A new meme: Bookshelf Travelling For Insane Times

These are difficult and challenging times we find ourselves in so to provide some entertainment for us bookish folk Judith at Reader in the Wilderness has started a new Friday meme. (I know it's Saturday :-) I was rather busy yesterday.) She's calling it 'Bookshelf Travelling For Insane Times' and here are a few details:


This meme involves books that are currently in your house or apartment or the abode where you reside. The books do not have to belong to you necessarily.

1. For each Friday post in the coming weeks while we endure the impossible, select a book shelf, or maybe two shelves, or a bookcase, or maybe a pile of books standing high upon the floor of your bedroom or living room. Or select any other random selection of books. Please don't be hemmed in by spatial constraints or parameters. Do it your way by all means!

2. From that shelf or bookshelves, choose a number of books that you would like to share with us whether you have read them or not. Some of them you may have read long ago and would like to revisit in memory or revisit the experience and time and place of reading the book. If you wish you could share a bit about what you liked or disliked or whatever else you would like to say.
Or select books you hope to read in the future and tell us about a few of them, as many as you like. And do this however you like. Jumble it up however you like.

3. If you'd like and if you're able to, share a photo of either the books, the shelf, the shelves, or whatever you'd like, but this is just a suggestion.

4. Feel free to ruminate and ramble in your discussions, because this is strictly for FUN, and I hope to have a lot of fun when I participate. Do delve into the shelves of your significant others, if that sounds like fun.

5. If you can't do it on a Friday, please feel free to participate on Saturday, Sunday, or Thursday.

A few concepts you can use:

1. Home.
2. Books in the home.
3. Touring books in the home.
4. Books organized or not organized on shelves, in bookcases, in stacks, or heaped in a helter-skelter fashion on any surface, including the floor, the top of the piano, etc.
5. Talking about books and reading experiences from the past, present, or future.

Please visit Judith's blog here and here for more ideas and info.

And here is her first post.

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In other words this is a very flexible meme that we can all have fun with.

So, inspired by Judith who mentioned a book of letters she has by Arthur Conan Doyle and because I've not long finished a book of them by Patrick Leigh Fermor, I thought I'd photograph my own tbr pile of books of letters.

From the bottom:

Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill edited by Mary Soames. I've been interested in the life of Winston Churchill for several years now and have read several books already. This one is 'huge' because they wrote to each other every day, so this is probably a good time to read it given I'll be spending more time than usual at home.

Over the Rim of the World: Selected Letters of Freya Stark, edited by Caroline Moorehead. Freya Stark was one of the most famous travellers and travel writers of the 20th. century. She knew and was friends with Patrick Leigh Fermor, in fact he's written the forward to this so I can't wait to read it.

Canada A Portrait in Letters 1800 - 2000 by Charlotte Gray. This is a portrait of a nation through a collection of letters as it says on the cover. Letters from many, many people included in this, suspect it's going to be fascinating.

Africa in my Blood: An Autobiography in Letters by Jane Goodall and edited by Dale Peterson. These are letters from the early years of naturalist, Jane Goodall, who lived on a wildlife preserve by the shores of Lake Tanganyika and studied chimpanzees.

Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson edited by Ernest Mehew. This is taken from eight volumes of his letters apparently. Wow. That's a lot of letters but then he must've been an interesting man, he certainly wrote some of the most iconic books in the English language.

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh edited by Charlotte Mosley. Two more authors who knew and wrote to Patrick Leigh Fermor. I think this might be the next volume of letters I read given my interest in the Mitford girls. And I wonder if it will lead me to read something fictional by either of them?

