What are you reading the week of January 16, 2016?

Dame Ngaio Marsh DBE (23 April 1895 – 18 February 1982), born Edith Ngaio Marsh, was a New Zealand crime writer and theatre director. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1966.

Internationally Marsh is known primarily for her creation Inspector Roderick Alleyn, a gentleman detective who works for the Metropolitan Police (London). Thus she is one of the "Queens of Crime" alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham.

Marsh was born in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, where she also died. Her father neglected to register her birth until 1900 and there is some uncertainty about the date. She was the only child of Rose and bank clerk Henry Marsh, described by Marsh as "have-nots." Her mother's sister Ruth married the geologist, lecturer, and curator Robert Speight. Ngaio Marsh was educated at St Margaret's College in Christchurch, where she was one of the first students when the school was founded. She studied painting at the Canterbury College (NZ) School of Art before joining the Allan Wilkie company as an actress and touring New Zealand. From 1928 she divided her time between living in New Zealand and in the United Kingdom. From 1928 to 1932 she operated an interior decorating business in Knightsbridge, London.

Internationally she is best known for her 32 detective novels published between 1934 and 1982. Along with Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, she has been classed as one of the four original "Queens of Crime"—female writers who dominated the crime fiction genre in the Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s.

All her novels feature British CID detective Roderick Alleyn. Several novels feature Marsh's other loves, the theatre and painting. A number are set around theatrical productions (Enter a Murderer, Vintage Murder, Overture to Death, Opening Night, Death at the Dolphin, and Light Thickens), and two others are about actors off stage (Final Curtain and False Scent). Her short story "'I Can Find My Way Out" is also set around a theatrical production and is the earlier "Jupiter case" referred to in Opening Night. Alleyn marries a painter, Agatha Troy, whom he meets during an investigation (Artists in Crime), and who features in several later novels.

Most of the novels are set in England, but four are set in New Zealand, with Alleyn either on secondment to the New Zealand police (Colour Scheme, and Died in the Wool), or on holiday (Vintage Murder and Photo Finish); Surfeit of Lampreys begins in New Zealand but continues in London.

Marsh's great passion was the theatre. In 1942 she produced a modern-dress Hamlet for the Canterbury University College Drama Society (now University of Canterbury Dramatic Society Incorporated or Dramasoc), the first of many Shakespearean productions with the society until 1969. In 1944, Hamlet and a production of Othello toured a theatre-starved New Zealand to rapturous acclaim. In 1949, assisted by entrepreneur Dan O'Connor, her student players toured Australia with a new version of Othello and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. In the 1950s she was involved with the New Zealand Players, a relatively short-lived national professional touring repertory company. In 1972 she was invited by the Christchurch City Council to direct Shakespeare's Henry V, the inaugural production for the opening of the newly constructed James Hay Theatre in Christchurch; she made the unusual choice of casting two male leads, who alternated on different nights.

She lived long enough to see New Zealand set up with a viable professional theatre industry with realistic Arts Council support, with many of her protégés to the forefront. The 430-seat Ngaio Marsh Theatre at the University of Canterbury is named in her honour. Her home on the Cashmere Hills is preserved as a museum.

She never married nor had children and had close friendships with women "companions", most notably her lifelong friend Sylvia Fox. Marsh also wore trousers and had a deep voice, but denied flatly that she was a lesbian throughout her life, according to her biographer Joanne Drayton. 'I think Ngaio Marsh wanted the freedom of being who she was in a world, especially in a New Zealand that was still very conformist in its judgments of what constituted ‘decent jokers, good Sheilas, and ‘weirdos’’,' Roy Vaughan wrote after meeting her on a P&O Liner. In 1965 she published an autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew. British author and publisher Margaret Lewis wrote an authorized biography, Ngaio Marsh, A Life in 1991. New Zealand art historian Joanne Drayton's biography, Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime was published in 2008.

She died in Christchurch, and was buried at the Church of the Holy Innocents, Mount Peel.

I finished up The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. It was an entertaining and enlightening read about the commonalities of myths worldwide, but it is really about story structure. Campbell's focus on the psychological and sociological implications of his 'monomyth' is interesting, but the references to Freud and Jung make it seem dated. (Does anyone still talk about those guys? They seem to have evaporated from the culture since 1980.) It's a little like reading about pre-tectonic "land bridges" between the continents to explain the fossil evidence.

Anyway, I've started Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth this week. I'm enjoying it so far, but at 700+ pages this is probably going to take me two to three weeks to get through.

Finished wild geese by Martha Ostenso and started reading Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by kay Larson

I'm still reading and enjoying my Early Reviewer, Ashley Bell by Dean Koontz.

I'm still working my way through Justin Cronin's The Passage, although by this point I'm beginning to wonder if I'm ever going to finish it. It's not holding my interest.

My first two books of the new year have been This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and My America: What My Country Means to Me by 150 Americans from All Walks of Life edited by Hugh Downs.

I finished The Past yesterday and am no reading When Breath Becomes Air - beautifully written, but heartbreaking.

5> I'm afraid that it's not going to get any better. I read it when it came out. The author writes well enough, but the book is filled with every cliche from the genre. It wouldn't be so bad if he used them to defy expectations, but he doesn't. I bought the second book in the series when it came out. I gave up on it after about 20 pages. This past summer, I donated both books to a take-one-leave-one book shelf in a local store. In retrospect that seems rather cruel.

Still working on The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg. Finished Shaman's Crossing and started Forest Mage by Robin Hobb.

Finished When Breath Becomes Air.

Now I am deciding between: The Versions of Us, The Happy Marriage, My Father, the Pornographer, and Browsings. Suggestions?

Enjoying The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Swedish author Katarina Bivald.

>11 nrmay:

Will be interestd to hear what you think, as this book is on my wishlist.

Just finished a re-read of the Burton Watson translation of Cold Mountain, an excellent book of poetry by Han Shan.

I finished and absolutely loved Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe by Sandra Gulland. It is the second book in a trilogy about Josephine Bonaparte and starts just after she marries Napoleon in 1796. Lots of intrigue and history and compulsively readable!

Yesterday I picked up My Name is Lucy Barton from the library so it looks like I'll be starting it next.

I'm just starting Shylock is My Name by Howard Jacobson, my most recent Early Reviewers book.

I am struggling with The Passage by Justin Cronin - 1,000 pages of vampirish lore set in post-apocalyptic California - and am so mired down by, and so little interested. For diversion I picked up a fat biography of Queen Victoria - Victoria - A Life, by A.N. Wilson (no touchstone for the book) - only to find it, too, very dull. I don't know if this is a reflection on me or the books. Tomorrow I'm going to put them both aside and read a mystery novel of some sort, either that or put all books aside and binge or Doctor Who.

> 16

I loved Cronin's Mary and O'Neil, but I have no desire to read The Passage.

Have got two books on the go at the moment although neither of them is really grabbing me; again, I don't know whether it's me or the books.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson got off to a good start but the premise has worn thin and there are a bewildering number of characters in the book, which I feel as if I've been reading forever. Likewise Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence just hasn't got my mojo working and my mind keeps drifting. I'll keep at it for now, though.

I just finished The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories by Marina Keegan. It was very good. I enjoyed most of the short stories and all of the essays. She was definitely talented!

I finished Euphoria which I very much enjoyed. It presents a A love triangle among anthropologists studying primitive tribes in New Guinea. Excellently done. The back drop allows for placing their actions and culture under an analytical light.

Next up Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe

Reading Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Watsons.

I'm reading Dirty Secrets of the World's Worst Employee. Great story for anyone who wants to be an author.

Finished The Paper Magician and started The Glass Magician. Interesting magic system.

>18 cappybear: Life after Life wore thin for me as well. I abandoned it somewhere around the middle of the book.

Not reading anything at the moment, but Rage Against the Dying by Becky Masterman looks interesting, should I find it in me to read.

Started Rage Against the Dying by Becky Masterman. It's really good so far.

Just started on Cold Comfort Farm.

I am 20 pages from the end of With Billie by Julia Blackburn. I admire the book but I have been able to take it only in small doses (as you can see by the fact that I need to take a break before reading the final 20 pages). Billie Holiday's life -- told mainly through the testimony of people who knew her -- illuminates, maddens, soars, shatters, breaks the heart. Even if only a small part of what they say is true -- and part of the experience of reading this book is trying to filter through the varying accounts to get some sense of the truth -- the journey back into that time is tough. I was a 12-year-old white child of the South when Billie died -- my parents admired her music so her passing was noted in our home. I'd had a sheltered, fairly happy middle-class childhood, but by 1959 I was beginning to understand that there were other points of view, other ways of looking at the decade that was ending, so much I hadn't been told. Billie Holiday's death -- and the insight into her life that I gained from reading the obituaries -- was one of those events that woke me, taught me, rocked my world -- as it still does today. I'd be in college before I read Frank O'Hara's amazing poem, "The Day Lady Died," but even now, so many decades later, reading about her death left me "sweating a lot by now" and remembering the way her voice emanating from my parents' scratchy 78s left me breathless.

I should also mention that one of the breaks I took as I read With Billie was to read a chapter of a book Blackburn recommends -- Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights in which Hardwick gives her own account of meeting Billie Holiday in 1940s Harlem. Hardwick's account added a great deal to my understanding of the New York City of that time.

Next up: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

I finished Chance by Joseph Conrad last weekend, but didn't get an opportunity to write up my review until today. Chance is not considered to be one of Conrad's great works, a judgement with which I concur, although somewhat ironically the book provided Conrad's first major commercial success. That said, Chance is still Conrad, even if it's not Conrad in top form. For a Conrad lover like me, happy to dig into one of the author's few novels that I hadn't read yet, this still meant a mostly happy reading experience. The story is a romance at its heart, but to say much more than that would already present a plot spoiler. You can find my more in-depth (or at least longer) comments on the book's work page and on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

I'm already almost all the way through The Devil's Code, the third installment in John Sandford's "Kidd" series. This is the sort of easy, though quality, fun I needed after Seven Pillars of Wisdom immediately followed by Chance.

Just finished Becky Masterman's Rage Against The Dying, which is the best crime fiction novel I've read in many years. I recommend it highly. Five stars.

Am now reading and enjoying the quirky stories in Marrying Off Mother and other Stories by the always enjoyable Gerald Durrell.

>8 fredbacon: It didn't get any better. I abandoned it, and will be taking it to the local used bookstore for credit.

I read Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton straight through, only stopping to answer two telephone calls. I wanted to shout at those people -- How dare you call right now? Don't you know I'm reading?

What a remarkable book. I shall read it again in a few days, or sooner. I'm not sure I want to read anything else in between.

>31 mollygrace:

I guess with that endorsement, I will go get it!

The new thread is up over here.