So, I am going to take part, because I’ve gone through my books and found that I have more than enough books to finish the challenge and after all it only involves reading 6 books over the year. It’s hosted by Beth at Beth Fish Reads:

The categories and my choices are as follows:

A book with a topographical feature in the title.  I have lots of choice for this category - 

• On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
• The Way Through the Woods by Colin Dexter
• The Secret River by Kate Grenville
• Hanging Valley by Peter Robinson
• The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
• The River Midnight by Lilian Nattel
• Shadows in the Street by Susan Hill
• The Island by Victoria Hislop
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy

A book with something you’d see in the sky in the title

•  Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber
• Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie

A book with a creepy crawly in the title – just one book!

• The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

A book with a type of house in the title:

• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Steig Larsson
• The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
• Wycliffe and the House of Fear by W J Burley
• I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill

A book with something you’d carry in your pocket, purse, or backpack in the title:

• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale
• Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
• Village Diary by Miss Read
• They Do It With Mirrors by Agatha Christie
• Book of Love by Sarah Bower

A book with something you’d find on a calendar in the title:

• The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
• The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
• The Day Gone By by Richard Adams (autobiography of the author of Watership Down)

I’ve  finished the What’s In a Name Challenge, hosted by Beth Fish Reads, reading a book from each of the set categories. Apart from Evil Under the Sun, which was a new purchase the books were all from my To-Be-Read books. They are listed below with links to my posts on them:

1. A book with a number in the title – One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
2. A book with jewelry or a gem in the title – The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
3. A book with a size in the title – Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
4. A book with travel or movement in the title – Exit Lines by Reginald Hill
5. A book with evil in the title - Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie
6. A book with a life stage in the title – Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden

I had read Little Women several times before, many years ago and I read it this time prior to reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father – Eden’s Outcasts by John Matteson. I think re-reading Little Women has taught me to leave well-loved books in my memory.  Although some of the magic was still there I thought it was a dated, sentimental tale.

Here’s the blurb:

It was not unusual to find the beautiful bronzed body of the sun-loving Arlena Stuart stretched out on a beach, face down. Only, on this occasion, there was no sun! she had been strangled. Ever since Arlena’s arrival at the resort, Hercule Poirot had detected sexual tension in the seaside air. But could this apparent ‘crime of passion’ have been something more evil and premeditated altogether?

My thoughts:

It’s August, the sun is hot, people are enjoying themselves, swimming and sunbathing and yet Poirot remarks that the sight of the recumbent figures on the beach reminds him of the Morgue in Paris, ‘the bodies – arranged in slabs – like butcher’s meat!’  The other guests remark it’s an unlikely setting for crime but Poirot disagrees:

‘It is romantic, yes,’ agreed Hercule Poirot. ‘It is peaceful. The sun shines. The sea is blue. But you forget Miss Brewster, there is evil everywhere under the sun.’

And so it turns out, with the discovery of Arlena’s dead body. Arlena, who Major Barry describes as ‘a personification of evil’.

‘She’s the world’s first gold-digger. And a man-eater as well! If anything personable in trousers comes within a hundred yards of her, it’s fresh sport for Arlena!’

Her step-daughter, Linda hates her and wants to kill her, wishing she would die.

Arlena was strangled. Poirot  maintains that her murder has resulted from her character, and his investigations revolve around understanding exactly what type of person she was. The suspicion of guilt is cast over one person after another; either a man or a woman could have been strong enough to strangle Arlena and there are plenty of suspects. And even Poirot is puzzled because from the beginning it had seemed to him that one person was clearly indicated as the murderer but at the same time it seemed impossible for that person to have committed the crime.

Poirot describes the murder as a ‘very slick crime‘ and indeed it was perfectly planned and timed. At the end he explains at length how he collected together all the isolated significant facts and events to make a complete pattern to discover the identity of the murderer. Although I enjoyed this book I did think the explanation was too long and the characters  were a bit sketchy and sterotypical. It all seemed to be more of a puzzle solving exercise, than a captivating mystery.

Agatha Christie wrote Evil Under the Sun during 1938 and it was published in 1941, having first appeared as a serial in the USA at the end of 1940. I read it on my Kindle.

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 416 KB
• Print Length: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper (14 Oct 2010)
• Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
• Language English
• ASIN: B0046H95QS
• Source: I bought it

Reading this book completes the What’s in a Name 4 challenge.

The What’s In a Name Challenge is hosted by Beth Fish Reads.

Challenge: to read one book from each category. I’ve now completed five out of the six categories – one more to go! The links go to my posts on the books:

1. A book with a number in the title – One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
2. A book with jewelry or a gem in the title – The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
3. A book with a size in the title - Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
4. A book with travel or movement in the title - Exit Lines by Reginald Hill
5. A book with evil in the title -
6. A book with a life stage in the title - Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

This is the second of her Jackson Brodie series. I read Case Histories, the first one, a few years ago and the third one, When Will There be Good News? just over 2 years ago, both of which I thought were excellent. So I had great expectations that this would be equally as good. Maybe it’s me, but I don’t think it is. It is good and I enjoyed it but I thought it was over complicated, especially at the beginning with so many different seemingly unrelated characters being introduced. It’s only near the end that you find out the connections and interactions between them all. And the ending did take me by surprise – a neat twist.

My problem with this book that I’d just get interested in one strand of the story and want to find out what happened next, when the action shifted to another set of characters. There is also too much detail, background information and flashbacks holding up the action for me to say it’s an excellent book.

But it is still a book that I had to finish; I had to find out what happened and work out the puzzle, because it is a puzzle. Like the Russian dolls within dolls (which also feature in this book), there is a thread connecting it all together. Set over four days an awful lot happens changing the characters lives for ever.

It’s summer in Edinburgh at Festival time when people queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road rage incident after Paul Bradley brakes suddenly to avoid hitting a pedestrian. The driver of the Honda behind him attacks his car with a baseball bat and then attacks Paul himself.  The one good turn comes from Martin Canning, the author of the Nina Riley mysteries, who stops the attack by throwing his laptop bag at the Honda driver hitting him on the shoulder.

One of the people in the queue is Jackson Brodie, who doesn’t want to get involved but who nevertheless gives Martin his mobile number and noted the Honda’s registration number. Amongst other witnesses are Gloria, the wife of an unscrupulous property developer, and her friend Pam. I got to like Gloria, a very sympathetically drawn character. Numerous other characters are involved – Jackson’s actress girlfriend, a failing comedian, exploited Eastern European workers for a housecleaning/escort agency called Favours, and Sergeant Louise Monroe and her teenage son, Archie, amongst others.

It’s complicated and full of coincidences, a very cleverly plotted book and as Jackson says:

A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.

One Good Turn is also my entry in Beth’s What’s In a Name Challenge – a book with a number in the title.

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Black Swan; Reprint edition (22 July 2010)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 0552772445
• ISBN-13: 978-0552772440

Challenge completed!

The What’s In a Name Challenge, hosted by Beth Fish Reads is running for the fourth time. I took part in the first two, but missed out last year. I’m tempted to join in again in 2011. I just need to read one book from each category and I’ve gone through my To-Be-Read books to find these titles:

1. A book with a number in the title – One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
2. A book with jewelry or a gem in the title – The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
3. A book with a size in the title – Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
4. A book with travel or movement in the title – Exit Lines by Reginald Hill
5. A book with evil in the title - Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie
6. A book with a life stage in the title – Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden

In Lienz we call this Bellermanswoch. The Bellerman is the old man who goes round after the feast is over, cleaning up the tables and snuffing the candles. … But when the Bellerman has finished his work, when he has extinguished the last candle, the snow will come.

Laura Hart travels to Lienz to stay with her brother who is the British Vice-Consul there. On the train there she meets an American who warns her of the growing political tension in the area, with a group of Nazis, blowing up pylons and railways causing trouble between the Germans, Austrians and Italians.

When she witnesses a political murder and insists that the Italian arrested for the shooting is innocent she becomes involved in a dangerous game. Helped by the American and a Secret Service agent she attempts to leave the Tyrol.  I did find the politics quite confusing in this book, knowing next to nothing about it and the episode at the end involving what I took to be a variation of the Abominable Snowman was far-fetched. However, the book as a whole is fast-paced with lots of action and would probably make a good film – if it hasn’t done so already.

This book completes my reading in the What’s In a Name Challenge in the “Weather” category.

