Category Archives: Sunday Salon

Sunday Salon – Current Books

Posted on by

I finished reading The Fall by Simon Mawer yesterday. It is the story of Rob Dewar and Jamie Matthewson from their childhood up to Jamie’s death 40 years later. But it’s also the story of their parents and how their lives are interlinked. I found it enthralling, one of those books that make me want to look at the ending to see how it all turns out. I managed to stop myself, however, and read impatiently to the end anxious to know what actually happened between them all.

It moves between the two generations beginning in the present day, when Rob hears on the news that Jamie, a renowned mountaineer has fallen to his death in Snowdonia. No one is sure whether it was an accident or suicide. Then it moves  back 40 years to the time when the two boys met, both fatherless – Jamie’s dad, Guy went missing when climbing Kangchenjunga and Rob’s parents are divorced, and back yet further again to 1940 when Guy Matthewson met the boys’ mothers – Meg (later calling herself Caroline) and Diana. And so  the drama unfolds in the mountains of Wales and the Alps, culminating on the North Face of the Eiger.

The Fall is not just a gripping account of the dangers of rock climbing and mountaineering, but it’s also a love story, with the intricacies of relationships, and love, loss and betrayal at its core. The love stories and the climbing scenes are both shown through the imagery of falling with all its ambiguities - actual falls, falling in love, falling pregnant and falling from grace. It’s beautifully written, capturing not only the mountain landscape but also London during the Blitz. This is the second excellent book by Mawer that I’ve read, even though it has a rather predictable ending.

I’m still reading Agatha Christie’s  An Autobiography and will be for some time as it is long and detailed – 550 pages printed in a very small font, which makes it impossible for me to read it in bed. But it is fascinating. It’s not just an account of her life but is full of her thoughts and questions about the nature of life and memory:

I am today the same person as that solemn little girl with pale flaxen sausage-curls. the house in which the spirit dwells, grows, develops instincts and tastes and emotions and intellectual capacities, but I myself, the true Agatha, am the same. I do not know the whole Agatha. The whole Agatha, so I believe, is known only to God.

So there we are, all of us, little Agatha Miller, and big Agatha Miller, and Agatha Christie and Agatha Mallowan proceeding on our way – where? That one doesn’t know – which of course makes life exciting. I have always thought life exciting and I still do. (page 11)

I’ll be writing more about Agatha Christie on Wednesday for my contribution to the Agatha Christie Blog Tour.

The Sunday Salon Secondhand Books

Posted on by

One of my favourite bookshops is Barter Books in Alnwick, so a trip there is always a treat. We were actually on our way to visit friends in Lancashire but stopped for a coffee in the shop, which is in a converted railway station, absolutely full of all kinds of books. I didn’t have any books in mind and just browsed the shelves, finding these, all in great condition:

  • An Omnibus edition of Wycliffe by W J Burley – Wycliffe and the Last Rites and Wycliffe and the House of Fear. I haven’t read any of the Wycliffe books before but if these two are anything to go by I’ll be looking for more. They are murder mysteries set in Cornwall where Burley lived. He was a schoolmaster until he retired to concentrate on writing. These two novels concern the deaths of two women, one from a community filled with hatred and the other from a dysfunctional family. Looking at the long list of Wycliffe books there will be plenty more to choose from.
  • The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. Wikipedia tells me that  ’it has been described as one of the most influential novels of the modern feminist movement.’ It was first published in 1977 to a barrage of criticism. Set in 1968 it describes Mira’s life as she decides it’s time for a change after subscribing for years to the American dream of husband, children and a spotless kitchen.
  • Two Moons by Jennifer Johnston. This looks like a brand new copy, with no creases on the spine as though it has never been read. I enjoyed The Illusionist a while ago and hope this one will be as good. Set in Ireland, it’s about three generations of women, ‘a modern fairy tale with a dark theme.’
  • Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes, described on the back cover as a story that takes us back to the Debutante Season of 1968 – ‘Poignant, funny, fascinating and moving’ .

It was a good job that we only had a limited time in Barter Books, or I could easily have bought more books.

Sunday Salon – What to Read on Holiday

Posted on by

I’ve not been doing much reading or blogging as we’ve been away for a few days in the southeast of England and today we’re off again, this time to Germany. I’ve been thinking what books to take, bearing in mind that they should not be big and heavy (in weight), so I’m not taking Fleshmarket Close even though I’m in the middle of reading it and will probably lose the thread and have to start again when I come back home.

