for a while, maybe …
The removal men are coming today to pack up our belongings to go into storage, so this may be my last opportunity to use the computer for a while. We’ll be leaving this house on Friday, but taking the laptop with us, so I may be able to write more later on (I’m not too comfortable with the laptop). We still haven’t got a date for moving in to the new house (it’s a bungalow, actually) but hope it will be very soon.
I was going through old photos recently. This is one of my favourite photos taken in the late 1980s of Ben.
Hosted by Wordless Wednesday
This week’s letter in the Crime Fiction Alphabet series is H for Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie.
I think this is one of the best Agatha Christie 
books I’ve read recently. Poirot investigates the death of Simeon Lee, the head of the Lee family. None of his family like him, in fact most of them hate him and there are plenty of suspects for his murder. He is found dead with his throat cut in a locked room – locked from the inside.
He lived with Alfred his eldest son and his daughter-in-law Lydia. Their lives are dominated by him and they agree to his every demand. He has invited his other two sons and their wives to stay for Christmas – David and Hilda and George and Madeleine. Then Simeon annouces he has invited two more guests, who happen to be another son Harry, who left home years ago, a disreputable character who is at loggerheads with Alfred, and Pilar his granddaughter, his daughter Jennifer’s child. Jennifer had recently died in Spain where she had married a Spanish artist. Pilar quickly gains her grandfather’s favour and when he annouces he is going to remake his will she hopes she will be included. Another unexpected guest turns up – Stephen Farr, the son of Simeon’s former partner in a diamond mine in South Africa.
The mystery is just how was Simeon killed? The family are dispersed through the house and on hearing a blood curdling scream they all rush to Simeon’s room. Pilar finds a small piece of rubber and a peg on the floor – just what do they signify? And the uncut diamonds Simeon kept locked in a safe in his room have gone missing – who has stolen them?
This story kept me guessing all the way through, with lots of red herrings and Tressilian, the butler’s confusion about the identity of the guests. He is old with poor eyesight and can’t be sure who is who. Poirot who is staying nearby with Colonel Johnson, the Chief Constable, unravels the mystery with the aid of a false moustache and then gathers the family together to go through the evidence and reveal the identity of the murderer.
There are a variety of themes, including the psychological hold Simeon has over his family, the effect of heredity, the distortion of the past through holding on to obsessions, jealousy amongst the siblings, and the effect of holding grudges for many years. Lydia and Hilda are level headed women, both of them suspicious of Simeon’s motives and supporting their husbands. Lydia maintains that evil exists and Hilda believes that it is the present that matters and not the past. But the past has cast a long and evil shadow over the present.
NB see more Christmas titles here – Suggest a Christmas Title.
Joy at Joyfully Retired does a weekly feature called Favorite Places and I thought today I’d post some photographs of one of my favourite places: Linlithgow about 20 miles from Edinburgh.
Last night D and I went to Abingdon for “An Evening With Susan Hill“, arranged by Mostly Books bookshop. Susan talked about her latest book Howards End is on the Landing, which I’m part way through. She read extracts from the book – one about Roald Dahl when they were both judges for literary competitions and the other about Iris Murdoch, who she knew when they both lived in Oxford. That extract was sad because her last meeting with Iris was when Iris was already suffering from Altzheimer’s and showed little recognition of Susan.
Susan’s favourite book by Iris Murdoch is my favourite too – The Bell. It was touching to hear her talk about Iris and the time she and John Bayley, her husband sang the Silver Swan madrigal in
… light wavering but not untuneful voices and everyone fell silent to listen. It could have been funny, a madrigal sung by these two small, oddly gnome-like figures, one of the country’s leading novelists and a distinguished don and man of letters. In fact it was rather moving. (page 117)
Howards End is on the Landing is an interesting little book which takes a look at some of the books in Susan’s three storey country house in Gloucestershire. She had decided to take a year off from buying new books and to read or re-read books from her own collection. There are books in every room and although she says they’re not arranged it appears that they are in some sort of order with books grouped together in different rooms even though they may be in strange combinations such as Medieval Monastic history books together with 400 Ladybird Books in one small room. I was amused to hear her say she has a Richard Dawkins’ book on a shelf next to an commentary on the Old Testament. I had a look this morning to see who he is next to on our shelves (until the removal men pack all the books away) – he is between a cookery book High Fibre Meals: a delicious range of menus to increase fibre in your diet and Ian Rankin’s novel Set in Darkness – quite an odd combination really. My books all started out sorted into fiction and non fiction and soon found their own order. Like Susan I know where they all are but every now and then some of them go missing.
In the book she has a few sharp words about e-readers and last night expanded on why she thinks there is a place for both “real” books and e-books. I haven’t ventured into the e-world just yet, but no doubt I will at some point as I think an e-reader would be useful in some situations – I wouldn’t have to leave a box of books handy for instance during our house move as I could load a few on an e-reader. She also has little room for book bloggers who
… boast of getting through twenty plus books in a week, as if they were trying for a place in the Guinness Book of Records. Why has reading turned into a form of speed dating? And then there is fashion and the desire to have the very latest book – which doesn’t matter a scrap so long as the book is wanted for itself, not just because it is one everybody is talking about, and so long as plenty of other, unfashionable books are desired as well. (page 171)
Thankfully I don’t fall into those categories, but I do blog, which Susan hasn’t got time for thinking
The internet can also have a pernicious influence on reading because it is full of book-related gossip and chatter on which it is fatally easy to waste time that should be spent actually paying close, careful attention to the books themselves, whether writing them or reading them. (page 3)
Phew! Personally I find blogging helps me concentrate more on my reading and writing. I no longer read a book and put it down thinking that was good, or not. It makes me think more about the book, what I liked and didn’t and analyse the themes, the way it was written and so on. Of course you have to be discerning about what you read and how much time you spend on the internet – it is easy to pass several hours without noticing, but for me it certainly hasn’t stopped me from being able to concentrate on single topics or tackle difficult long books.
Having said that I like Howards End is on the Landing very much. It’s full of lots of references to books and authors, some known to me and others not and Susan’s personal anecdotes. I just wish it had an index. It’s a bit like the blog she used to write.
It was an enjoyable evening, sadly the last I’ll be able to go to as soon we won’t be living in the area. It was nice to meet up again with Abigail from Gaskella and to meet Simon from Stuck in a Book and Becca from Oxford Reader.
This is Emily’s Attacking the TBR Tome challenge.
The challenge is to read 20 books from your TBR list between December 1st, 2009 and December 31st, 2010. AND you’re supposed to refrain from buying books until you have read or attempted to read all 20 of your chosen books, unless you need to buy a book for a book group. You also have to write a blog post about each book as you finish (or decide you can’t finish) it.
There’s been some discussion on blogs recently about feeling guilty about buying books and not reading them soon after buying them. This is something I’ve never felt. I often buy a book knowing I won’t get round to reading it for a while because I’m currently reading other books and this doesn’t bother me at all. In fact it adds to the pleasure of reading, knowing I’ve got some good books lined up to read in the future. The only time I feel bad about not reading books is when someone has lent them to me and months later I still haven’t read them. I’ll try not to buy any more books (I’m always trying not to buy books!) but I can’t see myself sticking to that for very long.
I attempted to read from my to-be-read piles this year and managed a few, but also added lots of books to the piles. So there are plenty to choose from. Emily’s challenge is to specify the books you’re going to read and not substitute them, but I think I’d better give myself some leeway and if I want to read a book I haven’t listed I will.
As there is a delay between our house sale and house purchase most of my books will be going into storage next week. This challenge has helped me focus on which books to keep out to read until I can get my hands on the rest. I keep changing my mind about which ones to take but so far these are in a box:
This could easily change in the next few days.
BooksPlease 