I have been reading...

Well the first half of this month I spent binge-reading four crime novels and jolly excellent they all were too. Since then my reading's been a trifle mixed. My next four books were a bit hit and miss and what I take from that is that I'm excellent at choosing murder mysteries I will love, more hit and miss when I stray into other genres and non-fiction.

So, after I finished Killing Trail by Margaret Mizushima I thought I should ring the changes a bit. So I read, There's More to Life Than This by Theresa Caputo. I had never heard of this American TV presenter who is a Medium from Long Island, New York. Mediums generally get a bad press and I have to admit I came into the, 'they're mostly frauds' category before I read this book. Caputo is very personable and convincing though (I've watched her on Youtube a bit) and me being curious and open-minded I found this book fascinating. Has it changed my mind about Mediums, probably not completely, but I now feel I at least know a lot more about the subject and that was the object of reading the book.

Next, I finished (because I've been reading this for several weeks) All Roads Lead to Austen by Amy Elizabeth Smith.

The author is a professor of English Lit at a university in California. She takes it into her head to take a year off and visit various countries in Latin America to see whether or not Jane Austen's books are read and appreciated there. The idea is create temporary book clubs, get the members to read one of the books and then have a discussion. The author is really interested in how these quintessential English characters are perceived by people from countries whose culture could not really be much different. She's brushes up on her Spanish before she goes but finds language is always a barrier, partly because she just hasn't learnt enough but also each country has its own Spanish dialect. I liked this book, I didn't love it and that's partly because I didn't feel like I learnt very much from it. In all honesty I felt the book was more about the author and her illnesses, romances, relatives, quirks, than it was about Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina and Paraguay. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it at all, the people she met were interesting and so was some of the history, but the book has not left a huge impression on me. One for the charity shop box.

Next up, Our Haunted Shores: Tales From the Coasts of The British Isles, edited by Emily Alder, Jimmy Packham and Joan Passey.

So, this collection of weird tales is from the British Library and is pretty much what it says on the tin - ghostly or macabre tales set around the coast. Authors include H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Hugh Walpole, Frances Hodgson Burnett and many more. I would describe this as another 'solid' collection. It begins with a couple of poems and then moves on to three 'anonymous' stories. Which is a shame as I marked one of those as 'excellent', The Strange Student, which is set on the coast of Scotland and tells of two holidaying students, one of whom is a bit fey and goes and falls in love with... well I won't say what but the beautiful descriptions of Argyllshire make the story come alive. Also excellent was, A Ghost of the Sea by Francis Prevost. This is a story about a chap who has an affair with a woman in Egypt, returns and, forgetting about her, gets engaged to someone else. Needless to say the first woman returns and weirdness ensues. This one is set on the North Cornish coast and is very atmospheric. Crooken Sands by Bram Stoker is another good'un, London family holiday in Scotland and Dad decides to get himself up in Scottish garb for the holiday, embarrassing the whole family. This one involves quicksand and doppelgangers. The Sea Raiders by H.G. Wells is an excellent giant squid yarn, as well written as you would expect from Wells. Seashore Macabre by Hugh Walpole lived up to my high expectation of his uncanny tales, but I think my favourite of the whole anthology was The Isle of the Blue Men by Robert W. Sneddon. Young couple living idyllically on a remote Hebridean Island for the summer. Locals say they should leave before winter sets in, 'nod, nod, wink, wink'. They don't of course and instead set sail for an island with a bad reputation, seven miles distant, where three lighthouse men live alone. They're horrified to see a woman arrive. Why? Well... :-) So, not a bad collection in all but folk tales and poetry are not really my thing, luckily some the short stories were excellent and made up for the bits and pieces that weren't really for me. 

Lastly I read, Three Stripes South by Bex Band. This was my Book Voyage read for this month covering the category of, 'The Middle East'.

There's a national trail that runs the length of Israel and it's known as the INT. Bex Band and her husband, Gil, himself an Israeli with family who live there, decide to give up their jobs and walk the length of it. The book charts their progress very nicely and there are other details such as Bex's awkward schooldays and then her search for a job she liked when she left school. Geographically speaking, I wasn't aware of how forested northern Israel is. That was a surprise. A lot of the south of the country is covered by the Negev desert... I knew that a lot of Irael must be desert but I had no idea what it was called and that the country is also very mountainous. I felt in awe of this couple as they trailed up and down mountain after mountain, constantly exhausted, constantly having to watch their water supply, constantly making sure they kept to the schedule to ensure they got to the designated camping areas and didn't end up having to spend a night on top of a mountain. As with most of these travel memoirs they met a lot of interesting and kind people and the nice thing is it all led to a massive career change for Bex and that was genuinely nice to read about.

So here we are almost at the end of the August and although it's not officially autumn until the 21st. September, I'm going with the meteorologists who judge the 1st. September to be the start of autumn. Thus I've already sorted a nice batch of books to read for the next three months - spooky reads and crime yarns mostly. I will do a post about that in a week or so.