BooksPlease

The Sunday Salon Secondhand Books

Aug 29th, 2010 by Margaret

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.

Posted in Books, Fiction, Sunday Salon, Weekly Events | 10 Comments »

Book Beginnings on Friday

Aug 27th, 2010 by Margaret

Book Beginnings on Friday is a meme hosted by Becky at Page Turners. Anyone can participate; just share the opening sentence of your current read, making sure that you include the title and author so others know what you’re reading. If you like, share with everyone why you do, or do not, like the sentence.

My opening sentence this week is from The Art of Drowning by Frances Fyfield:

Someone wants to kill me.

Nice and short and dramatic, leading me to wonder who is writing, who wants to kill him/her.

Posted in Book Beginnings on Friday, Books, Crime Fiction, Weekly Events | 8 Comments »

Wordless Wednesday – Waddesdon’s Floral Bird

Aug 25th, 2010 by Margaret

A Wordless Wednesday post

Posted in Buckinghamshire, England, Waddesdon, Weekly Events, Wordless Wednesday | 11 Comments »

Teaser Tuesday – 4.50 from Paddington

Aug 24th, 2010 by Margaret

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

This week one of the books I’m reading is 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie, in which a woman is killed on a train and then her body can’t be found. Miss Marple gets involved. As she is by now a frail old lady told by her doctor to take things easy she enlists the help of Lucy Eyelesbarrow in finding out what actually happened. This works out very well, mainly because of Lucy’s thoroughness and Miss Marple’s powers of deduction. This is how she thinks about it:

Of course, I am somewhat handicapped by not actually being on the spot. It is so helpful, I always feel, when people remind you of other people – because types are alike everywhere and that is such a valuable guide.

…

One is inclined to guess – and guessing would be very wrong when it is a question of anything as serious as murder. All one can do is to observe the people concerned – or who might have been concerned – and see of whom they remind you. (page 121)

Tags: Agatha Christie

Posted in Books, Crime Fiction, Teaser Tuesdays, Weekly Events | 14 Comments »

The Tapestry of Love by Rosy Thornton: Book Review

Aug 23rd, 2010 by Margaret

The Tapestry of Love is a beautiful book and a delight to read. I am so pleased that Rosy Thornton sent me a copy to review. It’s a gentle book and yet it’s about the drama of real life, its joys and tragedies. There is romance and so much more as the story of Catherine Parkstone and her move to the Cevennes mountains in southern France, reveals. Catherine divorced eight years previously has sold her house in England and moved to the Les Fenils, a house in the tiny hamlet of Le Grelaudiere near the village of St Julien de Valvert, to start a new life as a seamstress, selling her soft furnishings – tapestries, cushions, and chair covers.

Catherine has left behind in England her daughter, Lexie, struggling to find a niche in the world of journalism, her son Tim, a scientist and her aging mother, suffering from Altzheimer’s and in a nursing home. Catherine is obviously a capable woman, a woman of common sense, but also a caring, sensitive woman, who may not be as self-sufficient as she seems. She is a creative, skilled needlewoman who has the gift of being able to reproduce on canvas what she visualises in full colour in her mind’s eye. It is this skill and her ability to make friends in her new surroundings that means she soon has a full order book. But she is reckoning without the intricacies of French bureaucracy and because her business is not ‘agricultural’ she cannot get it approved.

Despite the initial reserve of her new neighbours she becomes part of the daily life in Le Grelaudiere, helping her neighbours and being helped in return. Her nearest neighbour is Patrick Castagnol, who at first she thinks is a compatriot until she hears his flawess French. He is a bit of a mystery and when Tim visits he comments astutely that he suspects Patrick is ‘a bit too smooth for his own good’. When Bryony, Catherine’s younger sister visits she is soon smitten by his charm, leaving Catherine feeling decidedly uncomfortable.

There is so much I love in this book. Rosy has a talent for portraying relationships – not just between Patrick and the sisters, but also between the sisters and their mother, and how they cope with their mother’s illness, between Catherine and her grown-up children and between Catherine and her ex-husband. She is nothing if not resourceful. She not only sets up her business, but also grows vegetables and keeps bees. For Catherine it is a time of new beginnings, of new relationships and of letting go of the past.

I also loved Rosy’s descriptions – of the tapestries as Catherine conceives and makes them and of the wild and desolate landscape which forms the backdrop of daily life in Le Grelaudiere. It’s autumn when Catherine arrives, a season of rain and power cuts, which her neighbours describe as ‘C’est triste’. But it was still beautiful. As autumn took its course:

The skies were still pewter, but now swirled with high, wild, wind-chased clouds in shades of angry orange. The view across the valley re-emerged in all its desolate splendour. (page 61)

and then:

the sky was a luminous mauve, a colour that would never seem credible if she replicated it in a tapestry. It cast everything round her into sharp definition, giving the illusion that road and rocks and vegetation were illuminated from some hidden source, like ethereal stage lighting. She had a clear view between the trees, down to the valley of St Julien de Valvert, the ‘green valley’ - although in this light it was etched in shades of grey and pink and silver.(page 88)

As I read on I wished I could be there. It is a moving story full of wisdom and one I shall re-read.

Tags: Rosy Thornton

Posted in Book Reviews, Fiction | 4 Comments »

Weekly Geeks – Reading from the Decades

Aug 22nd, 2010 by Margaret

This week’s Weekly Geeks is about examining a book (or books) which were published in your birth decade. Tell us about a book that came out in the decade you were born which you either loved or hated. Is it relevant to today? Is it a classic, or could it be? Give us a mini-review, or start a discussion about the book or books.

The first author I thought of who had written books in the 1940s was Enid Blyton and one of the books she published in 1946, my birth year is The First Term at Malory Towers. The Malory Towers books (she published 6 between 1946 and 1951) were amongst my favourite Enid Blyton books.

I read all of them avidly! The lives of these girls at boarding school were so different from mine. It sounded wonderful, by the sea, at a school that looked like a castle with towers built on the cliffs in Cornwall.

This is boarding school fiction written well before J K Rowling was born. I loved all the books about Darrell Rivers’ adventures at Malory Towers from the age of twelve, when she first went there. It’s been years since I read them but I still remember wishing I could go to a school like that. There is more information on this book and other Enid Blyton books at The Enid Blyton Society. I had started to write this post and stopped to watch Country Tracks and amazingly part of the programme was about Dorset where Enid Blyton once lived. Even though she located Malory Towers in Cornwall she was actually describing the landscape of Dorset. Ben Fogle was looking at places connected to Enid including the swimming pool cut out of the rocks that features in Malory Towers. The real pool was dug out of the rocks in the 1930s when a headmaster wanted to stop his boys from jumping into the sea from the rocks.

I no longer have my copy, but I do have two of the series – In the Fifth at Malory Towers and Last Term at Malory Towers, in which Darrell is the headgirl of the whole school. I’m tempted to read them again, but maybe I won’t enjoy them as much now as I did before and I’ll find them terribly dated.

The next book I first read when I was in my teens and it is Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, the first in his Gormenghast series. I found this book in the library, attracted to it by the unusual title. I thought it was brilliantly fantastic and read all three of the series. A few years ago I bought all three books.

This is from the back cover of Titus Groan:

Titus Groan, heir to Lord Sepulchrave, has just been born. A Groan of the strict lineage, Titus is seventy-seventh, he will inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that form Gormenghast Castle, and its surrounding kingdom. His world will be predetermined by complex ritual, the origins of which are lost in time; it will be peopled by the dark characters who inhabit the half-lit corridors. Lord Sepulchrave, a figment of melancholy, and his red-haired Countess; Swelter the chef and his bony enemy, Flay; Prunesqallor, castle physician, and his etiolated sister, Irma, and Steerpike, the Machiavellian youth.

This is a strange world and I loved it. I think it has stood the test of time, mainly because it is timeless, set in its own world. And, of course, I’m keen to read them again too.

My third choice is one I read only this year - The Hollow by Agatha Christie. I think this is one of the best Christie books. It is a country-house mystery with plenty of characters who could be the murderer and it kept me guessing, almost to the end. I wrote about it in February. This is also a book I’d love to re-read.

