Pamelad reads again

Happy New Year!

Best new reads of 2019

Second-hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich
Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys
Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
Is He Popenjoy? by Anthony Trollope
The Little Hotel by Christina Stead
The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers
The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq
The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

I also re-read a few favourites and enjoyed them just as much as I did the first time.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Persuasion by Jane Austen
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Lucia series, starting with Queen Lucia by E. F. Benson

January

1. A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell
2. L’Étranger by Albert Camus
3. Our Women on the Ground by Zahra Hankir
4. The Secret Lives of Men by Georgia Blain
5. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
6. The Cruel Way by Ella Maillart
7. Big Sky by Kate Atkinson
8. The Weekend by Charlotte Wood
9. Milkman by Anna Burns
10. Pomfret Towers by Angela Thirkell
11. The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
12. The Bertrams by Anthony Trollope
13. The Golden Spiders by Rex Stout
14. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
15. After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys
16. Private Enterprise by Angela Thirkell

February

17. The Private Wound by Nicholas Blake
18. Cousins by Meto Jovanovski
19. Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy
20. R. U. R. by Karel Capek
21. The Lenient Beast by Fredric Brown
22. A Buyer's Market by Anthony Powell
23. The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea
24. Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny
25. Say Nothing: A True story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
26. My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
27. The land Before Avocado by Richard Glover
28. Over My Dead Body by Rex Stout
29. The So Blue Marble by Dorothy B. Hughes
30. The Headmistress by Angela Thirkell

March

31. Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
32. Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P. G. Wodehouse
33. The Riddle of the Deplorable Dandy by Patricia Veryan
34. Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi
35. An Autobiography of Anthony Trollope by Anthony Trollope
36. The Cinderella Killer by Simon Brett
37. Kitty Flanagan's 488 Rules for Life by Kitty Flanagan
38. Not Quite Dead Enough by Rex Stout
39. Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales
40. Before Midnight by Rex Stout
41. The Acceptance World by Anthony Powell
42. Haunted Lady by Mary Roberts Rinehart

April

43. The Flowering Thorn by Marjery Sharp
44. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
45. Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
46. Eggshell skull by Bri Lee
47. Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton
48. Crime of Silence by Patricia Carlon
49. The Long Prospect by Elizabeth Harrower
50. See What You Made Me Do by Jess Hill
51. Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard
52. Eleven Came Back by Mabel Seeley
53. Rasputin and Other Ironies by Teffi
54. The Glass Slipper by Mignon G. Eberhart

May

55. While the Patient Slept by Mignon G. Eberhart
56. The Merchant's House by Kate Ellis
57. Rules for Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson
58. The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
59. At Lady Molly's by Anthony Powell
60. W, Or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec
61. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell
62. I Am Jonathan Scrivener by Claude Houghton
63. Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman
64. The Lucky Stiff by Craig Rice

June

65. Crimson Lake by Candice Fox
66. Redemption Point by Candice Fox
67. Painting in the Shadows by Katherine Kovacic
68. The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell
69. The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
70. Bird Lives! by Bill Moody
71. Not So Quiet by Helen Zenna Smith
72. A Lost Leader by E. Phillips Oppenheim
73. Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear
74. Sunburn by Laura Lippman

July

75. Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
76. You're Not Listening by Kate Murphy
77. The Returns by Philip Salom
78. The Shifting Landscape by Katherine Kovacic
79. China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan
80. Gone by Midnight by Candice Fox
81. I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron
82. A Man by Keiichiro Hirano
83. The Villa in Italy by Elizabeth Edmondson
84. The Temptation of Gracie by Santa Montefiore

August

85. The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo
86. Line of Sight by A. C. Koning
87. The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell
88. Hanged for a Sheep by Frances Lockridge and Richard Lockridge
89. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
90. Conviction by Denise Mina
91. The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell
92. The Duke and I by Julia Quinn
93. The Viscount Who Loved Me by Julia Quinn
94. An Offer from a Gentleman by Julia Quinn
95. The Hotel Years by Joseph Roth
96. Tamar by Deborah Challinor

