The Cold Dish

Last week was rather busy, so over the past couple of weeks I've only read a couple of books. Both were crime books and both were new series for me. The first of those was Cold Dark House by Christopher Fowler. I'm not going to review it properly, it was a good book, possibly a trifle overlong and too much theatre detail, but it was quirky and fun. I'm just not certain that it was all I expected it to be. I'll read the other two books I own in the series but not sure if I'll read further than that. The better of the two by far was The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson.

Walt Longmire has been sheriff of Absaroka county in Wyoming for 24 years. He's coming up to retirement but after losing his wife four years ago his job is all he's got. Truthfully he has yet to come to terms properly with her death, the house they were building together is still uncompleted and a bit of a wreck, he's drinking too much, and his friends and family are worried about him. Walt's dreams of retirement are shattered when the body of Cody Pritchard is found in the mountains. Cody was one of four teenage boys accused of raping a Cheyenne girl. They got off with light sentences and although Walt wonders if the death was an accident it somehow doesn't seem likely. He sets about investigating with the help of his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, a Cheyenne, and his staff who're nothing if not a varied bunch. It seems the weapon used to kill the boy was an old-fashioned Sharpe's rifle and that only a few people would be capable of making such a shot at long range. It had to be murder, so are the other three boys' lives now in danger? Walt has to find a way to protect them while being alive to the sensitivities of the local Native Americans. No easy task. And then another of the boys is found murdered...

It took me several chapters to get into this one and I was probably about halfway through before I realised that I really was enjoying it. By the end, I loved it. Why? Well it was certainly a good mystery, so that helps. I had no idea who had done the deed until close to the end which is always fun. More than that though I found the characters got under my skin. Longmire himself is an excellent main character, flawed, very human, just doing his best in difficult circumstances. His relationship with Henry Standing Bear is wonderfully poignant, full of humour, their exchanges are sometimes hilarious. Henry himself is also a fantastic character, and there are several other Native Americans who are also interesting as well as Vic, Walt's female deputy. I love the way they all try to engineer a date for Walt and the awkward way Walt feels on the date after so many years out of the dating scene. Wonderful.

The other big plus for me with this book was the setting. I had heard of The Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming of course but knew very little about them.

From this book I got an excellent idea of how it is to live in the shadow of these iconic mountains, the beauty, the bleakness, the isolation, the weather. One long scene has Walt having to facilitate a rescue in a snow-storm in the mountains and I'm not exaggerating when I say it's one of the best scenes of that nature I've ever read. Fantastic... both in the description but also in the spiritual aspects the author injects into the story. I'm not always that keen on that kind of thing but the way in which it was handled here was skilful and it worked wonderfully for me. It's a long time since I've read a book that had more of a sense of place than this.

To tell the truth I'm still thinking about this book and its characters and I'm having trouble starting something new. I have book 2 and have ordered 3 and 4 from Amazon but wanted to read something else before I carry on with the series. I shall be going back to Absaroka county very soon though.

I read this book as part of my What's in a Name challenge which is being hosted by Beth Fish Reads. It covers the category of 'something you would find in your kitchen'. It also qualifies very well for my own USA challenge for the state of Wyoming.
~~~oOo~~~

Jigsaw puzzles

I know I have mentioned the fact that I do jigsaw puzzles here, and I know I've put the odd picture up with a book post. However, I don't think I've ever done a post dedicated entirely to jigsaw puzzles, if I have, I can't find it. So, inspired by several other jigsaw puzzle posts which I'll put at the end, I thought I would pop up a few pics of the four jigsaws I've done since Christmas.

First up was Cobblestone Evening a painting by American artist, Thomas Kincade. Paintings are by far my favourite kind of puzzle and this one was so nice to do with nice thick pieces which stayed where they were put. I've done several by this artist and will do more when I can find them. This one belongs to my eldest daughter.

Next is Britain from the Air, a collection of famous British scenes which also belongs to my daughter. I thought this would be easy and then it wasn't. LOL.

Next is a photographic scene of Vernazza in Italy. My Italian geography is not good so I don't even know which part of Italy this is, but what a lovely town. I bought this one in a charity shop, which is where I get most of my puzzles as they are rather expensive to buy new, and I do so many that the cost would be prohibitive. It was quite easy and straightforward to do, until I got to all that sea...

Last and most recent is a puzzle entitled, One of the Family. This is a painting by Victorian artist Frederick G. Cotman. This one is slightly bigger than the others at 1,500 pieces (the rest are all 1,000) and was a bit tricky really. A lot of pieces looking the same, and all that brown was really hard and took me several days to do. But I really enjoyed doing it, the only downside being, as the eagle-eyed will have noticed, there's a piece missing. This is the penalty you pay for buying puzzles in charity shops. More often than not it's fine and they're complete, but just occasionally they're not and this is one of those instances. Oh well.

So that's what I've been spending the cold and wet months of January and February doing, as well as devouring books of course.

Some other jigsaw puzzle posts:

Yvonne at Fiction Books

Margaret at Books Please

Peggy Ann at Peggy Ann's Post who has put up a virtual version of One of the Family for anyone to do.
~~~oOo~~~

