Teaser Tuesday: The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.
Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser†from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
This week I’ve been reading The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery. It’s a slim book, packed with richness – sumptuous, and full to over-flowing with words and images. It is verbose, florid and sensational – meaning that is celebrates all the sensations experienced relating to food.
Here is a description of one of my favourite foods:
… crimson in its taut silken finery, undulating with the occasional more tender hollow, with a cheerfulness about it like a plumpish woman in her party dress hoping to compensate for the inconvenience of her extra pounds by means of a disarming chubbiness that evokes an irresistible desire to bite into her flesh.
… my teeth tore into the flesh to splatter the tongue with the rich, warm and bountiful juice, whose essential generosity is masked by the chill of a refrigerator, or the affront of vinegar, or the false nobility of oil.
The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one’s mouth that brings with it every pleasure. The resistance of the skin – slightly taut, just enough; the luscious yield of the tissues, their seed-filled liqueur oozing to the corners of one’s lips, and that one wipes away without any fear of staining one’s fingers, this plump little globe, unleashing a flood of nature inside us: a tomato, an adventure. (from pages 44-5)
Cozy Mystery Challenge 2010
I’ve completed the Cozy Mystery Challenge.
A  cozy mystery is a mystery that doesn’t normally have any rough language, sex scenes, or gruesome details about the killing, and the main character is normally an amateur detective.
The challenge: read at least least 6 cozy mysteries between April 1st, 2010 and September 30, 2010.Â
I read:
- Faithful Unto Death by Caroline Graham – finished April
- Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House by M C Beaton – finished May
- Revenge Served Cold by Jackie Fullerton – finished May
- Snapped in Cornwall by Janie Bolitho- finished May
- Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie – finished July
- The Body on the Beach by Simon Brett – finished July
- Most enjoyable: Death on the Nile.
- The spookiest and most querky: Revenge Served Cold
- The most frivolous: Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House
- Cosiest: The Body on the Beach.
Sunday Salon – Choices
This morning I was wondering what to read next. I finished reading Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett yesterday, and have almost finished The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery, and think I need a change. Maybe it’s time for an autobiography or a biography. I have several to choose from, some I’ve had for years and one that I picked up recently at a bookstall at the local village fair.
Should I read this latest one – Great Meadow: an Evocation by Dirk Bogarde? I couldn’t resist the cover of this book and remembered that I’d enjoyed another autobiographical book by Bogarde many years ago. When I read the opening words in the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book I knew I wanted to read this one too:
An evocation, this, of the happiest days of my childhood: 1930 – 34. The world was gradually falling apart all around me, but I was serenely unaware. I was not, alas, the only ostrich. (page vii)
Or maybe I’ll start Slipstream: a Memoir by Elizabeth Jane Howard, or Eden’s Outcasts: the story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father by John Matteson. Or do I fancy reading Mary Queen of Scots by Alison Weir, or Shakespeare by Peter Ackroyd, or The Day Gone By by Richard Adams (he wrote Watership Down and The Girl on the Swing, amongst other books)? Maybe The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters edited by Charlotte Mosely. I could go on and on.
Choices, choices! Deciding what to read next is sometimes so difficult, but it’s always enjoyable.
The Body on the Beach by Simon Brett: Book Review
The Body on the Beach is the first in Simon Brett’s Fethering Mysteries. It’s an easy read, a ‘cozy mystery’, set in a fictitious village on the south coast of England. Not a typical village as it has a large residential conurbation, but at its heart is the High Street, with its flint-faced cottages, dating back to the early 18th century. Radiating out from the High Street are a number of new developments, Victorian and Edwardian houses, bungalows, post-war council houses and a large private estate of huge houses backing on to the sea.
Carole Seddon has taken early retirement from her career at the Home Office to live there and as the book opens she is confronted by a new neighbour, Jude, who with her informality and casual approach to life breaks all the accepted local conventions. Carole views her with slight distaste. But when Carole is also confronted by the the discovery of a dead body on the beach, that has disappeared by the time the police go to investigate, she gradually accepts Jude’s help. Together they set about solving the mystery, which gets more complicated with the discovery of the body of a local lad.
This is an entertaining whodunnit which I liked well enough. It wasn’t too difficult to work out the identity of the first body and the culprit. I liked the contrast between Carole and Jude – Carole, set in her ways, reserved and conventional and the flamboyant, casual Jude. Despite her informality Jude reveals very little about her life and relationships, despite Carole’sefforts to get to know more about her. I also liked the way Brett so convincingly describes the relationships between the different groups of Fethering’s residents.
There are 11 books in the Fethering series. I’ve already read the fourth – Murder in the Museum, so there are plenty more to read, the latest one being The Shooting in the Shop. The full list is in Wikipedia and Simon Brett also has a website.
Agatha Christie Reading Challenge: My Progress
The Agatha Christie Reading Challenge is an open-ended challenge to read all of Agatha Christie’s books and short stories, run by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise. I first read some of Christie’s books when I was a teenager and hadn’t read any for years until I borrowed a copy of The Crooked House from my local library three years ago. This reminded me of how much I had enjoyed her books and set me off reading them again. Over the years I must have read a good number of them but had never kept any records of what I read at the time.
So when I saw that Kerrie was running this challenge I decided to join in. It’s one of the best challenges out, for me at least, because all you have to do is read Agatha Christie’s books at your own pace and link to the Agatha Christie Carnival once a month. There’s no pressure to meet any deadlines – if you haven’t read any Christie books for the Carnival that’s OK and you just carry on reading when you like.
I’m not even trying to read them in the order they were published, even though Kerrie and some others are, because I’m reading books I already own or books that I find in librarys and/or bookshops. So far I’ve read 17 and 2 collections of her short stories – I’ve listed them on a separate page.
My latest find is 4.50 from Paddington, which I received from Juxtabook as part of my prize in her recent competition. Catherine described this book as a ‘rather aged paperback’ and it is, but then it is 50 years old, published in 1960 for just 2/6 (in old money). It may be old and faded, but because it was published soon after Agatha Christie wrote it, it has a contemporary feel about it. I’ve watched so many TV and film versions, with different actors playing the part of Miss Marple, some more successfully than others that it’s interesting to see this book. I’m not sure who the woman on the front cover is meant to portray – surely not Miss Marple?
And this is the back cover – really that’s all the blurb you need to capture your interest.
This will be my next Agatha Christie book to read.
BooksPlease 