September

97. White Feathers by Deborah Challinor
98. Blue Smoke by Deborah Challinor
99. The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell
100. The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer
101. Blood Upon the Snow by Hilda Lawrence
102. A Time to Die by Hilda Lawrence
103. Death in Fancy Dress by Anthony Gilbert
104. Crossed Skis by Carol Carnac
105. Checkmate to Murder by E. C. R. Lorac

October

106. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
107. The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards
108. In the Dark by Loreth Anne White
109. Nothing to Do with the Case by Elizabeth Lemarchand
110. Postscript to Poison by Dorothy Bowers
111. The Robthorne Mystery by John Rhode
112. Distress Signals by Catherine Ryan Howard
113. They Liked Entwhistle by R. A. J. Walling
114. Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic
115. Fear and Miss Betony by Dorothy Bowers

November

116. Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell
117. The Bells at Old Bailey by Dorothy Bowers
118. The Silver Spoon: Quick and Easy Italian Recipes
119. The Antidote by Oliver Burkman
120. Consolation by Garry Disher
121. Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell
122. Inspector Frost and Lady Brassingham by Herbert Maynard Smith
123. Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins
124. Lady of Quality by Georgette Heyer
125. Cotillion by Georgette Heyer
126. Cheerfulness Breaks In by Angela Thirkell
127. The Black Moth by Georgette Heyer

December

128. These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer
129. Devil's Cub by Georgette Heyer
130. The Convenient Marriage by Georgette Heyer
131. A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer
132. Arabella by Georgette Heyer
133. Frederica by Georgette Heyer
134. Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer
135. Cousin Kate by Georgette Heyer
136. Regency Buck by Georgette Heyer
137. Venetia by Georgette Heyer
138. Hearing Secret Harmonies by Anthony Powell
139. The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer
140. Sylvester or the Wicked Uncle by Georgette Heyer
141. The Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer
142. Peace, Perfect Peace by Josephine Kamm
143. The Corinthian by Georgette Heyer
144. The Talisman Ring by Georgette Heyer
145. Friday's Child by Georgette Heyer
146. Jutland Cottage by Angela Thirkell
147. Charity girl by Georgette Heyer
148. The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Best wishes for 2020.

Your favorite re-reads list reminds me I need to get back to the Lucia books. Hope it's a good reading (and living!) year!

1. A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell, first book in the series A Dance to the Music of Time.

I read and liked A Dance to the Music of Time many years ago, and was reminded of it by EyeJayBee's reviews. Enjoyed this book again, and will continue with the series.

I first read the sequence nearly forty years ago and have been rereading it regularly ever since, with a view to writing about it (although I have never quite got around to that yet). I have always been intrigued by the fact that Powell’s early, pre-war novels were conspicuous by their blandness: not memorable at all, and they probably would not still be published if it weren’t for the Music of Time sequence.

>11 Eyejaybee: You're thinking of writing about the different ways you see Powell's series as your perspective changes with the years? It's an interesting idea.

I've just re-read L’Étranger in French. I read it when I was at school, when my French was better but my comprehension worse. It was a slow read due to the enormous concentration required, a sort of forced-close reading, so the impression it made was deeper. I've read it in English a few times, but haven't taken in as much.

3. Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World by Zahra Hankir

In this collection of essays women journalists write about their lives and work. All of them have reported from war zones, sometimes their own country. They see not just the violence, but the details of daily life amidst the chaos and carnage. They can speak to women surviving in the war zones, and in the repressive regimes of countries like Libya, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. In Libya, if a woman marries a foreigner she cannot pass on her Libyan citizenship to her children, so when they reach 18 they are deported from Libya to their father's country.

They write about the impact of their on their lives. Some women have put their families in danger by writing articles thought to be critical of the regime. it is a constant theme, the need to be impartial, to report every side, despite political control of the media. Some women have had to leave altogether - to be able to work, or even to save their lives. Some have remained single because no man would marry a woman so impure as to be a journalist, working with men.

The women reporting from Syria provide far more nuanced perspectives on the war than those we are used to receiving. The articles from Syria are, perhaps, the most devastating in the collection.

>13 pamelad: This sounds fascinating - adding it to the tbr.

