Sunday Salon – Rounding Up Recent Reads

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

We’re back “home” again after a couple of days away visiting our “future home”, so much still to organise and so much stuff still to sort. But still time to read, if not to write much about the books I’ve recently finished or have started to read.

Early last week I finished reading Death of a Chief by Douglas Watts and have drafted a post for the Crime Fiction Alphabet letter “D”. For once my current reading is in time for this meme and I should be able to finish the post during this week.

Over the last few days I’ve finished Agatha Christie’s A Pocketful of Rye, which I’ll be writing about for the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge and Blog Carnival. This one is a Miss Marple mystery in which she plays a minor role, albeit an influential one, based on the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence”. It reminded me of Heston Blumenthal’s Medieval Feast on channel 4 some time ago, when for the main course he made a pigeon pie (it’s illegal to cook blackbirds).

The day before yesterday I finished reading Diana Athill’s extraordinary book Somewhere Towards the End, which won the Costa Biography Award in 2008. Athill is a writer who had registered in my mind sometime ago, but I’d never read anything by her until this book. My copy of newbooks magazine arrived recently featuring an interview with her which drew my interest and then quite by chance when I went to the library to return some books, this one practically jumped off the shelves. I shall have to write a proper post about this book, which is the best book I’ve read this month, so far.

Tudor RoseI have now restarted Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, but didn’t take it away with me as it’s far too big and heavy. I’m using this bookmark (which I made some years ago) whilst reading it as it seems so appropriate.

I’ve read some of that this morning and was surprised by this coincidence – on the back cover is a quote from Diana Athill, no less. She says of Wolf Hall:

 A stunning book. It breaks free of what a novel has become nowadays. I can’t think of anything since Middlemarch which so convincingly builds a world.

This quote is even more compelling because Athill reveals in her memoir that she has “gone off novels” and to compare Wolf Hall with Middlemarch means it must be good because she recalled that approaching the end of her first reading of Middlemarch she thought:

Oh no – I’m going to leave this world, and I don’t want to.

I don’t think you can have much higher praise than that.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: C is for The Complaints

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

crime_fiction_alphabetThis week the Crime Fiction Alphabet  is featuring the letter C, which for me is Ian Rankin’s latest book The Complaints. The ‘Complaints’ are the cops who investigate other cops.

Set in Edinburgh in February 2009, Inspector Malcolm Fox works in the the PSU or Professional Standards Unit, part of the Complaints and Conducts office.  The PSU is sometimes called  ‘the Dark Side’,

They sniffed out racism and corruption. They looked at bungs received and blind eyes turned. They were quiet and serious and determined and had as much power as they need in order to do the job. (page 4) …

A lot of cops asked the Complaints the same question: how can you do it? How can you spit on your own kind? These were the officers you’d worked with, or might work with in the future. These were, it was often said, ‘the good guys’. But that was the problem right there – what did it mean to be good? Fox had puzzled over that one himself, staring into the mirror behind the bar as he nursed another soft drink. (page 5)

And there in those two quotes is the nub of this book. Who is the good guy? As Fox, yet another divorced cop with a drink problem, his father in a care home and his sister, Jude, in an abusive relationship, is drawn into an increasingly complex and puzzling investigation he has to work out just who the bad guys are.  He is asked to investigate DS Jamie Breck, a likeable young cop who is allegedly involved in a paedophile site run by an Aussie cop in Melbourne. Then Jude’s partner, Vince is murdered and Breck is the investigating officer. As Fox gets to know him it become increasingly difficult for him to know just who he can trust.

As I read on I grew to really like Fox. He is a good guy, he plays by the rules and looks after his family. He’s bit of a philosopher, an outsider mistrusted and hated by other cops.Then he finds he has to defend his reputation when he himself is accused  of a misdemeanor and comes under suspicion and surveillance. It’s about morality and vice. It’s up-to-date and I was absolutely engrossed in this book from the beginning to the end; one of the best books I’ve read this year. I hope Ian Rankin will write at least one more book featuring Malcolm Fox – and Jamie Breck.

Sunday Salon

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

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It’s been a busy time here this week as we now have a date for moving house. In six week’s time we don’t know where we’ll be living, but it definitely won’t  be in this house. We may be in our new house (a bungalow) but as we haven’t exchanged contracts yet we don’t have a date for moving in. Until we have I don’t want to write anything about it – but it looks as though there may even be a room that could be called a “book room”,  or even a “library”!

So this week has seen a transformation in this house – we’re now surrounded by boxes everywhere. Even though the removal company will be packing our stuff we’ve had to empty the lofts – why do we store so many things? – so the contents are now filling up the rest of the house. There are tons of old videos (not personal ones!), old computers and microwaves, tennis, badminton and squash rackets, a cricket bat, rucksacks, ropes and other climbing gear, an old breadbin (why?) even a box of coathangers as well as the usual Christmas decorations (three Christmas trees of varying sizes) and so on and so forth. I got excited when D said he’d found a box of books, thinking he’d found some I’d forgotten about. Sadly it was a box of his HNC notebooks! We’ve been sidetracked looking through old photos and old videos of the family and reminiscing.

D has been clearing out one of the sheds as well. We couldn’t find Lucy one night and eventually found her curled up on some old sheets in the shed. She was nearly locked in for the night:

Lucy in shed1

 

There’s still so much to do but I have been managing to read in between sorting out stuff and trips to the tip to dump stuff that we should have thrown out years ago. This week I finished reading Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Complaints by Ian Rankin – posts on both to follow and am well into Death of the Chief by Douglas Watt. I’ve caught up a bit with writing reviews of books as well with posts on:

As for Reading Challenges I’ve really been neglecting those since we started to sell the house earlier this year but I have been keeping up with the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge and this week have posted an update of my progress. I enjoy Agatha Christie’s books immensely and this has spurred me on to read more of hers – this morning I started reading A Pocketful of Rye – a Miss Marple mystery.

This coming week I do intend to pick up either Wolf Hall again or The Children’s Book. My problem is, as I’ve said before, they’re both physically heavy books and I really need to set aside some time to concentrate on one of them during the day rather than early morning or late at night – not easy right now.

Agatha Christie Reading Challenge Update

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

agatha_christie_rcI’ve been taking part in Kerrie’s Agatha Christie Reading Challenge. I’m not reading her books in the order she wrote them, but as I find copies. Sometimes I join a challenge and then lose interest, but I’m really enjoying this one – it’s pure pleasure.

These are the books I’ve read and reviewed to date:

  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. The Thirteen Problems (1933) Short Stories
  9. The Hound of Death (1933) Short Stories
  10. Elephants Can Remember (1972)

The following are Agatha Christie books that I own and will be reading next – not necessarily in this order:

  1. The Pale Horse
  2. Murder on the Orient Express
  3. A Murder is Announced
  4. Death on the Nile
  5. They Do It with Mirrors
  6. The Moving Finger
  7. A Pocket Full of Rye

I’ll be looking out for more books to read once I’ve finished these.