Tags: Enid Blyton, Gormenghast, Malory Towers, Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

Posted in Books, Weekly Events, Weekly Geeks | 7 Comments »

My Life in Books

Aug 21st, 2010 by Margaret

Last year I participated in a meme to describe my life in terms of the books I read during the year. Now Pop Culture Nerd has created a 2010 version of the meme with new sentences and I seen it on several blogs - DJ’s Krimiblog, Bernadette at Reactions to Reading and Margot at Confessions of a Mystery Novelist. So I thought I’d have a go too. Here are my answers using only the titles of the books I’ve read so far this year.

In high school I was: Invisible (Paul Auster)

People might be surprised I’m: Black and Blue (Ian Rankin)

I will never be: The Warrior’s Princess (Barbara Erskine)

My fantasy job is: The Gourmet (Muriel Barbery)

At the end of a long day I need: The Very Thought of You (Rosie Alison)

I hate it when: Losing You (Nicci French)

Wish I had: King Arthur’s Bones (The Medieval Murderers)

My family reunions are: A Question of Blood (Ian Rankin)

At a party you’d find me with:Fallen Gods (Quintin Jardine)

I’ve never been to: Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)

A happy day includes: The Right Attitutude to Rain (Alexander Mccall Smith)

Motto I live by: Faithful Unto Death (Caroline Graham)

On my bucket list: 100 Days on Holy Island (Peter Mortimer)

In my next life, I want to be: The Man who Planted Trees (Jean Giono)

Posted in Books, Memes | 4 Comments »

Book Beginnings on Friday

Aug 20th, 2010 by Margaret

I’m just about to start reading 4.50 From Paddington by Agatha Christie. The first sentence is:

Mrs McGillicuddy panted along the platform in the wake of the porter carrying her suitcase.

I like this sentence because it paints a picture and I know immediately that Mrs McGillicuddy is not a young or a fit woman, as she’s out of breath, or she’s running late for the train. The next few sentences pad out the picture of a woman who is short and stout, carrying a large quantity of parcels as a result of Christmas shopping. So I also know that it is most likely to be December and as she has been shopping she is most likely to be going home and she’s probably tired out.

As this is an Agatha Christie book I know there’ll be a murder and I also know from the blurb that she is about to witness the murder on a passing train through the train window. Now I just need to get reading.

Tags: Agatha Christie

Posted in Book Beginnings on Friday, Books, Crime Fiction, Memes | 4 Comments »

Fleshmarket Close by Ian Rankin: Book Review

Aug 19th, 2010 by Margaret

The latest Rebus book I’ve read is Fleshmarket Close. As usual with Ian Rankin’s books this is a complex novel, based around the issues of asylum seekers, illegal immigrants and racial prejudice. Rebus, himself is tolerant, pointing out that his grandfather was Polish and an immigrant. But Rebus hasn’t mellowed at all. He is still a loner and now an outsider, shipped out of his old office, St Leonard’s to Gayfield Square where there is no office or even desk space for him. He’s impatient with his superiors, realising they think it’s time for him to retire.

There is plenty going on in this book, a lot of characters and sub-plots, so it needs concentrated reading. There’s the murder of an unknown immigrant found dead in Knoxland, high-rise blocks of flats, the discovery of two skeletons under the concrete floor in the cellar of the Warlock pub in Fleshmarket Close, the disappearance of Ishbel Jardine, whose sister, a rape victim, had committed suicide, and the murder of the convicted rapist, Donny Cruickshank.

Rebus is relentless in his pursuit of the truth, despite his drinking problems and his difficulties in maintaining any meaningful relationships. DS Siobhan Clarke is also feeling more and more as though she is turning into Rebus, with her late-night lone drinking and methods of working,and there are signs that she and Rebus are drawing closer. How all the cases connect, or indeed if they do connect, is not clear until near the end of the book, when Big Ger Cafferty makes a brief appearance. Although Rebus can’t prove it he knows that Cafferty was behind the scenes using, abusing, conning and manipulating people.

Tags: Ian Rankin

Posted in Book Reviews, Crime Fiction, Fiction | 7 Comments »