This description of a bookshop near the British Museum appealed to me:

Inside, it was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down. The distance between bookshelves was so narrow that you could only get along with great difficulty. There were piles of books perched on every shelf or table.

On a stool in a corner, hemmed in by books, was in a old man in a pork-pie hat with a large flat face like a stuffed fish. He had the air of one who has given up an unequal struggle. He had attempted to master the books, but the books had obviously succeeded in mastering him. He was a kind of King Canute of the book world, retreating before the advancing tide of books. (page 170)

I don’t suppose this will be included in the drama, but I hope it will.

I’m about halfway through the book and Poirot has yet to appear!

For more Teaser Tuesdays go to Should Be Reading.

I’ve dipped into each book. From top to bottom they are:

Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro, translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni. I fancied reading something a little different from my usual type of book – this book won the Premio Donna Citta di Roma in 1994. From the book jacket – it reflects on feelings and passions and how failure to communicate leads to futility, misunderstanding and tragedy – a meditation on existence. An old woman writes to her granddaughter. Here’s my teaser:

As I have wandered aimlessly through the empty house these last few months, the misunderstandings and bad temper that marred our years together have vanished. The memories surrounding me now are of you as a child – a vulnerable, bewildered little creature. (page 3)

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. A book I’ve known of for so many years and never read. I had no idea that it is a detective story! I love the way it begins:

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong – belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind of the sea, the holiday crowd. (page 1)

I can just see the scene!

White Nights by Anne Cleeves. I’ve been looking out for this book, the second in her Shetland Quartet, ever since I enjoyed reading the first one – Raven Black. Shetland detective Jimmy Perez investigates what seems at first to be a straightforward suicide. This is my teaser:

‘I don’t know my name’, he said flatly. No drama now. ‘I can’t remember it. I don’t know my name and I don’t remember why I’m here.’ (page 16)

Sister by Rosamund Lupton. More crime fiction, a psychological thriller. I’d read about this book on a blog (sorry, can’t remember which one – it may have been more than one blog) and thought it sounded good. Beatrice’s younger sister Tess is missing. She refuses to give up looking for her and  is determined to discover the truth about Tess and what has happened to her.

For a moment, amongst the crowd, I saw you. I’ve since found out it’s common for people separated from someone they love to keep seeing that loved one among strangers; something to do with recognition units in our brain being too heated and too easily triggered. This cruel trick of the mind lasted only a few moments, but was long enough to feel with physical force how much I needed you. (page 26)

I have high hopes of all four books.

No doubt I’ll be writing more about this book. For now here is a little teaser quotation:

Her problem wasn’t she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn’t a blonde and she wasn’t dumb. (page 232)

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly event hosted by MizB of Should be Reading.

Teaser Tuesday

I’ve just finished reading Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit, which is one of her earliest books. It has a very complicated plot about a diamond robbery, an accidental death at a London tube station and a murder in a remote country mansion. I’ll write about in more detail about in a later post, but for now here is a teaser:

For in each suspicious instance Pagett had been shown as the directing genius. It was true that his personality seemed to lack the assurance and decision that one would suspect from a master criminal – but after all, according to Colonel Race, it was brain-work only that this mysterious leader supplied , and creative genius is often allied to a weak and timorous physical constitution. (page 148)

And the last few sentences in the book show Agatha Christie’s interest in anthropology:

‘Congratulations and love to the latest arrival on Lunatics’ Island. Is his head dolichocephalic or brachycephalic?’

I wasn’t going to stand that from Suzanne. I sent her a reply of one word, economical and to the point:

‘Platycephalic!’ (page 238)

My teaser today is from The Adventure of the Dancing Men in Favourite Sherlock Holmes Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Holmes had been seated for some hours in silence, with his long thin back curved over a chemical vessel in which he was brewing a particularly malodorous product. His head was sunk upon his breast, and he looked from my point of view like a strange, lank bird, with grey dull plumage and a black top-knot.

‘So, Watson, said he, suddenly, ‘you do not propose to invest in South African securities?’ (page 57)

Favourite Sherlock Holmes Stories is a collection of twelve stories that Arthur Conan Doyle rated as his very best. It includes what Conan Doyle described as ‘the grim snake story’, The Speckled Band, and The Red-Headed League and The Dancing  Men on account of the originality of the plot of each.

It  also includes his first story – A Scandal in Bohemia; the story that deceived the public with the erroneous death of Holmes –  The Final Problem;  and the story that explained away the alleged death of Holmes – The Empty House.

My teaser today is from Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary, which I’ve just started to read. This is the first Tommy and Tuppence mystery first published in 1922. It begins:

“Tommy, old thing!”

“Tuppence, old bean!”

The two young people greeted each other affectionately, and momentarily blocked the Dover Street Tube exit in doing so. The adjective “old” was misleading. Their united ages would certainly not have totalled forty-five. (Kindle Loc 56-61)

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by MizB of Should be Reading.

Teaser Tuesday

Yesterday I finished reading Where Three Roads Meet by Salley Vickers. I borrowed it from the library simply because I’ve enjoyed other books by Salley Vickers –  in particular Miss Garnet’s Angel and Mr Golightly’s Holiday.

Where Three Roads Meet is different, but just as good. It’s one of the Canongate Myths series, modern versions of myths told by a number of different authors. I’ve read others in the series – A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, Weight by Jeanette Winterson (the myth of Atlas and Heracles) and The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (the myth of Penelope and Odysseus).