I'm definitely adding Our Women on the Ground to my to-read list. I read Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here last year, and they seem like they might be good companion pieces.

>15 mabith: I've added Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here to my wishlist and plan to read it soon.

The Cruel Way by Ella Maillart

I read Maillart's Forbidden Journey, about her travels from Peking to Kashmir in the company of Peter Fleming, and loved it, so was expecting great things from The Cruel Way which describes Maillart's journey from Geneva to Kabul in 1939. However, unlike the earlier book, which bounds along with energy and enthusiasm, this one is more reflective. Maillart, who was Swiss, wrote it in English. It doesn't flow very well, and the language is often pompous, bordering on biblical, littered with obscure Gallicisms and archaic expressions. It was written in the forties, when the author was living in India, and in parts is a meditation on finding life's meaning. There are many quotes from authors who have written about the history and architecture of the region, adding an academic overlay to this disjointed account.

Maillart is travelling with a friend, Christina (pseudonym forAnnemarie Schwarzenbach ) an anguished fellow-writer who is addicted to morphine. Maillart hopes the journey will mend her friend, but cannot understand Christina's apparent need to suffer, which Maillart believes is a choice.

This is a mess of a book, with some interesting bits.

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

This is the latest in the Jackson Brodie series. It was OK, but I found the pace too slow and the characters two-dimensional.

9. Milkman by Anna Burns

I saw this described as "stream of consciousness" and was a little concerned because on my recent trudge through Ulysses I lost my way many times. Not a problem with Milkman. The narrator's consciousness flows in an orderly stream, one thread at a time.

The book is set in the seventies, in a city in Northern Ireland dominated by sectarian violence. The narrator, the eighteen-year-old middle sister, belongs to a big family linked to the "renouncers." Two renouncer brothers are dead and a third is in hiding. People of the "other religion" are loyal to the "country over the water." In middle sister's community, even the people who decry the violence are loyal to the cause, not that they have a choice. They are assaulted and killed by British soldiers and the police, and are governed, in effect, by the balaclava-wearing, military arm of the renouncers.

Middle sister ignores the politics and the violence. She walks the streets with eyes on a book from the nineteenth century or earlier because she wants nothing to do with the twentieth century. She tries to reveal nothing of herself to the people around her, so when she is staled and threatened by a middle-aged paramilitary, Milkman, she knows noone who could help her. Worse than that, local rumour has her already the mistress of the married Milkman.

I enjoyed Milkman for its depiction of a beleaguered Catholic community during the Troubles - the loyalties, the prejudices, the rules, the gossip, the hopelessness, the insularity, the warmth, the wit. I also liked the narrator's voice, a sardonic and funny young person experimenting with language, analysing the motives of the people around her, trying to manage the senselessness of the Troubles.

11. The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

LT keeps recommending this book to me and it has an overall rating of 4.5 stars, so I was looking forward to reading it.

The Knapps are an ill-assorted couple. The gentle, poetic Lester makes barely enough money to support his family, and hates his job. The energetic, efficient, angry Evangeline has an immaculate house, cooks beautifully and makes her herself, her husband and her children miserable. Everyone has an ailment except for the youngest boy, who throws tantrums. Circumstances result in a role reversal. Lester runs the house, Eva goes out to work and everyone is better off. But in 1924, an able-bodied man in Smalltown U.S.A cannot be allowed to stay home raising the children.

This book is for people who enjoy a clear moral, repeated often, don't mind sentimentality, and can do without subtlety. I found it cringe worthy.

14. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Only people who don't know her call the elderly Mrs Janina Dusjejko by her first name. She's never thought it belonged to her, and calls herself Duszejko. Other people, too, have names that don't fit, so she gives them names that do: Dizzy, Oddball, Good News, Bigfoot. She lives on an isolated plateau, so close to the Czech republic the phone signal is as likely to come from there as from Poland. In winter, she acts as caretaker for the holiday houses on the plateau, with Oddball and Bigfoot her closest neighbours.

When the story starts, Dusjejko, the narrator, has little to do with her neighbours, but that changes when Oddball calls her out in the middle of the night. Bigfoot is dead, choked to death on a bone from a deer he has killed and eaten. His death is followed by others, all of them hunters, so Dusjejko formulates the theory that the animals are taking revenge.

Dusjejko has an appealing voice: wry, funny and observant. She once built bridges in the Middle East, but her Ailments have limited her activity. Now she teaches English to primary school children one day a week, helps her friend Dizzy translate Blake into Polish, and casts horoscopes. Like Blake she has a mystical view of the natural world and animals are as important to her as people are.

This is a philosophical, comic, crime investigation, with a pinch of politics and sociology. I loved it.

15. After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys

A sad and haunting book, based on the author's life. Julia relies on men to support her, but her looks are going and she's drinking to survive. She's enraged at the world, and worried that she's losing her mind. It's beautifully written, and genuine.

Adding a few books to my wish list from an article in the Guardian: Beyond American Dirt: the best books to understand Latinx culture

Children of the Land, Fiebre Tropical and Dominicana. I've read another on the list, Pedro Paramo, which I would recommend highly, and The House of Broken Angels was already on my wish list.

17. The Private Wound by Nicholas Blake

This was published in 1968, but is set in 1939.

Dominic Eyre, a writer, is travelling around Ireland, the country where he was born, looking for a quiet place to stay for a while to finish his novel. His car breaks down in a small town, and he ends up renting a house there. His closest neighbour is Flurry Leeson, loved and renowned as a brave leader in the fight against the Black and Tans. Flurry is much older than his wife, the beautiful and promiscuous Harriet. She and Dominic begin a passionate affair, which ends with her death.

The writing is good and the Irish politics are interesting, but I don't like writers to kill off their female characters. It seems so misogynistic. I would have liked Harriet to be a more like a person, less like an archetype.

Overall it's an entertaining read, but the characters are wooden and the ending is silly unless you're a connoisseur of fly fishing.

18. Cousins by Meto Jovanovski

The cousins are two young men from a village in Macedonia. It is a tradition in the village that the young men leave during wartime to avoid being forcibly recruited into an army. They find work elsewhere and bring their earnings home to their families when the threat of war is over. It is 1917, and the villagers are at risk of being recruited by the Bulgarian army, the Serbian army, and the Allies. (The Bulgarians are allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary, Serbia and Greece with the Allies). It is not at all clear which country their village belongs to.

The cousins have no political affiliations at all and their only aim is to make their way home to their village, but the front is in the way.
They cannot avoid being recruited into an army, so they need to choose the one that most likely to get them home.

Cousins reads like a fable. The young men are simple villagers who understand little, do what they are told, and try to stay out of trouble until they reach home. Their plight highlights the absurdity of this war.

The book was an oddity. I enjoyed it.

19. Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle concentrates on Dervla Murphy's travels through Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan in 1963. She's a woman with strong opinions that she's not afraid to voice. Here she is on the Persians.

"But I've decided that the Persians, though it's impossible for me to like them as I do the Turks, are more to be pitied than censured. Hundreds of years of inbreeding and malnutrition have undermined the race and it is only when you approach them from that angle and treat them with the necessary patience that you can come to terms with them."

Here she is in Muzaffarabad, a small town in a disputed area of India-Pakistan. "The people are in general the most moronic I've met since Persia, but they're friendly.....

Dervla loves Afghanistan and the Afghans, likes Pakistan and some of the Pakistanis, and hasn't a lot to say about India. She's against roads being built into remote areas because they allow the Western world to swamp ancient customs, and is in two minds about women's independence (education makes them discontented with their way of life) and education for the underclasses. "We have yet to prove that universal literacy as we know it advances the mass of people in any worthwhile direction."

Murphy saw ancient towns, like Herat, before they were destroyed. She met people who had lived in the same ways for centuries. She cycled during the coldest winter for decades and in temperatures close to 120F.. She crossed rivers and glaciers, cycled through the Himalayas up mountains and through idyllic valleys. She lived with the locals, rich and poor, and made friends everywhere she went.

This book is about Dervla Murphy, her experiences and her opinions. Like her or lump her.

20. R. U. R. by Karel Capek

Capek's play introduced the term robot and in this translation, by David Wyllie, it seems that Capek also introduced the fax and spoke American slang. Find another translation!

R. U. R. stands for Rossum's Universal Robots. Rossum discovered a different kind of protoplasm, much quicker to make than the old kind that humans are made from, and made the first robots. These aren't the mechanical robots we're used to - they're like a simplified human, containing all the body systems they need as workers, but nothing inessential. No emotions, no pain, and they can't reproduce.

Rossum died long ago, leaving his instructions for making the robots whose production is now a big business. That's the problem. The factory produces robots for all sorts of jobs, and people no longer have to work. The armies are manned by robots, who are utterly ruthless. The robots become so competent that they take over.

This was a precursor to War with the Newts, which has a similar theme: short-sighted greed leading to destruction. Recommended, but War with the Newts is better.

>26 pamelad: I had never heard of Dervla Murphy before but shall definitely look out for her books now.

A Buyer's Market, the second volume in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time

I enjoyed this, but Powell goes in for long sentences with many subordinate clauses, so at times I'd lose the thread and have to start again. It reminded me of reading In Search of Lost Time, but Powell's interior and exterior worlds don't entertain me as much as Proust's did. Powell seems a conventional Englishman of his time.

The first volume covered the narrator's school and university days. In the second volume he is working for a publisher of art books, attending coming out dances, and spending weekends at country houses. An important character is an elderly artist, a friend of the narrator's parents. I am sure that when I read this the first time, many years ago, I would not have picked up all the references to gay men.

This is a picture of the British class system. Very interesting.

Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

An amusing book about a couple with a son who has Asperger's. The husband divorced Elspeth, a quiet, orderly, capable lawyer and married Audra, her opposite. The humour comes from Audra, who never shuts up.

The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea is recommended in the Guardian article Beyond American Dirt: the best books to understand Latinx culture

Big Angel, the patriarch of a huge Mexican-American family is dying of cancer. His mother just died at 102, a few days before Big Angel's birthday, so he schedules her funeral one day and his birthday party the next, so that the hordes of relatives arriving from all over America only have to make one trip. These two days of celebration present the opportunity for love, new understanding, apology and forgiveness. Joy and laughter, music and dancing, mingle with sadness.

Initially the huge cast of characters is confusing, but the problem is the same for the relatives themselves. Little Angel, the younger half-brother of Big Angel, same father but white mother, is a university lecturer in Seattle. He's surreptitiously making a chart of the relatives and their connections. These are not hypothetical characters. It's clear that Urea knows people just like them, that he's shared the same poverty and experienced the same violence. But it's not a bleak book. It's wild and joyful.

Well worth reading.

Say Nothing: A True story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

This is an account of the Troubles, with a significant amount of information drawn from first-hand accounts of Provisional IRA members. This means that there is far more emphasis on the role of the IRA than of the Ulster Constabulary, the Unionists and the British Army, though the participation of the last three groups is touched on.

Gerry Adams, with his denials of ever belonging to the IRA, does not come out of this at all well. Nor do the British.

Milkman led me to Say Nothing, and now I would like to find out more.

My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

The title clearly represents the story, with the narrator being the older sister who is traditionally responsible for the younger. In this family, at least, the women have no power and are at the mercy of a monstrous father. It's a small book, but interesting for the snippets of life in Nigeria.

28. Over My Dead Body by Rex Stout

This was a find, an early Nero Wolfe novel I hadn't read. Published in 1938, it has Balkan Royalty, Nazi spies, corrupt financiers and a young woman who says she is Nero Wolfe's daughter! Excellent.

29. The So Blue Marble by Dorothy B. Hughes

This is one of Howard Haycraft's cornerstones of crime fiction. I'd have picked In a Lonely Place, but I enjoyed this one too.

Griselda used to be a film star, but she gave that up to become a dress designer. She's arrived in New York to see suppliers, and is staying at her ex-husband's apartment. One her way back there one night, she is waylaid by handsome, sinister twins, one dark and one fair, who are looking for the blue marble. This marble is a ludicrous thing to hang a plot on, so it's best not to stop to think about it, and move on with the psychopaths, film stars, spies, and multiple murders. The heroine is in constant peril because she hides the truth from the police in order to shield the ex-husband she still loves. A silly but suspenseful crime novel that rockets along entertainingly.

30. The Headmistress by Angela Thirkell

The Beltons have rented their family home, Harefield Park, to the Hosier's Girls' School, which has been evacuated from the wartime dangers of London to peaceful Barsetshire. The two Belton sons are in the armed forces, and Elsa, the daughter has an important hush-hush job. The fighting means that each time Mrs Belton sees her children could be the last time. It's the same for everyone with children in the forces. So, in this sense, Mrs Belton is a sympathetic figure.

In no other sense, though. Pompous, sneering, xenophobic snob. No sympathy for the lower classes, none for refugees.

The main character is actually Miss Starling, the headmistress of The Hosiers' School. She's not quite right, because she's not upper crust enough, but her grandfather was a canon, so she can fit in.

Cringeworthy.

31. Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

This is the third Rhys book I've re-read recently. A review in The Guardian led me to Voyage in the Dark, then I read After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. She's such a good writer, never a wasted word, such nuanced observations of people and places. She captures the inner lives of her main characters with devastating clarity and intensity, reaching a peak with Good Morning, Midnight.

Sasha is alone in Paris. She had lived there in her youth, when she could rely on her looks to find a man to look after her, but now she is in her forties, conscious of losing her looks, and is not having the same success. A relative has lent her money to move from London to Paris, out of the way. Sasha's life has been so sad, and she has been treated so cruelly so often that she expects to be.

This sounds so bleak, and it is, but Sasha sees herself clearly, with wit, and doesn't take herself too seriously. Her story is an interior monologue told with flashbacks. A room today reminds her of rooms years ago, the life she lived then, the man she was with.

I am making this book sound dreary and pedestrian, but it is anything but. It is a one-off, a wonderfully truthful piece of writing.

32. Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse

Pongo owes 250 pounds and has made the mistake of asking his Uncle Fred for help. The pair of them, along with Polly Potts, daughter of ex-bookie and current private detective and card sharp Mustard Potts, end up at Blandings Castle impersonating the eminent psychiatrist Sir Roderick Glossop, his secretary and his daughter. Many complications ensue, and, this being Blandings, the prize pig, the Empress of Blandings, is kidnapped.

I've read funnier Wodehouses, books that made me snort with laughter on public transport. This one raised only small smiles, but small smiles are good enough.

33. The Riddle of the Deplorable Dandy by Patricia Veryan

In 2018 I read many historical romances as I searched for a replacement for Georgette Heyer. There is no replacement but Patricia Veryan was worth the try. This is a Georgian adventure-romance with a spirited heroine and a sardonic hero. This is much more adventurous than Heyer's books, and not nearly as witty.

Elspeth Clayton, the spirited heroine, learns that her brother Vance, who has been working for Madame de Pompadour to make money to support his mother and sister, has been jailed as a spy and will probably be executed. Elspeth sets off to France to save her brother. She joins forces with the sardonic hero, Gervaise Verian, and you can guess what happens but there are lots of sword fights and threatened abductions, and multiple groups of villains who waylay the rescue party along the way. Entertaining.

I thought that Heyer's Beauvallet was pretty darn adventurous. It might be a little les witty than usual, though?

>40 LShelby: It's a long time since I read Beauvallet, so I'll take your word for its levels of wit and adventure.

34. I am pleased to have finished Jokha Alharthi's Celestial Bodies, which won the International Booker. It was translated from Arabic into leaden American prose by Marilyn Booth.

This is a fragmented narrative that jumps from person to person and era to era. Through the stories of one family and its slaves it traces the history of Oman since the end of the nineteenth century. The book was difficult to follow, and was a lot of effort for little reward.

35. An Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

Trollope's father was a barrister who was too bad-tempered to succeed at the bar. After a series of failed business enterprises, his money ran out. The fist part of Anthony Trollope's autobiography describes the misery of his poverty-stricken schooling. It was his mother, Fanny, who ended up supporting the family with her writing. She comes across as a joyful, energetic, generous woman. How sad for her to be tied to that awful husband.

Trollope worked for the Postal Service for most of his adulthood, not resigning until he had saved enough money that the interest would make up for the pension he would forego by taking early retirement. The book is full of financial calculations: the money earned for each book, and for writing jobs, his earnings at the post office, the cost of visiting his son in Australia versus the amount Trollope could earn by writing about the trip.

Part of the book is devoted to critiquing the writers of the day. Most of those worthy of Trollope's consideration are renowned today, but a couple have faded into obscurity. Trollope also discusses his own writing aims. He is brutally honest about which of his books met his goals and which were failures. Fascinating.

This was an odd book, which I found both interesting and enjoyable.

36. The Cinderella Killer by Simon Brett

I was pleased to find a Charles Paris mystery that I hadn't read. This time Charles is working in a pantomime in Eastbourne. The famous star of a well-loved, though discontinued, American television series has top billing, despite thinking that pantomimes have something to do with Marcel Marceau.

A slight, but entertaining read.

37. Another slight, entertaining read is Kitty Flanagan's 488 Rules for Life: The Thankless Art of Being Correct.

Flanagan is an Australian comedian, and this etiquette book comes from a spot she does on a regular TV show. The bit about trying on bathers in the changing room with the too small curtain had me snorting with laughter.

38. Not Quite dead Enough by Rex Stout

This book consists of two novellas. In the first, Archie, who is now a major in the US Army, has to persuade Wolfe to take on a detecting job for the army. Wolfe, however, has given up detection and is preparing himself to fight.

In the second novella, Wolfe is working for the army, investigating what seems to be a case of industrial espionage and profiteering that has already resulted in a death.

I enjoyed these, but they were too short to get right into.

39. Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales

Sales is an Australian television journalist know for hard-hitting political interviews. She works for the government-funded channel, the ABC (which predates the American ABC!).

After nearly dying of a ruptured uterus, and almost losing her baby, Sales became sensitised to life-changing disasters that befall people. She interviews some people who underwent shattering experiences that were widely covered by the media at the time. She wants to find out how they are now.

Quite interesting, but too much of the author.

40. Before Midnight by Rex Stout

An advertising company is running a literary competition, with a prize of $500,000 (an enormous amount for the fifties), to publicise the perfume, Pour Amour. After a murder and a theft, Wolfe is hired to find the thief.

Archie and Wolfe are always entertaining, but the plot was a stretch. The motives for the two murders weren't nearly good enough.

42. Haunted Lady by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Just what I wanted. Nurse Hilda Adams is hired to guard a wealthy elderly lady who thinks someone is trying to frighten her to death. Her house is full of relatives, all of whom have a motive.

This is one of Rinehart's later works, 1942. Loved it.

I was getting bogged down in Girl, Woman, Other so Haunted Lady was light relief.

43. The Flowering Thorn by Margery Sharp

Lesley is a brittle, witty young woman, living in a tiny flat with minimal possessions and spending her time socialising with other brittle, witty people. In a fit of bravado, she decides to adopt an orphaned four-year-old boy, and when she realises just how difficult a task she has taken on, she is too proud to give up.

This book was first published in 1934, so there is an acceptance that women find their fulfilment in domesticity. We witness the mellowing of Lesley.

This was a light, frothy read, but I had to keep reminding myself that women's lives and aspirations were different in 1934.

44. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

A book about the lives of a group of interconnected black women in the UK. Each character has a chapter. I felt that the characters were chosen to illustrate the points the author wanted to make and did much not enjoy it.

45. Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

Like Girl, Woman, Other, this book is about a group of interconnected people, this time in a small US town. Many of them have overcome early hardships - family violence, poverty, sexual assault - and have made a choice to be the best people they can. I enjoyed this book for its generosity and kindness.

Currently I am reading Boy Swallows Universe which, like Strout's book has a theme of choosing who to be.

46. Eggshell skull by Bri Lee

When she finished her law degree, the author spent a year working as a judge's assistant, travelling with him to regional court sessions in Queensland country towns. She witnessed many sexual assault cases and realised just how difficult it was for female complainants to fight their way through the legal system and get justice. Most perpetrators were found not guilty. Adult women complainants were just not trusted to be telling the truth and perpetrators were given the benefit of the doubt. One particular case, however, had an outcome that raised in Lee the hope that she could free herself from the shame of a childhood sexual assault by making her molester face charges.

