  3. Black Roses by Jane Thynne
  4. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
  5. The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas
  6. Road Ends by Mary Lawson

Six Books I Read from My To Be Read List

  1. The Invisible Man by H G Wells
  2. The Fledgeling by Frances Faviell
  3. The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
  4. The Silence Between Breaths by Cath Staincliffe
  5. Shakespeare: The Man who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench, Brendan O’Hea
  6. The Innocent by M R Hall

Six books I have read but not reviewed (yet)

  1. You Are Dead by Peter James
  2. Past Lying by Val McDermid
  3. The Death of Mrs Westaway by Ruth Ware
  4. The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmyre
  5. Cut and Thirst by Margaret Attwood
  6. In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill

Six books recently added to my wish list

  1. The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
  2. The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin by Patrick Barkham
  3. The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
  4. Troy by Stephen Fry
  5. The Well-Lived Life by Dr. Gladys McGarey 
  6. Trouble in Nuala by Harriet Steel

How is your reading going this year? Do let me know if you take part in Six in Six too

Review and Quotes: Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Close to Death is the fifth in Anthony Horowitz’s Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery series. I have read all the earlier books, and I think it really is best if you read these books in order to fully understand the main characters and their relationship. Daniel Hawthorne, an ex-policeman, is now a private investigator, who the police call in to help with their more complicated cases. Anthony Horowitz himself appears as a fictional character, recruited by Hawthorne to write a book about him and the cases he investigates. It’s one of the books on my 20 Books of Summer list.

Book Beginnings quote:

It was four o’clock in the morning, that strange interval between night and morning when both seem to be fighting each other for control of the day ahead.

Friday 56 quote:

‘We’re not going to let them get away with it,’ Roderick exclaimed. ‘Someone should do something about him! Someone should … I don’t know! Ever since he came here, he’s been nothing but trouble.’

Synopsis from Goodreads:

In New York Times–bestselling author Anthony Horowitz’s ingenious fifth literary whodunit in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series, Detective Hawthorne is once again called upon to solve an unsolvable case—a gruesome murder in an idyllic gated community in which suspects abound.

Riverside Close is a picture-perfect community. The six exclusive and attractive houses are tucked far away from the noise and grime of city life, allowing the residents to enjoy beautiful gardens, pleasant birdsong and tranquillity from behind the security of a locked gate.

It is the perfect idyll until the Kenworthy family arrives, with their four giant, gas-guzzling cars, a gaggle of shrieking children and plans for a garish swimming pool in the backyard. Obvious outsiders, the Kenworthys do not belong in Riverside Close, and they quickly offend every last one of their neighbours.

When Giles Kenworthy is found dead on his own doorstep, a crossbow bolt sticking out of his chest, Detective Hawthorne is the only investigator that can be called on to solve the case. Because how do you solve a murder when everyone is a suspect?

My Review:

In the earlier books Horowitz works with Hawthorne on current murders. In this book he is looking back at one of Hawthorne’s earlier cases, using Hawthorne’s case notes and recordings. Set in Riverside Close, a gated community, this is a variation on the locked room type of mystery, with all the residents being suspects for the murder of Giles Kenworthy who had been found dead, shot with a crossbow. He and his family had disrupted the peaceful lives of all the residents in one way or another, when they moved into the largest property in the Close.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, with interesting and believable characters, two of whom own a bookshop/cafe, The Tea Cosy, which specialised in the Golden Age of Crime detective stories, or modern novels that reimagined it. This link to the Golden Age of Crime novels reminded me not only of Agatha Christie’s novels, and in particular Murder on the Orient Express, which is also a version of a locked room mystery, but also of John Bude’s The Cheltenham Square Murder in which one of the residents of the Square is also killed with a bolt shot from a crossbow. Needless to say, really, there are plenty of twists and turns, numerous complications and red herrings before Horowitz gets to the bottom of the case.

Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Rose City Reader. Share the opening quote from the book.The Friday 56 is hosted by Anne@ MyHeadisFullof Books.  Find a quote from page 56.

  • Publisher‎ Penguin (11 April 2024)
  • X-Ray Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ :411 pages
  • Source: I bought my copy
  • Rating: 4/5