So, those are the books of letters I have on my tbr pile at the moment. I have a Goodreads shelf devoted to book of letters here as well so I think it can be said that I like to read volumes of letters by famous and not-so-famous people. It's become a bit of a lost art and I'm not one to point the finger as I used to have dozens of penpals all over the world and wrote endless letters myself during the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

So I hope others will now have a go at this lovely new meme. It's very flexible and unstressful and lots of fun. Go on... you know you want to.

~~~oOo~~~

A couple of murder mysteries

I'm just back from four days in Cornwall, had a lovely time seeing my Cornish family down there and made the most of it because it's clearly going to be a while before we can go again. My husband is 'at risk' from the corona virus, with a heart condition and diabetes, and as such we'll have to isolate ourselves for the duration. I won't be bored... books and book blogging, jigsaws, knitting, cooking, the garden, social media... but I will badly miss my daughters and grandkids. We're a close knit family who support each other in everything and that will be a loss. Still, it's necessary and this too shall pass.

I have a couple of crime book reviews to catch up on, first up, Castle Skull: A Rhineland Mystery by John Dickson Carr. This is my 3rd. book for the European Reading challenge covering the country of 'Germany'.

Fifteen years ago a flamboyant stage magician, Malegar, died when he either fell or was pushed from a moving train. Now an actor friend of his, Myron Alison, has died, set alight and burned to death on the battlements of Malegar's old home, Castle Skull. French detective, Henri Bencolin, and his associate Marle (the narrator of the story) are asked to go to the castle, near Coblenz on the Rhine, to investigate. They stay opposite the castle in the home of the dead man, Alison, which is now being lived in by his sister, Agatha. A whole list of suspects are also staying, along with Bencolin and Marle... can the two men, plus the German police, get to the bottom of this mystery?

There's a lot more to this story than I've outlined, to be honest I found the plot quite hard to follow, overly melodramatic, and was constantly confused as who was who and what happened when. My confusion did clear as the book moved on and I did begin to enjoy it a bit more. But I never did take to the detective, Bencolin, didn't feel that his character was fleshed out at all and mostly the book was inhabited by a large cast of very unpleasant people. What did come over strongly was a sense of the Rhine, the dangers of the river, its moods, the high cliffs and hills on either side, the traffic on it and so on. I enjoyed that aspect more than the mystery if I'm honest and will see if I can see any non-fiction books about the river and its history.


Next, Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell, I saw this reviewed on Pat's blog and thought it sounded rather good: it was.

Laurel Mack's teenage daughter, Ellie, went missing ten years ago. The family, Laurel, her husband, Paul, and two older teenage children, basically imploded. The marriage slowly fell apart and the two older children moved out as soon as they could. Ellie disappeared off the face of the Earth that day but Laurel has never given up hope that she will be found alive or at the very least her body found so that the family can have closure. She's having coffee in a café one day when a man walks in and starts to chat to her. He's Floyd, an American, and gradually the two begin a relationship. The odd thing is, he has a nine year old daughter, Poppy, who, shockingly, looks just like Ellie. How can this possibly be?

I read this in two sittings and actually had to make myself stop the first session and go and cook a meal. It really is a pageturner. And different as there aren't any police or private investigators, just Laurel trying to sort her life out and be normal for the first time in ten years, but this question of what happened to Ellie, unsurprisingly, just won't go away. The book is quite agonising to be honest because of course the reader knows or can guess at things that Laurel can't see. There are multiple viewpoints but it's not confusing, very cleverly done in fact. In essence, a scary, psychological sort of book... not always my thing but this one worked very well indeed for me.

I hope everyone who visits and reads this blog stays safe. A few of us have decided to try and post more often during this crisis to keep people's spirits up, please join us! Judith at Reader in the Wilderness plans to start a Friday meme so go and read her initial post about it here. It sounds like a lot of fun and we all need that at the moment. Take care.

~~~oOo~~~

It seems I can't stop buying books!

As an experiment for this year I thought I'd keep count of the number of new books I acquire. In previous years I've just bought books willy-nilly, I've not kept a record. Consequently, I never have any idea come the end of the year whether I've made any impact on the number of books on my TBR pile or not, suspecting that I may well have bought more new books than I've actually taken off it. So this year I thought I'd change that and monitor it.

So, I created a shelf on Goodreads and every time I buy a new book I add it there. And it makes for interesting reading. I'm a bit shocked to see that the shelf now has 13 books on it... and we're only halfway through March. But the breakdown is interesting, it seems that only 3 of these books are physical... actually adding to the number of books on my shelves. The other 10 are sitting on my Kindle. I think what I've subconsciously done is been happy to to buy ebooks but tried not to add too many real books to my TBR mountain shelves. What I have to work out is whether or not this is OK. Is it cheating when I'm trying not to add too many books to the pile to quietly sneak them onto my Kindle instead and hope no one notices? It's a very grey area. After all, ebooks take up no room and they don't worry me, it's the number of books on my shelves that I'm trying to reduce so that when we downsize in a few years it won't be so difficult when I find I don't have room for as many.