In August I read a beautiful little book- it was a birthday present – James Herriot’s Cat Stories. It was a great relief to read this book after some of the books (about war and disasters) I’d been reading lately and this book with its lovely illustrations by Lesley Holmes cheered me up immensely. That’s not to say it has no drama or desperate situations of the feline type that tugged at my heart strings. (An aside the heart does have strings – I saw them on Alice Roberts’ programme Don’t Die Young.)

I must have watched all of the programmes in the TV series All Creatures Great and Small about “James Herriot’s” vet practice in Yorkshire.  There are many James Herriot books and I’ve read a few of them in the past. This book contains ten short stories, all about cats. In the Introduction James writes that cats were one of the main reasons he chose a career as a vet. They have always played a large part in his life and and now he has retired they are still there “lightening” his days. When he studied to become a vet he was astounded that he couldn’t find anything about cats in his text book Sisson’s Anatomy of Domestic Animals. Yet when he began his practice there were cats everywhere and every farm had its cats. Things have moved on since then and now “Large, prestigious books are written about them by eminent veterinarians, and indeed, some vets specialise in the species to the exclusion of all others.”

Cats have always played a large part in my life too (see here and here). 

James Herriot’s Cat Stories is not large; in fact it’s very small (158 pages) but the ten stories clearly demonstrate his love of cats. Inevitably there are some spoilers in my summaries:

• There is Alfred the Sweet-shop Cat, “a massive, benevolent tabby”, belonging to Geoff the sweet-shop owner. When he starts to lose weight and becomes gaunt and listless, Geoff too begins to wilt and become bowed and shrunken.
• Oscar the Socialite Cat who loves people often goes missing as he visits his human friends. Everyone loves him.
• Boris by way of contrast lives in household full of cats taken in mainly as strays by Mrs Bond. Boris is a “malevolent bully” who regularly beats up his colleagues, so that James was always having to stitch up ears and dress gnawed limbs.
• Three stories are about Olly and Ginger were two little strays who came to live, not with the Herriots but who sat on the wall outside the kitchen window, too wild to actually venture into the house. When they become desperately ill will they let James treat them?
• Emily, a dainty little cat, has adopted Mr Ireson, “a gentleman of the road”. When Emily becomes pregnant, seemingly full of kittens she needs a caesarean operation.
• Moses – Found Among the Rushes. He was rescued by James, looked after by a farmer’s wife and adopted by a large sow. 
• Frisk the Cat with Many Lives (don’t they all). Why does Frisk, old Dick Fawcett’s faithful companion keep falling unconscious?
• Buster the Christmas Day Kitten – the little orphan born on Christmas Day who grows up playing with dogs and behaves like a feline retriever.

And here is the back cover with pictures of some of the cats.

Finally this book qualifies  for the What’s In a Name Challenge: a book with an animal in the title.

And I hadn’t forgotten this little verse that that “six foot odd of georgousness as represented by Sir Percy Blakeney, Bart” had composed whilst tying his cravat:

We seek him here,
We seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?
Is he in hell?
That demmed elusive Pimpernel.

Everyone knows that Sir Percy is hopelessly stupid, but he is incredibly rich and as a leader of fashion he is the talk of the town and “his inanities were quoted, his foolish laugh copied by the gilded youth at the Almanack’s or the Mall.” His French wife, Marguerite is by contrast, a clever, witty woman, but she is trapped by Chauvelin into betraying the identity of the Pimpernel. Chauvelin had acquired a letter written by her brother revealing that he was working with the Scarlet Pimpernel – either she finds out who the Pimpernel is or her brother will go to the guillotine.

I wish I could remember whether I guessed the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel when I first read the book, but I do remember that I loved the romance and the action of this tale based loosely on the French Revolution. I was still spellbound by the romance and drama of it all. I’ve discovered that it start out as a play, starring Fred Terry (the brother of Dame Ellen Terry and great-uncle of Sir John Gielgud) as the Scarlet Pimpernel. There have been many films of the book and the role of the Scarlet Pimpernel has been played by many actors on stage and screen including Leslie Howard, Anthony Andrews, and Richard E Grant. Amazingly I have never seen any of them, so my mental vision of the characters is drawn straight from the book, which is what I prefer.

 I re-read this book as part of the Heart of a Child Challenge. 

It also qualifies for the What’s In a Name Challenge as a book with a plant in the title, because the Scarlet Pimpernel is not only the nickname of the hero but it is also the symbol with which he signs his messages.