The two I’ve settled on are The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, (235 pages of quite small print) which should last me a while to read – I’ve never read any of Dickens’s books quickly. The other book I’ve chosen is Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden (221 pages), which looks very different from the Drood book. Both are paperbacks and are books I’ve been wanting to read for a while. It feels strange only taking two books but we’ll only be away for three days and staying with family, so there may not be much time for reading. The flight time isn’t long – the longest time is between flight connections at Heathrow, so I think they’ll last me. But I think I should also take Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington as a standby because that is a very slim book (190 pages). Deciding which books to take is a doddle compared to deciding what clothes to pack, as I find it really difficult to travel light!

Sunday Salon – Choices

Posted on by

This morning I was wondering what to read next. I finished reading Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett yesterday, and have almost finished The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery, and think I need a change. Maybe it’s time for an autobiography or a biography. I have several to choose from, some I’ve had for years and one that I picked up recently at a bookstall at the local village fair.

Should I read this latest one - Great Meadow: an Evocation by Dirk Bogarde? I couldn’t resist the cover of this book and remembered that I’d enjoyed another autobiographical book by Bogarde many years ago. When I read the opening words in the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book I knew I wanted to read this one too:

An evocation, this, of the happiest days of my childhood: 1930 – 34. The world was gradually falling apart all around me, but I was serenely unaware. I was not, alas, the only ostrich. (page vii)

Or maybe I’ll start Slipstream: a Memoir by Elizabeth Jane Howard, or Eden’s Outcasts: the story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father by John Matteson. Or do I fancy reading Mary Queen of Scots by Alison Weir, or Shakespeare by Peter Ackroyd, or The Day Gone By by Richard Adams (he wrote Watership Down and The Girl on the Swing, amongst other books)?  Maybe The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters edited by Charlotte Mosely. I could go on and on.

Choices, choices! Deciding what to read next is sometimes so difficult, but it’s always enjoyable.

Sunday Salon – Books I Haven’t Read

Posted on by

I’ve seen others have been writing a sort of meme ”confessing up ” to the books they haven’t read, so I thought I would too. These are the books that maybe I “should have read” by now but haven’t yet got round to. I don’t actually believe there is any “should” about it, but there seems to be some idea that to be “well read” you have to have read from a “canon of literature”.

I haven’t read:

  • The epic poem Beowulf, and reading about the film doesn’t count (I haven’t seen the film either)
  • Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen has passed me by as though it was never written. Apparently Elizabeth I loved it.
  • Gulliver’s Travels, although I think I “know” the story of his time in Lilliput and Brobdingnan from watching a cartoon version once.
  • Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, although I read extracts when I was taking an Open University course.
  • The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith – it’s one of those books I’ve been meaning to read for years.
  • Anything by Samuel Richardson, although he is considered one of the authors of the first novel in English, but I have read Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, amd Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, other contenders for the title.
  • There are several of Charles Dickens’s books I haven’t read, such as The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby and Barnaby Rudge although I have read some of his books – Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations immediately spring to mind – there many be others.
  • The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, although I have read The Moonstone.
  • The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas – this is on my tbr list.
  • Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome – apparently a classic satire.
  • The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith – a classic British comedy.
  • Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas – one of my school friends (and that’s aeons ago) was forever extolling its praises and I still haven’t read it,
  • Ulysses by James Joyce – need I say anymore?
  • The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. But I did watch both of the TV series of the books.
  • A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell – I did try the first book once.
  • Anything by Salman Rushdie.
  • Ditto Terry Pratchett
  • White Teeth by Zadie Smith, although I have read On Beauty.

This list is getting far too long and depressing in the amount of books I haven’t read and I’ve hardly touched the surface of the 20th century, never mind the 21st. Looking at this list of English Novelists on wikipedia is even more depressing (or exhilarating depending on how you view things) because of so many authors I haven’t tried that I’m stopping now. And there are so many more world wide authors as well!

