Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Readerwhere 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.
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how the bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew in circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin
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 if 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.
Page 56:
We stared across the water at each other. In the dark she looked like a boulder shaped by five hundred years of storms.
Description from Goodreads:
Lily has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother when she was four years old. Now, at fourteen, she yearns for forgiveness and a mother’s love. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her harsh and unforgiving father, she has only one friend, Rosaleen, a black servant.
When racial tension explodes one summer afternoon, and Rosaleen is arrested and beaten, Lily chooses to flee with her. Fugitives from justice, the pair follow a trail left by the woman who died ten years before. Finding sanctuary in the home of three beekeeping sisters, Lily starts a journey as much about her understanding of the world as about the mystery surrounding her mother.
~~~
What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?
Paula at The Book Jotter is hosting the sixth Reading Wales celebration (aka Dewithon 24), a month-long event beginning on Saint David’s Day, during which book lovers from all parts of the world are encouraged to read, discuss and review literature from and about Wales. I haven’t taken part before but this year I hope I can read at least one book.
Here are a few books I have on my bookshelves to choose from:
How Green was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn. A story of life in a mining community in rural South Wales as Huw Morgan is preparing to leave the valley where he had grown up. He tells of life before the First World War.
Richard Llewellyn Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd, known by his pen name Richard Llewellyn, was born in Hendon, London of Welsh parents. Only after his death was it discovered that Llewellyn’s claim that he was born in St Davids, West Wales, was false.
The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan. Gwenni Morgan is not like any other girl in this small Welsh town. Inquisitive, bookish and full of spirit, she can fly in her sleep and loves playing detective. So when a neighbour mysteriously vanishes, and no one seems to be asking the right questions, Gwenni decides to conduct her own investigation.
Mari Strachan was born into a Welsh family in Harlech, on the north-west coast of Wales, and was brought up there with Welsh as her first language.
Completely Unexpected Tales by Roald Dahl. Described on the back cover as a collection of macabre tales of vengeance, surprise and dark delights. I used to enjoy these tales in the TV series, Tales of the Unexpected, years ago.
Roald Dahl was born n Llandaff, Glamorgan. His parents were Norwegian. I bought this at The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in the village of Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire where Dahl lived until his death in 1990.
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies. In 1944, a German Jewish refugee is sent to Wales to interview Rudolf Hess; in Snowdonia, a seventeen-year-old girl, the daughter of a fiercely nationalistic shepherd, dreams of the bright lights of an English city; and in a nearby POW camp, a German soldier struggles to reconcile his surrender with his sense of honour. As their lives intersect, all three will come to question where they belong and where their loyalties lie.
Peter Ho Davies was born and raised in Coventry to Welsh and Chinese parents, he now makes his home in the US.
I enjoyed Frances Faviell’s memoir, The Dancing Bear, which is set in Berlin just after the end of the Second World War, so I was looking forward to reading another one of her books. The Fledgeling (first published in 1958) is her third novel. It appealed to me because it’s also a book about the post war period, but set a few years later in Britain in the late 1950s. National Service was then in force meaning that all men aged 17 to 21 had to serve in one of the armed forces for an 18-month period. It was discontinued in 1960, with the last servicemen discharged in 1963.
It tells the story of 19-year old Neil Collins , who deserted from his National Service for the third time taking place over the twenty four hour period following Neil’s desertion. When the book begins and sets out to go to his grandmother’s small basement flat in London. Mrs Collins is bedridden and dying. She has strong ideas about duty and thinks Neil should go back and finish his National Service. Nonie, his twin sister, supports him, despite the fact that Charlie, her husband, thinks he is a coward and should finish his National Service. But Nonie makes plans to get him to Ireland where their Great Aunt Liz lived. The flat is small and Neil has to stay hidden whilst several people visit during the day – Miss Rhodes the social worker, some of the neighbours, and Linda, a little girl who regularly climbs in through the basement window to see ‘Gran Collins’.
Neil is in a ‘sickening state of collapse’, is desperate to get away, and he lives in fear of the military finding him and taking him back. And adding to his terror is his fear that Mike, a bullying fellow soldier who has made Neil’s life a nightmare, will catch up with him, to escape with him to Ireland. It all seems hopeless to Neil.
In an Afterword by John Parker, Faviell’s son, he writes that each of her books were inspired by episodes in her own life. And The Fledgeling, about a National Service deserter was based on an actual incident. I enjoyed this book. As I read it I could imagine the reality of the fear and desperation that the family were experiencing. It gives an excellent insight into what life was like in Britain in the 1950s, and in particular into the impact National Service had at that time.
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 Covers/Titles with Things Found in Nature (covers/titles with things like trees, flowers, animals, forests, bodies of water, etc. on/in them).
This week I’ve read all ten books I’ve chosen so the links all take you to my reviews.
The first five books all have trees in the titles and on the covers:
The Man Who Climbs Trees by James Aldred, nonfiction. If you have ever wondered how wildlife/nature documentaries are filmed this book has the answers. James Aldred, a professional tree climber, wildlife cameraman, and adventurer, explains how he discovered that trees are places of refuge as well as providing unique vantage points to view the world.
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, a novel. There are several themes running throughout this book – both political and social including family relationships, particularly mother/child, sexual and physical abuse of small children, the integration of cultures, as well as the always current issue of refugees and illegal immigrants.
Wildwood: a Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin about his journeys through a wide variety of trees and woods in various parts of the world. It’s a memoir, a travelogue and also it’s about the interdependence of human beings and trees.
The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, a short book about a shepherd who transformed the land by planting trees. Not just a few trees, thousands of them over the years. Where once the earth was dry and barren the trees brought water back into the dry stream beds, seeds germinated, meadows blossomed and new villages appeared.
The Wych Elm by Tana French – psychological thriller, as dark family secrets gradually came to light. It isn’t a page-turner and yet it is full of mystery and suspense about a family in crisis. Soon after Toby returns to his family home a human skull is found in the hollow trunk of a wych elm, the biggest tree in the garden.
The last five books are a mixture of fiction and nonfiction on different Nature topics:
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owen, fiction, set mainly in the marshlands in North Carolina where Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl lives She has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. It is also a murder mystery.
The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing – a novel set in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1940s, this is a novel about failure and depression, disaster, racism, racial tension and prejudice, colonialism at its worst. It’s beautifully written, but so tragic.
Corvus: A Life With Birds by Esther Woolfson, nonfiction, mainly about the rook, Chicken. Esther Woolfson also writes in detail about natural history, the desirability or otherwise of keeping birds, and a plethora of facts about birds, their physiology, mechanics of flight, bird song and so on.
The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane, a travelogue that will intrigue readers of natural history and adventure in which he explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath, to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex, and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places.
English Pastoral by James Rebanks. This is an absolutely marvellous book. I enjoyed his account of his childhood and his nostalgia at looking back at how his grandfather farmed the land. And I was enlightened about current farming practices and the effects they have on the land, depleting the soil of nutrients. Rebanks also explains what can be done to put things right, how we can achieve a balance of farmed and wild landscapes, by limiting use of some of the technological tools we’ve used over the last 50 years so that methods based on mixed farming and rotation can be re-established. By encouraging more diverse farm habitats, rotational grazing and other practices that mimic natural processes we can transform rural Britain.
This is a British Library Crime Classic, first published in 1933, during the Golden Age of detective fiction between the two world wars. Dr James Earle and his wife live near the Hog’s Back, a ridge in the North Downs in the beautiful Surrey countryside. When Dr Earle disappears from his cottage, Inspector French of Scotland Yard is called in to investigate. At first he suspects a simple domestic intrigue – and then begins to uncover a web of romantic entanglements beneath the couple’s peaceful rural life.
I’ve only read two Inspector French books before. They’re puzzle-type mysteries. French is a most meticulous and methodical detective – maybe too meticulous and methodical, but he is a very likeable character. It begins leisurely introducing the characters and setting the scene. He pays great attention to all the information as he discovers it. This slows the pace down, going over and over the clues several times and he even lists them, giving the page numbers they appear on towards the end of the book. Crofts’ descriptions of the countryside are outstanding, giving it a great sense of place.
The more he (Inspector French) had explored the country, the more it had appealed to him. He loved the tree-edged out lines of its successive ridges,showing up solid beneath one another like drop scenes in a theatre. He loved its quaint villages with their old red-roofed half-timbered buildings and their still older churches. He liked following the narrow twisting deep-cut lanes. But most of all he delighted in the heaths, wild and uncultivated, areas of sand and heather and birches and pines over which one could wander as entirely cut off from sight or sound of human habitation as if one was exploring a desert island. (page 61 in my paperback copy)
Ideal countryside for burying a dead body.