Anyway, just out of interest I checked my '2020-my books read' shelf and counted the number of physical books read or being read off my TBR shelf: they number 12. So that's 3 physical books in, 12 out, now that makes for more cheerful reading. I think. *Tries not to look shifty*

So which ebooks have I bought recently? Let's start with these three crime yarns:



Deep Waters edited by Martin Edwards is what it says on the tin - a selection of short stories all about water, the sea, rivers, even swimming pools I gather. I never can resist these vintage themed anthologies from Martin Edwards.

A Watery Grave by Joan Druett is the first in a historical crime series, set in the 1800s, about 'Wiki Coffin' who goes to sea with The United States Exploring Expedition. I spotted this series on Cathy at Kittling Books' blog.

Lying and Dying by Graham Brack. This is book 1 in the 'Josef Slonsky' series, set in Prague. I'll be reading this for the European Reading challenge.

Next:



Winter Cottage by Mary Ellen Taylor is set in Virginia and is a family history and family secrets kind of book. At the princely sum of £1 I thought it was a no-brainer.

A Kilo of String by Rob Johnson. Brits olive farming in Greece. Another one for the European reading challenge.

Why the Dutch are Different: A Journey into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands by Ben Coates. Another self-explanatory title and another book for the European reading challenge.

And just for the record, these are the three physical books I've bought this year:



The Nine of Us: Growing up Kennedy by Jean Kennedy Smith. A rec from Nan at Letters From a Hill Farm

The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures edited by Mike Ashley. Because, obviously, you can never have enough Sherlock Holmes.

The Aeneid by Virgil. Well, I thought I'd give it go...

So what am I? A Lost Cause when it comes to my book-buying habit? It certainly looks like it. But you know what? I don't think I'll fall into a decline over it. Judging by all of your blogs, I'm in very good company.

~~~oOo~~~

Six Degrees of Separation: from Wolfe Island to The Glass Guardian

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is a monthly meme hosted by Books are my Favourite and Best.

Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge.

A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the ones next to them in the chain.

This month's chain begins with Wolfe Island by Lucy Treloar.

I haven't read this book and probably won't as I think it's dystopian and I'm not fond of that genre. It's set on an island in Chesapeake Bay, a very beautiful area, I've been there and can vouch for that.

Also set on an island but this time on Lake Superior is, A Superior Death by Nevada Barr.

The island is Isle Royale NP and this is an Anna Pigeon murder mystery, very exciting and informative about the area, I absolutely loved the book. Must get back to the series.

Isle Royale is part of Michigan which borders Lake Superior. Another state which borders that lake is Wisconsin and a book set in Wisconsin is The Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

This is the very first 'Little House' book featuring the Ingalls family. The narrator of them all is Laura, very young in this book of course but we still learn a lot as we experience a year living in the forests of Wisconsin in the late 1800s. Charming and delightful.

Another book featuring a 'Laura' is Love Letters by Katie Fforde.

This Laura works in a bookshop, a job she loves until the shop has to close. She takes a job organising a Literary Festival and gets into all kinds of trouble with one of the male authors. My favourite bits were the depictions of the romance and chick-lit authors who appeared to be having more fun than anyone. A fun read.

Another book with 'Letters' in the title is Letters From Skye by Jessica Brockmole.

This is a story of letters exchanged between a young writer of a book of poetry who lives on the Isle of Skye and an American who volunteers to drive ambulances at The Front in World War One. The Isle of Skye features very strongly, a beautiful but restricted place to live for a young woman.

Skye is also the setting for The Glass Guardian by Linda Gillard.

This is a delightful book about a woman, a TV gardening presenter, who suffers several deaths very close to her and goes to The Isle of Skye to grieve... to the home of her deceased aunt which has been left to her in her aunt's will. The supernatural plot is complicated but absorbing, for more see the link to my review above.

So, I've travelled from an island in Chesapeake Bay,to Lake Superior and Wisconsin and thus to England (with a quick foray to Ireland in that one), finally finishing on another island, the beautiful Isle of Skye where I have never been but hope to go one day.

Next month's Six Degrees will begin with Stasiland by Anna Funder.