Sunday Salon – Today’s Books

Posted on by

This morning I’ve been reading The Border Line by Eric Robson, of interest because we live near the border – the one between England and Scotland. This is the account of Robson’s walk following the border line from the Solway Firth to Berwick-upon-Tweed. It’s also interesting because Robson includes anecdotes, snippets of history and personal memories as well. For all the disputes over the border and the reivers’ raids there is a similarity between English and Scottish Borderers:

For more than four centuries the Borderlands were seen as the scrag end of their respective countries, the frayed edges of monarchy. English borderers and Scottish borderers at least had that much in common. The Border was a remote battleground where national ambitions could be fought over. Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland were excluded from the Domesday Book. They were regarded as a military buffer zone. They became a bearpit. (page 51)

The Reivers were romanticised by Sir Walter Scott,  who gave them ‘the spit-and -polish treatment’ and a ‘romantic bearing and heroic stature.’ Robson also sheds light on the derivation of words, such as ‘reiver’: a ‘reef” in Old English meant a line, a Shire Reeve was a man who protected boundaries, thus the reiver raided across the Border Line. ‘Blackmail’ has two possible derivations – greenmail was agricultural rent and blackmail was money taken at night, or protection money. Alternatively it could be that it came from the fact that the reivers blacked their armour to ride as shadows in the moonlight (page 49).  I prefer the alternative derivation.

Then I moved north of the Border Line into Scotland with my reading and finished Ian Rankin’s book The Falls, a book I first read a couple of years ago. I wrote about it at the time and I haven’t much to add to that post. The Falls combines so much of what I like to read – a puzzling mystery, convincing characters, well described locations, historical connections and a strong plot full of tension and pace. Rebus has morphed in my mind into a combination of the actors who’ve played him – John Hannah and Ken Stott - and his creator Ian Rankin. But there is no doubt that the books are far superior to the TV productions. The next Rebus book I’ll be reading is Resurrection Men.

Sunday Salon – Reasons for Not Reading

Posted on by

I’ve been thinking about books I own but haven’t read yet and wondering why I haven’t  even though some of them have been sitting on my bookshelves for a long time.

There are a number of reasons, apart from the fact that I keep getting more books before reading all the ones I’ve already got. They are:

  • Books that are part of a series and I haven’t read the earlier ones – such as Ian Rankin’s Exit Music
  • Books everyone else raves about and I can’t get into such as Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
  • Books that are just so big, like A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book
  • Classic books – The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  • Books I’ve forgotten I’ve got – like Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett – I don’t even remember seeing it before!
  • Books bought  to make up a 3 for 2 offer – such as Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier
  • Books by an author I like, but haven’t got round to reading yet – The Death Maze by Ariana Franklin
  • Non fiction books that require concentrated time devoting to them – such as Jonathan Dimbleby’s Russia

Looking at them today I’d like to reading them all as soon as possible – well, maybe not Cloud Atlas for a while – I’ve started it twice in the past.

The Sunday Salon – Books I’d like to Read Right Now

Posted on by

Currently I’m reading The Right Attitude to Rain, the third Isabel Dalhousie novel  by Alexander McCall Smith. It’s the sort of book that makes me pause whilst I’m reading it and think about what I’ve read. It’s not a book to rush through at top speed to find out what happens, but rather a book to savour for its characters and settings, for its interaction bewteen the characters and the images it evokes.

It’s also the sort of book that reminds me of other books I’d like to read and this morning when I read Isabel’s and Tom’s discussion about Mary Queen of Scots I began to think of a couple of books I’ve been meaning to read and wanting to read them right now. These are:

I also want to read these books I’ve borrowed recently from the library:

  • The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, the story of an imaginary shepherd hoping to plant thousands of trees. I saw this reviewed on Simon’s blog and thought it looked good. It’s only52 pages, so I could read that right now.
  • The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves, crime fiction set in the Pennines featuring DI Vera Stanhope. This is yet another long book (over 500 pages)
  • and, bringing me back to Alexander McCall Smith, the fifth Isabel Dalhousie novel, The Comfort of Saturdays.

I have to settle for the fact that I can only read one book at a time, so it’s back to The Right Attitude to Rain – right now, along with a cup of tea.

Sunday Salon – Crime Fiction

Posted on by

Today I’ve been dipping into The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction by Barry Forshaw, published in 2007. This is an excellent little book giving “a selection of the best in crime writing over the last century or so, organized by subject (or sub-genre)”.  There are succinct book reviews, ‘top five’ lists for writers such as Agatha Christie, notes on screen adaptations and profiles of writers.