Although this is a slower paced novel than I usually prefer to read and the detail is rather repetitive in places, I really enjoyed reading this book, and I’ll be looking out for more of Inspector French murder mystery novels.
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 a Love Freebie (in honour of Valentine’s Day tomorrow). I usually find it a bit difficult with this freebie as I don’t read many romantic novels, but love is not just romance. These ten books all demonstrate some sort of loving relationship. I’ve listed them in alphabetical author order. The links take you either to my post, or if I haven’t written about them either to Amazon or Goodreads (marked *).
The Girl in a Swing* by Richard Adams. A shy young man meets a beautiful woman in the company of a young girl. He finds himself swept off of his feet and married to her, bringing her with him to live in his family home. She is his erotic dream come true; she does everything she can to bind him to her and join him in his comfortable life.
Soon, however, odd things begin to happen. Things in the house are strangely damp with what looks like seawater, bodies appear under the water that aren’t really there. It all winds up to a horrifying conclusion. I read this many years ago, after reading Watership Down, which I loved.
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry – Thomas McNulty is a young Irish immigrant, aged 17, who had left Sligo, starved and destitute, for Canada and then made his way to America where he met John Cole under a hedge in a downpour and they became friends and secretly lovers for life. After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, they, fought in the Indian Wars and then in the Civil War.
Midnight in St Petersburg by Vanora Bennett beginning in 1911 in pre-revolutionary Russia with Inna Feldman travelling by train to St Petersburg to escape the pogroms in Kiev hoping to stay with her distant cousin, Yasha Kagan. She is welcomed into the Leman family where she and Yasha are apprentices in their violin-making workshop. Inna is a talented, albeit shy, violinist and she falls in love with Yasha through their shared love of music.
Oscar and Lucinda* by Peter Carey. Peter Carey’s Booker Prize winning novel imagines Australia’s youth, before its dynamic passions became dangerous habits. It is also a startling and unusual love story. Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling. A country girl of singular ambition, Lucinda moves to Sydney, driven by dreams of self-reliance and the building of an industrial Utopia. Together this unlikely pair create and are created by the spectacle of mid-nineteenth century Australia.
I Love the Bones of You by Christopher Eccleston about his love for his father. This is not the usual celebrity autobiography that is just all about him and his work. It is a really vivid portrait of his relationship with his family and particularly with his father who had dementia at the end of his life.
The Glass Guardian by Linda Gillard a ghost story and a love story, with a bit of a mystery thrown in too. It’s a ‘supernatural love story‘. When Ruth prepares to put her Aunt’s old house up for sale, she’s astonished to find she’s not the only occupant. Worse, she suspects she might be falling in love again. With a man who died almost a hundred years ago.
The Remains of the Day* by Kazuo Ishiguro – I love the pathos of this novel about Stevens, an English butler, reminiscing about his service to Lord Darlington, looking back on what he regards as England’s golden age and his relationship with Miss Kenton who had been the housekeeper at Darlington Hall. This was the first of Ishiguro’s books I read.
The Four Loves* by C S Lewis. This summarises four kinds of human love–affection, friendship, erotic love, and the love of God. Masterful without being magisterial, this book’s wise, gentle, candid reflections on the virtues and dangers of love draw on sources from Jane Austen to St. Augustine. I read this along with several other books by Lewis many years ago
Atonement by Ian McEwan. As well as being a love story and a war novel this is also a mystery and a reflection on society and writing and writers. It begins on a hot day in the summer of 1935 when Briony, then aged thirteen witnesses an event between her older sister Cecelia and her childhood friend Robbie that changed all three of their lives. Most of all, though, it’s a book about love.
Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky, an intense story of life and death, love and burning passion. It’s about families and their relationships – husbands and wives, young women married to old men, lovers, mothers, daughters and stepdaughters. It’s set in a small village based on Issy-l’Eveque between the two world wars. The narrator is Silvio looking back on his life and gradually secrets that have long been hidden rise to the surface, disrupting the lives of the small community. The people are insular, concerned only with their own lives, distrusting their neighbours
BooksPlease 