It’s the Oedipus myth as told to Sigmund Freud during his last years when he was suffering from cancer of the mouth. Under the influence of morphine he is visited by Tiresias, a blind prophet of Thebes who tells him his version of the Oedipus story. In between telling the story, Freud and Tiresias discuss language and the origins of words. The point where the three roads meet is the place Oedipus and his father had their tragic meeting, setting in motion the sequence of events that led to his downfall and to the fulfilment of the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother.

In Tiresias’s version Freud’s interpretation wasn’t quite right:

Because, if I may say so, here in all the world was the one person you could safely say didn’t have the complex you dreamed up for him. He was Oedipus, plain Oedipus. But not simple. What was complex about him was not that he wanted to sleep with his mother (as she herself said, that impulse is not so uncommon) nor even that he killed a man who had once threatened his life. Tit for tat, some might say. What was so remarkable was that his own safekeeping was usurped by the need to know what he needed not to know. (page 169)

This is a book with multiple layers, not a simple book. Although it’s easy enough to read it straight through, it is complex, with many ideas about life and death, and truth and ambiguity to ponder. Even if you know the story of Oedipus it seems fresh and new in this version. I found the details of the operations Freud had, their effect upon him and the terrible pain he suffered was quite shocking. All in all, a satisfying, entertaining and challenging book.

I have spent hours, days, years even trying to get rid of bindweed and ground elder. No matter what I’ve tried – digging them out, which seems impossible, smothering them or dousing them with chemicals, which worked for a while,- they always comes back and kill anything growing in the way. The only benefit I can see is that the flowers are quite pretty.

So, when I was sitting in the café in a bookshop the other week and I saw Weeds by Richard Mabey on display opposite where I was sitting I just had to have a look at it:

I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve dipped into it. Here is an extract that caught my eye as I browsed the pages:

Weeds thrive in the company of humans. They aren’t parasites, because they can exist without us, but we are their natural ecological partners, the species alongside which they do best. They relish the things we do to the soil; clearing forests, digging, farming, dumping nutrient-rich rubbish. They flourish in arable fields, battlefields, parking lots, herbaceous borders. They exploit our transport systems, our cooking adventures, our obsession with packaging. Above all they use us when we stir the world up, disrupt its settled patterns. It would be a tautology to say that these days they are found most abundantly where there is most weeding; but that notion ought to make us question whether the weeding encourages the weeds as much as vice versa. (page 12)

Is he saying we’d do just as well not doing any weeding?

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by MizB where you share ‘teasers’. I’ve adapted it a bit in this post, to include more information about the book and longer teasers.

I have two teasers today. The first is a description of one of May’s terrors:

When she lay down again she saw strange shapes before her eyes, trees with branches that curled upwards and inwards and turned to ash and blood-covered beaches dotted with mounds of sand-coloured snakes which stirred and coiled and uncoiled. Her own heart was beating extremely slowly and as it beat she felt it enlarging, swelling and filling out like a balloon inside her chest and stomach and finally growing up into her brain. (page 53)

And the second is about Frank. Frank is the mysterious one, the loner; the others felt they didn’t know him and said that no one knew what went on inside his head – it was one of life’s mysteries. There are hints throughout that Frank is different and it is only in the latter part of the book that it becomes clear why none of his siblings have any contact with him and don’t want him to know of his mother’s illness and death.

He did little speaking but a great deal of staring out of large green-grey, slightly bulbous eyes. He followed people too, his father and the men about the farm, his mother in the house, the other children at school almost anywhere. Turn round and Frank would be there, silent, watching, following. (page 32)

It’s a short, powerful book about truth and memory, about the ordinary everyday outer lives we  live and the inner turmoil and tensions within us. It’s also about what we make of our lives, how we express ourselves and about how other people see us. It’s amazing.

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by MizB where you share ‘teasers’. I’ve adapted it a bit in this post, to include more information about the book and longer teasers.

On Sunday I was wondering which book to read next and eventually decided upon Missing Link by Joyce Holms. She is a new writer to me. I liked the description of her at the front of the book:

Joyce Holms was born and educated in Glasgow. The victim of a low boredom threshold, she has held a variety of jobs, from teaching window dressing and managing a hotel on the Isle of Arran to working for an Edinburgh detective agency and running a B & B in the Highlands. Married with two grown up children she lives in Edinburgh and her interests include hill-walking and garden design.

Val McDermid’s blurb on the front cover reads, ‘Holms is a magician – the reader is so busy laughing, the clues just slip by unnoticed.’ More words by other authors are on Joyce Holms’s website , like this from Ian Rankin: Joyce’s humour is sharp without being nasty, her characters well drawn, and her Edinburgh a place you’ll want to spend time in….. read her books.

I began reading and was immediately drawn into the mystery. Mrs Sullivan wants to be proved guilty of murder and asks Fizz Fitzpatrick, a lawyer to help her. This extract is from the Prologue describing the murder of Amanda Montrose. Amanda is  driving home when the narrow country road ahead is partially blocked by old Volkswagen and someone has the bonnet up and is leaning under it. Amanda goes to see what’s the problem:

The driver straightens and turns, smiling, and fear surges through Amanda’s body like an electric charge. She sees the hammer. She sees the gloating, resolute eyes. And she knows she is looking at her own death. (page 14)

The question is did Mrs Sullivan kill Amanda or was it Terence Lamb, a known criminal, or one of the other people who also claimed to have killed her?