I suppose all guides are subjective and not everyone will agree on the selection, but for me this works, with information on writers whose books I know and those I don’t. I could wish it had a section on ‘cozy mysteries’ but it doesn’t!

There are sections on

  • The origins of crime novels, including Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle
  • The Golden Age, classic mysteries from authors I know, such as Christie, Allingham and Tey and from ones I don’t such as Christianna Brand and Edmund Crispin.
  • Hardboiled and pulp – a hazardous world of carnality and danger, violent and brutal. Not really my cup of tea, but there are some classics here too – Raymond Chandler and The Big Sleep.
  • Private eyes, sleuths and gumshoes – in this section are Kate Atkinson, Michael Connelly and Alexander McCall Smith to name but a few.
  • Cops – police procedurals and mavericks. This includes the maverick cops, those loose canons at daggers drawn with their superiors, like Ian Rankin’s Rebus. It’s a long section covering authors both known and unknown to me – too many to list here, but including Jon Cleary, Colin Dexter and Ed McBain.
  • Professionals – lawyers, doctors, forensics etc. So, John Grisham, Val McDermid and Scott Turow et al feature here.
  • Amateurs – journalists and innocent bystanders. These are books that don’t fit easily into other genres, exploring the human psyche by for example authors as varied as Christopher Brookmyre and G K Chesterton, Dick Francis and Michael Ridpath.
  • All in the Mind – psychological matters. This chapter includes books that ‘foreground the psychology of their characters in extremis’, such as Iain Banks ‘The Wasp Factory’ and Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith.
  • Serial killers – Thomas Harris (Hannibal Lector) and Karen Slaughter (Faithless) – not a genre that I’m comfortable with, one for me to skip over maybe.
  • Criminal protagonists taking the reader into the heads of criminals. I haven’t read any of the books in this section, books like Maura’s Game by Martina Cole and Night and the City by Gerald Kersh.
  • Organized Crime – the world of the godfather and gangs. Another new-to-me genre, more familiar to me from films, such as The Gangs of New York - I didn’t know it was based on Herbert Asbury’s series of books on 19th century crime.
  • Crime and Society – key issues such as class, race and politics, from writers such as P D James in Britain and Michael Crichton in the US.
  • Espionage – John Le Carre, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming to name but a few.
  • Historical crime – one of my favourite genres from Ancient Rome (Lindsay Davis and Steven Saylor), Medieval murder (Michael Jecks) and World War thrillers from Robert Ryan and Robert Harris. Here is one of my favourites – C J Sansom (Shardlake) and new-to me Jane Jakeman who wrote In the Kingdom of the Mists, which appeals to me with the Impressionist painter, Monet at the centre of the mysteries – I must find this one.
  • Crime in Translation – some of these are familiar, like Umberto Eco, Andre Camilleri, and Henning Mankell. No Stieg Larsson, though. It maybe that his books came out too late for this guide, I don’t know.

Sunday Salon

Posted on by

This week I’ve been reading  Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison, both shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. I’ve finished both of them and can’t find any easy way to compare them. They are such different books, Wolf Hall – historical fiction about big events, full of characters based on real people, but written in such an intimate way that I felt I was there, versus The Very Thought of You – a quiet book about love in its various forms but written with so little dialogue and so much explanation of what the characters are thinking and feeling that I felt detached as though I was merely watching the events as they unfolded rapidly before my eyes. I enjoyed them both in different ways. I’ll be writing more about both books in later posts.

I haven’t written much here this week, more reading than writing! I wrote an Agatha Christie Reading Challenge Update which is included in The Latest Agatha Christie Blog Carnival out today with 30 contributions from 11 contributors in a bumper edition. It also includes my post on Christie’s Passenger To Frankfurt. This month’s carnival has a new feature – A Featured Blog kicking off with Margot Kinberg’s remarkable blog Confessions of a Mystery Writer. Every day Margot writes such interesting posts on various aspects of crime fiction which, of course, majors on Agatha Christie’s books.

I’m also reading Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade, which is not just about her mysterious disappearance in December 1926 but is also about her life as a whole. It’s fascinating reading. I’m not sure what to read next – the choice is too much, but I may start Agatha Christie’s autobiography or go for something completely different, such as Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out or John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy.