Just finished and currently reading.

So, it's been quite a good reading month so far. This week I finished two non-fictions I've been reading for several weeks and a crime fiction novel that didn't take me quite as long.

First up, the crime novel which was, Two for Sorrow by Nicola Upson. This is the third book in the author's 'Josephine Tey' series in which she imagines the famous crime author investigating murders in the 1930s, alongside her friend and Scotland yard detective, Archie Penrose.

Josephine is staying at her club in London and, to her delight, no one knows she is there so she has a few days of freedom. Her club, The Cowdray, is for women only and is being run by a former nursing teacher of Josephine's, Celia Bannerman. It's also attached and connected to a teaching hospital for nurses. Archie's cousins, Ronnie and Lettice Motley, who make costumes for West End theatres, are currently working on costumes for a gala night which will raise money for the nursing hospital. Tey is currently working on a fictional account of a notorious baby farming case from the early 1900s, the result of which saw two women, Amelia Sachs and Annie Walters, hanged for the murders of babies who were mainly illegitimate. Celia Bannerman has a connection to one of the hanged women, she was a prison warder at the prison where she was being held and looked after Amelia Sachs on the eve of her death. The Motley sisters employ female ex-convicts and Marjorie Baker is one of them. When she is murdered in a particularly brutal manner, Archie, with some help from Josephine, has to somehow untangle this convoluted mess to see who is connected to whom and where Josephine's historial case fits into it. I don't think I've made a very good fist of explaining this complicated story and plotline. I lost track about two thirds through, trying to remember who was connected to whom and why. That said, the book was quite gripping and Upson's writing is always top-notch. You might even call this book a historical with a crime element, 'maybe'. There is also quite a lot of Josephine's backstory, romance-wise. Will she plump for a lesbian relationship with her friend's ex, Marta? (Having already read book 9, I know the answer to this of course.) All in all, a decent read, if very complicated and full of baby farming detail some might find disturbing, so beware if that's not your thing... but I learnt an awful lot about a subject I previously did not know much about. 

The two non-fictions were, firstly, The View from Mary's Farm by Edie Clark, which was kindly sent to me by Nan from Letters from a Hillfarm. This is a delightful book of essays which have appeared as columns in the Yankee Magazine. In each one she tells stories of how she bought and went to live on an old farm in New Hampshire that was built in 1762, before the USA actually came into being. She talks about so many varied things, mainly country life and what it's like living out in the wilds of the New Hampshire countryside. I particularly loved hearing how she prepared for winter, the awful storms they got and how she hunkered down inside, warm and cosy by the fire. But there was also cooking, the neighbours, the vagueries of her tractor, painting her Adirondack chair (I saw some of those in the Blue Ridge mtns.), Thanksgiving and so on. This collection is beautifully written and I absolutely loved it. I'll be reading it again someday. 

And secondly, The Pleasure of Reading a collection of bookish essays put together by Antonia Fraser. This is pretty much what it says on the tin, the great and the good talking about how they learnt to read and developed their reading tastes. It was interesting in parts but I couldn't help getting the feeling that for many it was a place to display their cleverness and taste for classics that a lot of people will not even have heard of. There also seemed to be a conspiracy to look down on the likes of Enid Blyton, C.S. Lewis and so forth. A few were interesting to me, such as Ruth Rendall, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Wendy Cope, Catherine Cookson. Sue Townsend amused me with this;

The first erotic book I read was about a Spanish bullfighter. I don't recall the title or the author but I certainly remember the delicious anticipation it aroused in me. I couldn't wait to grow up and have a sexual experience. Though Spanish bullfighters were thin on the ground in Leicester.

All in all a bit of a hit and miss collection but not a bad bedtime read.

So current reads. This first of all:

 

On Basilisk Station by David Weber is a piece of space opera science-fiction. It's the first in the author's Honor Harrington series: Honor is a fairly new captain of a star-ship belonging to the planet Manticore.  For one reason or another, mainly political, the ship and crew end up with a duff assignment in the middle of nowhere but I'm assuming things turn interesting. I'm only 100 pages in and it's good so far. The book is part of my personal aim to read more science-fiction this year. 

And then this:

William Horwood is the author of the Duncton Wood series of books but he also wrote four sequels to The Wind in the Willows. This is the first of them, The Willows in Winter, and a reread for me - I plan to read all four ending with The Willows at Christmas (which I have not read) hopefully some time in December. Please don't throw rotten tomatoes at me for discussing next Christmas in January...

I hope you're all keeping well this cold January and finding lots of good books to read.