Down the Nile

My first two books of February I haven't reviewed. This is because some months ago I decided not to try and review every single book I read, not because I haven't liked the books but really it's to do with time and a sore neck and shoulders when I spend hours typing away on the computer. So now I review books that have had a real impact on me and do 'mentions' of the others.

So today I will 'mention' Fall of a Philanderer by Carola Dunn. It's book 14 in the author's 'Daisy Dalrymple' series and is set in a seaside village in Devon. I have to say, it's absolutely one of my favourites of the entire series, probably because of the setting but also her husband, Alec, a police inspector, is in it a lot and that suits me just fine. I'll also 'mention' A Book of Frank Herbert by, of course, Frank Herbert. Not sure why this book of science fiction short stories is so oddly titled, but there you go. As with all books of short stories, some I liked and some were a bit so-so. Frank Herbert was never one of my favourite science fiction authors, unlike my husband, Dune did nothing for me at all, had no idea what all the fuss was about to be honest. But such is life, it would be boring if we all liked the same thing. This was not a bad book and one or two stories were excellent, but it's now sitting in the charity shop box ready to be donated.

So, an actual review and it's a book I saw mentioned on Pinterest of all places... I say 'of all places'... Pinterest is actually awash with bookish folk and libraries... wonderful. And the book is, Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff by Rosemary Mahoney.

Author, Rosemary Mahoney (I think she's written a clutch of non-fiction, mainly travel books) is an American who lives in the state of Maine. She's been rowing for about 10 years I gather and took it up because she lives on a small island and needed a way to get to the mainland. She does most of her rowing in Narragansett Bay - I love trying to get my tongue around these names, I presume it's a Native American word. I Googled it as I hadn't heard of it and it seems it's the bay that surrounds Rhode Island... it looks *so* beautiful.

Anyway, the author develops a yearning to row a boat down The Nile from Aswan to the coast on The Med. This was after a normal trip to Egypt where she did the usual tourist thing with a tour boat and guides. She knows this is not going to be easy, not because it's physically difficult, she's sure it won't be, but because she'll be a woman in a country where women have no status whatsoever and no power. Buying the boat in Egypt was likely to be the hardest thing, as women never buy boats, and so it proved to be. Mahoney kicked her heals in Aswan for weeks, approaching boat owners and being laughed at and ridiculed.

What tourists normally do in Aswan is hire a felucca...

... of which there are many, with a small crew, and see the sights that way. Luckily for her she eventually meets Amr, the only local captain of a felucca who has any sensitivity and understanding, a gentle man who treats her as an equal. She meets his family, mother and sister, and gradually gets to trust him enough to tell him what she wants to do. He suggests she find a boat and he will follow her in his felucca for part of the way, a female friend of the author, working in Cairo, also joins them and this is how Rosemary eventually sets out on her journey.

Goodness, what an eye opener this book was for me. I'll be honest, Egypt is not a country I give an awful lot of thought to... bar its history which of course is quite fascinating. This book was written in 2009, just before The Arab Spring and Hosni Mubarak was still in power. I bet the author never imagined he would be gone within a couple of years. What had happened of course was that 62 members of a tour group had been hacked to death at Luxor in 1997 and tourism had never fully recovered. This lack of recovery, for me, was the shocking thing. I suppose I knew it, but unless you read a book like this, the effect it had on thousands of inhabitants of a very poor country never really hits home. Egypt relied entirely on tourists for income and that went with the massacre and now with more troubles in the country, presumably the situation is still dire.

Mahoney describes in great detail the way the people live, the extreme poverty, how women are treated - by that I mean local women and white women. I found it profoundly disturbing. Egyptian women are basically kitchen slaves and the men have absolutely no respect for them whatsoever. The men's attitude to white women is unprintable, mind... some of the behaviour of European women who holiday in the country is also unprintable. I told you this book was an eye opener for me...

The actual rowing bit of the book is sort of secondary to the social side. Nevertheless it is interesting and there are descriptive passages which are stunning, I really 'got' Egypt and the feel of it from the book. I daresay I will never go there but at least now I have much more of an understanding of the country than I ever had before.

Another side to the book was also excellent and that's the way the author used trips by famous people from Victorian times to illustrate how the country was then and is now. Shockingly, not a lot has changed! Principally she used writings from Florence Nightingale's Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile and Gustave Flaubert's Flaubert in Egypt, a Sensibilty on Tour and compares their attitudes to what they found in the country. That was amusing. Flaubert was overly emotional and sensitve and loved prostitutes, Nightingale was a very down-to-earth Victorian woman who skipped up the pyramids ahead of her guides! Winston Churchill also apparently went down the Nile, his book My African Journey is available on Amazon. I'd love to read them all to be honest.

This is a book that's so worth reading. It illustrates perfectly how you can be completely ignorant of the way a country is, read a book, and then *not* be quite so ignorant any more. I love how that can happen simply by picking up a book in the library. This will definitely be one of my non-fiction reads of the year. I simply loved it and am hoping to find more books by Rosemary Mahoney, a really terrific author.
~~~oOo~~~

Books for January

I tend to average six books a month so it looks like I had quite a good reading month in January. Especially as in years gone by I often found Janaury was a kind of slump month for me, reading-wise. No idea why that was but it doesn't seem to be the case this year as I read seven books last month. I'm not so interested in the number as I am the mix. Of the seven books, four were fiction and three non-fiction and I'm quite happy with that, delighted in fact as one of my reading 'hopes' for this year was to read a lot more non-fiction.

Anyway, books read last month were:

1. Rifling Through My Drawers by Clarissa Dickson Wright - essays of her comings and goings through a typical year. Very enjoyable.

2. High Rising by Angela Thirkell. From my review you can see how much I enjoyed this one and I plan to read more.

3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. Brilliant.

4. Serving Victoria by Kate Hubbard. Superb.

5. Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. Reminded me why I love classic science fiction as much as I do and made me look into a few more space opera type books, with help from that skilled enabler, Geranium Cat. I now have a whole bunch of them including, Consider Phlebus by Ian. M. Banks, Helliconia Spring by Brian Aldis, The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and Hyperion by Dan Simmons (library book). So I can forsee a good science fiction year this year.

6. & 7. Tempest Rising and Tracking the Tempest by Nicole Peeler. A few brief words about these two.

These books feature Jane True who lives a pretty ordinary life in small town in Maine, working in a bookshop and looking after her father who has a heart condition. Two things make Jane stand out. Her mother mysteriously disappeared when Jane was six, almost as mysteriously as she appeared in the town after a violent storm. And Jane knows herself to be slightly odd anyway, as she has an addiction to the ocean and swimming in it - often dangerous swimming involving a local whirlpool. In fact she feels she may have been partly responsible for the drowning of her first boyfriend. Jane's life changes forever when a body is found on the beach where she swims, and murder is suspected. One night, Jane is chased on the way to her cove by a huge dog and there she is approached by a tiny woman, Nell, a gnome, and told she is a halfling, half human, half selkie. The dog is Anyan a shape shifter. She's told that the dead man, who jane knew from the bookshop was also a halfling and that her life could also be in danger. Someone would come to investigate. That *someone* turns out to be a vampire, Ryu, and Jane finds herself falling for him. Ryu introduces Jane to a hidden world of supernatural beings of all descriptions that exists in secret and that humans have never known about. But someone is out to add Jane to their list of murdered halflings and Ryu has his work cut out keeping Jane safe.

In the second book Jane is back in Rockabill and Ryu in Boston and the two are trying to conduct a long-distance relationship. On Valentine's Day he sends her airline tickets to visit her for the weekend and she goes, anticipating a wonderfully romantic weekend. What she gets is murder and mayhem. A fire-demon halfling, Conleth, is on the loose and taking revenge for a lifetime of captivity it seems. Jane believes there may be a connection between where he was kept and some supernatural beings she ran foul of at the King and Queen's court; one, Jarl, had in fact tried to kill her, unbeknownst to Ryu. So he is hard to convince. Until it's discovered that Conleth has developed an unhealthy obsession with Jane and is probaly coming after her... but with what end in mind?

I do quite enjoy having a kind of 'nonsense' series on the go that is light and fun and completely daft. These books have a lot of humour in them, an element of crime, and quite a lot of the supernatural. I enjoyed hearing about the various supernatural beings, and Jane is a fun heroine. I like her determination to remain independent and in the second book she underlines this quite strongly; things don't quite turn out as you'd imagine, romance-wise. These are not children's book's or even YA... they're definitely for adults as there is a small degree of eroticism, nothing offensive, but something to bear in mind if that's not your bag. These will probably be my light reads of 2013 - along with my Daisy Dalrymple books by Carola Dunn, as I still have six of those left to read. There are six Jane True books altogether, although that sixth book is not out until May I believe.

I'm currently reading a Daisy Dalrymple book - Fall of a Philanderer which I'm loving as it's set in a Devon seaside village. Also dipping into The Book of Frank Herbert which is a science fiction anthology by the author of Dune. This month I'd like to read a book of letters, something about Queen Victoria, some Wilkie Collins, and some more science fiction. We'll see how that pans out, I'll probably end up reading none of those!
~~~oOo~~~

Two quick reviews

This past week has been a story of snow, snow and more snow. Not that we've had feet of the white stuff but just a steady fall, then a slight thaw and then more over the last couple of days. So we have a white garden and the hills around are white but the roads are passable and there hasn't been too much inconvenience. It could have been a lot worse. I've learnt not to venture out in it though, having slipped over on ice in the bad winter of 2010/2011, I'm not keen to repeat the experience, so I mainly stayed in and read, so I have a couple of books to do quick reviews of.

I'll start with this one, Serving Victoria by Kate Hubbard.

I picked this up in the library after watching the three part BBC documentary series on Queen Victoria and her children. The doc. was so good and so interesting that I realised I wanted to know more about one of our most famous monarchs. What this book does is chart Victoria's reign from start to finish from the eyes of the people who served her. By that I don't mean those who cleaned or waited or cooked, I mean those higher up the pecking order, Charlotte Canning, lady of the bedchamber, the woman who was in charge of the children, Sarah Lyttleton, Victoria's personal physician, John Reid, her chaplain, Randall Davidson. Also the notorious people she took to her heart, the Scotsman, John Brown, and her personal servant known as The Munchi, who was Indian and could do no wrong, despite driving the whole court completely mad. Victoria's children also figure quite heavily of course and, naturally, her marriage to Albert. When he died she was devastated as she relied on him completely and utterly and clearly loved him to distraction. She was never the same again and, although this book is a very honest account of the queen's personality, her need to control every single thing that went on at court, her stubborness, her tendency to bury her head in the sand when it came to the misdeeds of her favourites, you can't help but sympathise with this very human woman, cut completely adrift when the love of her life dies young. It's heart-breaking and made me ponder on the morality of having royalty at all, even though I do actually believe in the monarchy. I know they live a luxurious life and want for nothing, but goodness me, the price they pay for that is very high. Their lives are not their own, we expect nothing short of perfection from them, shove them up on a pedestal and then complain when they make a wrong move and prove to be human just like the rest of us. Should we really do that to any human being...

Anyway, this was a fascinating book. Hearing about Victoria's life from the point of view of people who knew her better than anyone was rivetting. It sounds like it might be a cushy job, living and working at court but of course it was not (and probably still isn't). The Queen was demanding, there were petty rivalries and jealousies, and people like Henry Ponsonby, who basically ran the royal household - I forget his offical title - was sometimes worked to total exhaustion and ended up being hospitalised in order to recover. So much to say about this book that it's impossible in a brief review, to say it all. If you have any interest at all in Queen Victoria's reign this is a *must read*. It's not a quick read, I took over a week to work my way through it, but it is an extremely rewarding read and well worth the effort.

My second book could not be more different - I like to ring the changes - it's the classic science fiction story, Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke.

It's 2131 and the Solar system is now a confederation of planets. Mars, Mercury and various moons, including our own have been colonised. A computer known as SPACEGUARD is logging asteroids and their threat to the human race when its radar locates something rather different. It turns out to be a massive cylindrical object, not an asteroid, and has clearly been made by another intelligence. Humans name the spacecraft, 'Rama', and the spaceship, Endeavour, is sent to investigate. Its captain is Commander Norton who has two wives, one on Earth and one on Mars (things are very different in the future, LOL). The commander and his second-in-command enter what is clearly a space-ship, but having absolutely no idea what they will find inside. The interior is huge, about 40km in length 7km wide, and in complete darkness. In order to get to the 'surface' (this is complicated) they have to climb down a staircase which is miles long. The logistics of this place are almost mind boggling but this is the first time humans have had any contact whatsoever with alien intelligence and it must be investigated. It's thought the craft is merely passing through the Solar system, but what if it's not? What if there is another agenda altogether? Time is short and these questions need to be answered.

I feel like I may have read this book before, or rather, like I *should* have read it, but I'm not entirely sure. It felt fresh and new but bits seemed familiar. It doesn't matter. This is one of those odd books where not a huge amount happens. It's not pacey and hugely plot-driven, in fact it's quite casual as it tells you all about physics and how alien civilisations might differ from ours and how they might solve the problem of travelling through space. It sounds like it might it might be rather dry but in fact it's not at all. The physics was quite understandable, though I did struggle with the concept of a sea that went right around a cylinder and didn't fall down. But Clarke makes it clear that that's ok, because the characters in the book are also struggling with this, and many other concepts, in the book. This not a character-driven book. You don't get to know anyone that intimately. The book is really all about the alien spacecraft; I would even say that 'Rama' is the main character in the book. That might seem very odd but it works wonderfully. There's a reason why some of these older sci fi books are called classics and I can easily understand why this one is numbered amongst them. It maintains a sense of awe right the way through, even though you would not call it exciting or even a page-turner. It takes clever writing and a clever writer to achieve that and I can honestly say I absolutely loved this book.

I'll be reading more by Arthur C. Clarke. Oddly enough we lived for eight years in the town where he was born, Minehead in Somerset, although he lived most of his life in Sri Lanka. While we were there, there was talk that he wanted to fund some kind of science centre in the town (he didn't die until 2008). Sadly it never happened, I'm not sure why, but it's rather a shame as it's a small town with a large Butlins holiday camp, and really it could do with something else to offer the many tourists that visit the area, not to mention the children who live there. I think he was rather an amazing scientist and writer and would have loved to leave that kind of legacy behind.
~~~oOo~~~

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Part of the reason I signed up for The Southern Literature Reading Challenge, which is being hosted by The Introverted Reader, is because I'd just started I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and I realised I wanted to read more books in this vein. This challenge would present the perfect opportunity to do just that, not that I couldn't do it off my own bat but it's always good to have an incentive. I'm now really pleased I signed up for it because if Caged Bird is typical of some of the books I might discover then I think I'm in for a real treat.

Maya Angelou was born in 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents' marriage fell apart when she was three and her brother, Bailey, four and her father sent her and her brother off to Stamps, Arkansas to live with his mother. Maya's grandmother came to be called 'Momma' by both the children, neither of them able to remember their real mother and father at all as they grew. 'Momma' ran a grocery store in the black area of the town, so although the family were not by any means rich, they were not as poorly off as many of their neighbours whose main employment was cotton picking and who existed at subsistence level.

Maya and Bailey are reasonably happy living with their grandmother and Uncle Willie, who is disabled. Bailey is Maya's rock and they face the world together, finding humour in various situations, and trying to understand the difference between them and the white folk. It seems even the poorest of the whites are better than them and it's quite permissable for their children to stand in the store and mock Maya's grandmother and none of them can do anything about it.

A few years later - Maya is eight - their father arrives out of the blue. The children soon realise that he's going to take them away with him and they will at last meet their mother, though she does not now live with their father. They live with her for about a year; their stay comes to an abrupt end when something traumatic happens to Maya and she stops speaking. Back they go to their grandmother. Maya will only speak to Bailey - this lasts for years - until a woman called Mrs. Flowers comes into her life and introduces her to poetry and literature. Maya has always been a keen reader but now she has focus in her life and something to retreat into when things get unbearable.

The children do eventually return to live with their mother. By then they're teenagers and things are very different. For a start they are now living in San Francisco and although blacks are still second class citizens, there is in California a lot more room for manouevre than there was in Stamps, Arkansas.

Hard for me to know what to say about a book which is probably one of the most iconic pieces of literature to come out of the southern states of the USA. And such an author! This about sums it up:

I suppose the first thing to admit is that as a white person, this book made me feel very uncomfortable. I know this was the 1930s and things were very different back then, but injustice is injustice and just because it was eighty years ago doesn't mean I was able to think, 'It's history, it doesn't matter any more'. Several episodes stick in my memory. The white kids mocking 'Momma' and Maya feeling completely helpless; the awful thing that happened to Maya, which I won't into as I don't want to spoil it for other readers; what happened when Maya needed dental work; the Graduation when Maya was twelve and a white dignitary made a speech basically telling these black kids that it didn't matter how well they did at school, all they were good for for waiting table or being servants in white people's houses or, if they were really lucky, they might become sports stars. A lot of it made me feel quite murderous to be honest.

The other thing that sticks in my mind is Maya herself. Her determination not to be cowed by the circumstances of her childhood, her strength, her dignity, her belief that she was as good as anyone else whether her skin was black, white or something inbetween. She became the first black person ever to be a streetcar conductor in San Francisco for instance. They didn't want to employ her but she kept at them and eventually they hired her. I love that kind of bloodyminded persistance, to my mind it's the only way to bring change about and I admire her so much for that.

The book ends when Maya is fifteen or sixteen. I'm not going to say what life-changing thing has happened, you'll have to read the book... though I suspect most people already have. There are five autobiographical volumes altogether - or maybe six - and I hope to get to all of them this year. This is the only one I'll use for this challenge though as I want to vary what I read for it. I will however be adding this to my own 'Read around America' personal challenge.
~~~oOo~~~

My series update

I was thinking the other day that the various series that I read these days are mostly new ones with a few odd old ones that I still wish to read interspersed. I am a bit fickle with series though. Sometimes I read so far into them and then lose interest. I've no idea why this is - I'm sure it's my fault but there's little I can do about it and at my age I don't really feel like forcing myself to read books in a series I'm no longer rivetted by. Because of that it's time to update and repost my series post from two and half years ago. As always this is just for my own reference as I find it very useful, but any recs are most welcome.

Crime - modern and historical:

Charlie Parker - John Connolly - (read 9... up to book 10)
Matthew Shardlake – C.J. Sansom (read 3)
Flavia de Luce - Alan Bradley (read 6)
Daisy Dalrymple - Carola Dunn (read 20)
Rizzoli and Isles - Tess Gerritsen (read 8)
Ruth Galloway series - Elly Griffiths (read 6)
Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes – Laurie R. King (read 4)
The Lewis trilogy - Peter May (read 1)
Lord Peter Wimsey - (read 5)
Alan Grant - Josephine Tey - (read 2)
Gordianus the Finder - Steven Saylor (read 1)
Kate Burkholder - Linda Castillo (read 2)
Reverand Clare Fergusson - Julia Spenser Fleming (read 3)
Josephine Tey - Nicola Upson - (read 1)


Sci Fi, Fantasy and horror - both adult and young adult:

Mercy Thompson - Patricia Briggs (read 5)
Jackelian - Stephen Hunt (read 1)
Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch (read 4
Liveship Trader - Robin Hobb (read 1)
Astreiant - Melissa Scott - (read 2 1/2)


Sundry:

Barsetshire - Angela Thirkell - (read 3)
The Little House series – Laura Ingalls Wilder (read 5 up to book 6)
The Barchester Chronicles - Anthony Trollope (read 2)


Series I want to read: (mainly fantasy)

The Kingkiller chronicles - Patrick Rothfuss
The Wit’ch series – James Clemens
Alpha and Omega - Patricia Briggs
Starborn - Lucy Hounsom
The Priestess of the White trilogy – Trudi Canavan




The Tawny Man trilogy – Robin Hobb



The Coldfire trilogy – Celia Friedman
The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy – Guy Gavriel Kay
The Gardella Vampire Chronicles – Colleen Gleason
Swordspoint - Ellen Kushner

I think what this post underlines more than anything is how much my reading tastes have switched from fantasy/horror to crime. I still read the former but am much more into crime stories these days, especially vintage and historical it would seem. And that's fine. Things change and I always believe in going with the flow.


~~~oOo~~~