~~~oOo~~~

Books for March, TBR shelves & knitting

How about some bookish photos for a wet March day? Not that I'm bored or anything..........

First up, books I plan to read this month. Maybe.

My camera gave up the ghost recently, well it was easily 15 years old, possibly 20, and I can't decide whether or not to buy a new one. These are taken with my phone and I think they're ok so I may not bother, I have a new Kindle Fire 10 which takes super photos too so maybe I don't need an actual camera. I'm so terrible at decisions like this. Anyway, my 'to read' pile for March, bit ambitious perhaps with two classics on there but I would like to read one of those at least and a few of the others.

And these are the 3 books I'm currently concentrating on reading:



The Patrick Leigh Fermor and the Frederick Forsyth are excellent, enjoying those very much. Castle Skull by John Dickson Carr I'm a bit iffy about. It's a bit melodramtic but I'm not that far in so hopefully it will grow on me. Nice cover though and if I can get to the end it will be perfect for Germany for the European Reading Challenge as it does have a nice sense of the river Rhine.

Back at the beginning of January I did a post with a photo of the shelf I'm trying to read from this year. It wasn't a very good photo so I'm putting these two up instead. Various books have been pulled out or discarded so it is slightly different but it gives me a good idea of where I'm heading... or trying to head.

The top shelf of the 2nd. pic has more tbrs of course. On the left a few books for the European challenge again, next to those some BLCC vintage crime yarns I want to read this year etc. etc.

And I mentioned to a few people, Yvonne, Judith and Cathy I think, that I was going to start knitting again. So I did. I haven't knitted in what must be well over 20 years so I thought I'd start simple and knit myself a scarf in some pretty wool. This is my progress so far:

It's a double moss stitch pattern, I think maybe I choose wool that was a bit too dark to show the pattern properly but no matter, I'm pleased with it. Long way to go if I want it to be about 5ft. long but 'mighty oaks from little acorns' and all that.

Happy March reading... and knitting if you're a knitter.

~~~oOo~~~

Books read in February

I can't really believe that in the shortest month of the year I've managed to read 11 books (and it's almost 12). How on earth that happened I don't know, my average is generally 6. And I have to say, quality-wise, which after all is the important thing, it's been an excellent month.

February books:

7. The Icelandic Adventures of Pike Ward - K.J. Findlay

8. Howards End is on the Landing - Susan Hill. I think this is my 2nd. or 3rd. reread of one of my favourite books about books.

9. The Returning Tide - Liz Fenwick

10. The Giant Rat of Sumatra - Richard L. Boyer

11. Unnatural Causes - Dr. Richard Shepherd

12. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club - Dorothy L. Sayers

13. St. Peter's Fair - Ellis Peters. Cadfael helping to solve the death of a Bristol Merchant at the annual St. Peter's Fair. Quite good.

14. The Leper of St. Giles - Ellis Peters. Cadfael investigates when a prospective groom, much older than the bride, is murdered. Suspicion falls upon one of his squires who it is thought is in love with the bride, his disappearance seems to give credence to the theory. This one was really excellent.

15. The Stone Circle - Elly Griffiths

Archaeologist, Ruth Galloway, is called in when the skeletal remains of two young girls are found on a henge site on the Norfolk saltmarshes. One turns out to be a Bronze Age burial, the other is Margaret Lacey, a 12 year old girl who disappeared some 30 years ago. The case is reopened and Nelson is heading the investigation with Ruth's help of course. Michelle has had her baby, a boy, further complicating everyone's lives but strangely, pulling her into the investigation too. Another excellent Ruth Galloway instalment. I'm not keen on the child abduction theme if I'm honest, but it didn't prevent me from enjoying the book. I read this series not just for the murder mystery but also for an update on the lives of Ruth and Kate, Nelson, Michelle and their kids, Judy and the wonderful Cathbad and so on. The books are a joy.

16. Beyond the Footpath - Clare Gogerty. This non-fiction is all about pilgrimages, not just of the religious variety but also to other spiritual sites, mountains, forests, lakes, ancient trees, locations of favourite books etc. That last one was my favourite section in a book that was interesting in parts but not so much in others. A pic of the cover is in my header photo.

17. Evening Class - Maeve Binchy


So there we are, 11 books of which 4 were non-fiction, 7 fiction. I majored as usual on crime fiction, 5 of those, all very good. But really it was a mixed bag and although the murder mysteries were good, my favourite two books turned out to be these:


I'm not sure what this kind of fiction is called now, 'modern' fiction? Whatever, I'm rather surprised that I enjoyed these two so much that they ended as favourites of the month. I can see that it means something and that something is probably that I should read more of these family orientated stories that often concern secrets from the past. I didn't know I had such a taste for them and am truly surprised.

So, onwards into March and hopefully more good books. I'll do a separate post on what I plan to read this month, the problem is there are so many of them...

~~~oOo~~~

Evening Class

Evening Class by Maeve Binchy is my second book for the European Reading Challenge 2020, which is being hosted by Rose City Reader. It covers the country of 'Ireland'.

Aidan Dunne, staid, a bit plodding, but clever, teaches Latin in a secondary school in Dublin. The head of the school is retiring and Aidan is quietly confident that he will get the position. At home, his wife and two grown-up daughters ignore him so he needs this new role to restore some pride in himself and to give him a renewed purpose in life.

Nora O'Donoghue has recently returned to Ireland after 20 years living in a small village in Sicily. She went there following the love of her life, Mario, whom she'd had an affair with in London. When he returned to Italy to marry a woman his family had always assumed he would marry, Nora went too, much to Mario's disgust. She took up residence opposite the hotel he owned, became known to the villagers as 'Signora', and stayed there until he died in a car accident. Up to then her presence in the village had been tolerated and she had friends, but suddenly it's made clear to her that she must go for the sake of the widow. Back in Ireland, estranged from her family, she has to build a new life for herself.

The headship does not come Aidan's way. Instead he's offered a chance he's always wanted, that of setting up evening classes at the school. One of these classes will be 'Italian' as Aidan is very much in love with that country and its language, but first he has to find a teacher and thirty people who want to attend the lessons.

Well of course there's a lot more to the book than that brief introduction, it is after all 400 pages long (540 in some versions). There's quite a large cast of characters and about half a dozen of them get long chapters to themselves. There's Bill the staid Bank Officer who falls in love with vivacious spendthrift Lizzie. There's Fran trying to give her teenage sister, Kathy, a better start in life than she had by encouraging her in her studies. There's Lou, indulging in petty crime that slowly becomes not so petty until he meets Suzi, a waitress with ambitions. And there's Laddy with learning difficulties who wants to go to Italy. Each one is somehow connected to another character, or a member of that character's family, but doesn't always realise it, a bit like 'six degrees of separation'. And you don't always realise it either, or at least I didn't, until there's a small moment of revelation and you think, 'Oh, that's so and so's daughter' or 'That's thingy's mother'.

The pivotal character in the book is the Signora... Nora O'Donaghue. It's her that has the ability to bring people together to solve problems: after 20 years of waiting for Mario she's learnt patience and tolerance, a sort of modest quietness that somehow inspires people to do their best so as not to let her down. She's a gentle soul who acts as a catalyst for a whole group of people whose lives are far from perfect, in some cases tragic, somehow or other enhancing their lives in ways they could never have imagined when they signed up to learn a new language.

This is my first book by Maeve Binchy. I'd heard of the Irish author of course (she died in 2012, aged 72) and knew how popular her books were. I just didn't think they were my kind of thing which only goes to show how very wrong you can be. I absolutely loved Evening Class, such beautiful story telling about real people with what seem like insurmountable problems but stressing that there's always hope, always a way out, a solution, if you just set your mind to it... ask for help from your friends. I'm certain this won't be the last book I read by this author, she wrote seventeen books, I just need to work out which of them will appeal to me next.

~~~oOo~~~