Sunday Salon – Looking for Agatha Christie!

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I’ve spent quite a few hours this week unpacking and shelving books. There are still quite a lot of boxes to deal with. So far I haven’t come across my Agatha Christie books and those are the ones I want to read right now. It was made worse this morning when I watched Country Tracks. Ben Fogle  was travelling through South Devon and visited Agatha Christie’s home Greenway House on the banks of the River Dart. Now managed by the National Trust it is open to the public with only 20 people at a time being allowed entrance every ten minutes on allocated timed tickets. Nobody else was there when Ben went in (lucky Ben!) to a beautiful room, lined with white bookcases and renovated to be how it was when Agatha lived there. Now I want white bookcases – D says I’d better get painting! 

I finished reading Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue and Losing You by Nicci French earlier this week and now I’m wondering what to read next. Maybe the next Rebus book – The Hanging Garden or one of the many other books from my to-be-read pile. But what I really want to find are my Agatha Christie books, so I’m off to unpack and shelve more books until I find them.

Ten Random Books Meme

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Simon T at Stuck in a book developed this meme. Other people have since done it, so I thought I’d do it too.  It’s a development of the ten random things about yourself type of meme.  Here’s how to do it…

1.) Go to your bookshelves…
2.) Close your eyes. If you’re feeling really committed, blindfold yourself.
3.) Select ten books at random. Use more than one bookcase, if you have them, or piles by the bed, or… basically, wherever you keep books.
4.) Use these books to tell us about yourself – where and when you got them, who got them for you, what the book says about you, etc. etc…..
5.) Have fun! Be imaginative. Doesn’t matter if you’ve read them or not – be creative. It might not seem easy to start off with, and the links might be a little tenuous, but I think this is a fun way to do this sort of meme.
6.) Feel free to cheat a bit, if you need to…

I read Annabel’s post at Gaskella and have copied her method of using a random number generator to pick books from my LibraryThing catalogue, because most of my books are still in boxes after moving house in December. Like Annabel, if I couldn’t think of anything to say about the books – I moved to the next one down the page.

Purple Hibiscus1.Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I bought this about 18 months ago after reading Half of a Yellow Sun. I can’t believe I haven’t read it yet, because I thought Half of a Yellow Sun was such a great book, emotional without being sentimental and factual with being boring. These books are about Nigerian history from a personal viewpoint. I haven’t read much African literature apart from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Wole Soyinka’s play Madmen and Specialists and Jack Mapanje’s poetry. I must make time this year to read Purple Hibiscus.

2. The next book the random generator threw up is Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, an all-time favourite of mine. My copy was either a birthday or Christmas present from my Great Aunty Sally when I was I don’t know how old. I’ve read it many times since then. It has the Tenniel illustrations and it may be the book that my love of words stems from. I remember learning and reciting the Jabberwocky as I enjoyed the sounds, without understanding exactly what it means:

Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

3. Rococo to Revolution: Major Trends in Eighteenth Century Painting by Michael Levey

I bought this book several years ago when I was visiting an art gallery (I forget which one or when it was). I haven’t read it but have just looked at the paintings. I know very little about that period in art – maybe that was why I bought the book  to learn about it, or maybe I liked the paintings. When I’ve unpacked it I must look at this one to remind myself why I have it.

4. Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris

I bought this about three years ago in a 3 for 2 at Waterstones. It was the first book by Joanne Harris that I’ve read and I was bowled over by it. Set in a private school, it’s a novel of mystery and suspense, told from two characters’ point of view. There are plenty of twists and turns and although I began to guess the outcome before the end it was not disappointing. A study in obsession and revenge.

5. Sense and Sensibility by Jane AustenSense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics) by…

I’m glad the random number threw up this book because Jane Austen is one of my favourite authors, although this is not my favourite book by her – that is Pride and Prejudice. I’ve had this copy for many years. It’s one of a box set, along with Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

6. The Penguin Atlas of World History: v. 2…The Penguin Atlas of World History: Volume 2: From the French Revolution to the Present

I’ve had this book for years. I bought it in a secondhand bookshop because I love history and this is a nice compact book packed with information and lots of maps.

7. Jamie’s Kitchen by Jamie Oliver

I have unpacked some of my cookery books including this one. It’s a big book with beautiful full page colour photos. I have most of Jamie Oliver’s books and have watched all of his TV programmes. Jamie’s Kitchen was a Channel 4 series about the restaurant he set up to train 15 unemployed kids. The profits from the restaurant were used to send the kids on scholarships with the best chefs around the world. The book gives different cooking methods and lots of recipes. I don’t think I’ve actually cooked any of these recipes – my favourite book of Jamie’s is Jamie At Home – I’ve cooked quite a lot from that book.

8. The Hours of the Night by Sue Gee

I bought this book because I’d read and enjoyed Sue Gee’s Mysteries of Glass. I have read it but have very little memory of it. Even reading the reviews of it on  Amazon doesn’t really bring it back to me, apart from its setting on the Welsh Borders. I only gave it three stars in my LT catalogue,  I think Mysteries of Glass is much better.

9. Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake

This is book one in Peake’s Gormanghast trilogy.Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

I  first read this when I was a student many years ago. I knew nothing about it and had just picked it off the library shelves based on the title alone. I loved it. I suppose it’s a gothic novel, strange and wonderful, full of bizarre and grotesque characters, set in a the castle of Gormenghast, a place with its own rituals and traditions. I couldn’t wait to read on – fortunately the library had all three books and I read them avidly. Some years ago it was dramatised on TV and that is when I bought my own copies of the books.

10. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith

I bought this for 10p in a secondhand bookshop about two years ago. I Ripley Under Waterhaven’t read it yet. It’s number 5 in the Ripley crime fiction series and I thought I’d read the earlier novels first and I keep meaning to look out for the first one – The Talented Mr Ripley. I listened to a dramatisation of the first book last year on BBC Radio 4’s The Saturday Play and then missed the following episodes.

Those are my ten random books and I think they’re fairly representative of my books, fiction and nonfiction, both old and new.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: N is for Not Safe After Dark

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

My choice this week for the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme is N for Not Safe After Dark by Peter Robinson.

This is a collection of twenty short crime stories, including three Inspector Banks stories and an Inspector Banks novella (90+ pages). The title story Not Safe after Dark is just six pages long and yet those six pages are full of tension and suspense as an unnamed man enters a park after dark, even though he knows that such big city parks are dangerous places.

Peter Robinson’s introduction is interesting for me in that he explains how he writes and compares writing a novel to writing short stories. He’s used to thinking in terms of the novel, with it’s ‘broad canvas’ and finds it hard to ‘work in miniature’. Short stories don’t come easily to him.

I carry a novel around in my head for a long time – at least a year, waking and sleeping – and this gives me time to get under the skin of the characters and the story. Also, plotting is probably the most difficult part of writing for me, and being asked to write a short story, which so often depends on a plot twist, a clever diversion or a surprising revelation, guarantees that I’ll get the laundry done and probably the ironing too.

In short stories there is no space to develop the characters or the plot, nor to give different points of view as in a novel. But, as far as I’m concerned, with the stories I’ve read so far in this book Robinson has succeeded in creating convincing stories with believable characters in real settings.

Often reading short stories I’m left wanting more, which is what happened to Robinson with one of these stories. Innocence is a haunting tale of a man accused of murduring a teenage girl. After writing Innocence, which won the Crime Writer of Canada’s Best Short Story Award in 1991, he couldn’t let the story go and went on to write a whole novel expanding on the events of the story. This eventually became Innocent Graves, featuring Inspector Banks (who is not in the short story).

The other stories include a private-eye story set in Florida, a romantic Parisian mystery, a historical story inspired by Robinson’s interest in Thomas Hardy and the place where he was born, and stories about such varied topics as American Football and Shakespeare.

Note: Peter Robinson’s website is here.

Tuesday Teaser

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

In between reading the books shown on the sidebar (Black and Blue and Can Any Mother Help Me?) I’ve also read the beginning of William Fiennes’s  The Music Room, which I borrowed from the library three weeks ago. It’s due back today and I’ve got to decide whether to renew it or return it. Some of it really interests me and makes me want to continue reading but other parts are rather boring and make me put the book to one side. It’s a gentle book, written with sensitivity and warmth.

It’s the story of William Fiennes childhood. It reads in parts like a novel, but is actually a memoir. He lived in a moated castle, in a beautiful setting with his parents, and older brothers and sister. Richard, eleven years older than him suffered from severe epilepsy, which has a profound effect on the family. I like the descriptive passages in this book and the details about the family, the loving memories that William evokes. The castle is open to the public part of the time and is also used by film crews and he was entranced by the filming as well as by the actors. Just fancy meeting Eric Morecambe when you’re five and he asks if you’re married, or selling Ian McKellen a postcard.

Here’s his description of the castle:

Our house was almost seven hundred years old, a medieval beginning transformed in the sixteenth century into a Tudor stately home, a castle surrounded by a broad moat, with woods, farmland and a landscaped park on the far side and a gatehouse tower guarding the two-arched stone bridge, the island’s only point of access and departure.

The gatehouse doors hung on rusty iron hinges, grids of sun-bleached vertical and cross beams, like the gates of an ancient city, a Troy or Jericho, creaking like ships as you manoeuvred them. (page 4)

Interspersed with the narrative about his family are sections on early experiments with electricity which, although interesting in themselves, slow down the book for me and make me impatient for the author to get on with his story.

But looking at the book again this morning has revived my interest in it. I hope I can renew it

Agatha Christie Reading Challenge Update

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

I’m taking part in the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge. Listed below are the books I’ve read. I’ve reviewed them all except for A Pocketful of Rye, which I read last year. That book is still packed away in a box after our house move. When I find it I’ll write about it.

10 / 87 books. 11% done! Still got a long way to go!

  1. Crooked House (1949)
  2. By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968)
  3. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962)
  4. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
  5. Dead Man’s Folly (1956)
  6. The Body in the Library (1942)
  7. Peril at End House (1932)
  8. Elephants Can Remember (1972)
  9. A Pocketful of Rye (1953)
  10. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938)

I’ve also read two collections of short stories

  1. The Thirteen Problems (1933)
  2. The Hound of Death (1933)

The rest of my Agatha Christie books are still unpacked. We are still trying out the best places for the bookcases and I’m not unpacking any more books until they are ready for the books. If the library has any available for loan I’ll snap them up straight away on my next visit which is tomorrow.