This is an account of how our legal process works against the victims of sexual assault and violence, and how the author made her way through it.

A bit drawn out, but interesting. Recommended.

47. Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton

Many people have loved this book, but it just wasn't my cup of tea and I plodded through its 497 pages. I thought that the mystical bits detracted from the plot, which had to be distorted to fit them, and that too many of the characters were quirky caricatures. Perhaps the author wrote it like that to lighten up what could have been a bleak book about drug dealing, violence and family breakdown. He definitely looks for the positive.

On the plus side, the description of life in a Brisbane suburb in the eighties was interesting.

51. Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard

The narrator, Thomas Bernhard, is in hospital to have yet another operation on his lungs. He has been in and out of hospital since he was young, and is now in his fifties. In the same hospital his friend Paul Wittgenstein, nephew of the philosopher, is recovering in the mental wing. Wittgenstein's mania builds; his relatives commit him; the hospital destroys him, then he returns to the world and the cycle starts again. The mental patients are separated from the pulmonary patients by a fence, but there are places in the fence where the patients can scramble under the wire, and mental patients wander through the pulmonary wards. Bernhard dreads seeing his friend in this setting.

Although the book is ostensibly about Paul Wittgenstein, Thomas Bernhard uses his friend's life to illustrate his own and to expound his philosophies. He loathes most of the people he knows, the hypocrites, and hates his homeland of Austria, but somehow this is a very funny book.

Berhard uses no paragraphs so I was relieved that the book was only 100 pages long, but I found it so thought-provoking that I plan to read another.

Highly recommended.

49. The Long Prospect by Elizabeth Harrower is set in Newcastle, an industrial city north of Sydney, in the forties.

Emily lives with her grandmother Lilian, who is a monster, an entirely self-centred woman who destroys people's happiness for her own entertainment. At the start of the book Emily is about seven, and is very attached to Lilian's boarder, Thea, a scientist at the local steelworks who takes an interest in her, the only person who does. Thea eventually leaves Lilian's house, and although she makes an effort to see Emily, their friendship dissipates, leaving Emily alone again.

Years later, another scientist, Max, comes to board at Lilian's house, and becomes a great friend to Emily, an interested and intelligent child, and encourages her to do well at school and aim to study at university. Lilian and her friends disapprove.

Harrower is a wonderful writer with great psychological insight. Her writing is never tired or cliched, nor is it obscure and pretentious. She writes with wit and clarity, and her characters live. But she is bleak, so be prepared. Highly recommended.

52. Eleven Came Back by Mabel Seeley

This is a crime novel, written during WWII. Lots of scenery and atmosphere. A bit slow-moving, but that's comforting, in a way.

Eight years ago, a young couple has set up a radio station with the help of a financial backer. Their backer rings them to say that he is selling his interest to a notoriously unethical, power-mad woman who will use their station as a platform for views that are anathema to them. They trace their backer to an isolated dude ranch where he is staying with the evil woman and a group of suspect people.

The plot is not really believable, but that's not a problem. What is a problem, though, is the depiction of the one native American character, who is a collection of racist cliches.

53. Rasputin and Other Ironies by Teffi

Teffi was a beloved writer in Russia before and just after the revolution. Herr book Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea chronicles the journey that ended with her settling in France. I much preferred that book. This one is scrappy collection of articles, some of them more engaging than others. But all of them cover aspects of life in Russia, where Teffi was in the thick of the literary world, so they are a bulletin from a lost time.

54. The Glass Slipper by Mignon G. Eberhart has all the things I know and love about her books: a Mr Wrong and a Mr Right; an orphaned heroine who loses contact with her brain and puts herself in danger; a femme fatale; a menacing atmosphere; nice dresses. This one was predictable, even for Mignon G, but that's part of its charm.

I have recorded 24 of MGE's books in LT, but had started reading them way before LT came into being, so I've probably read close to forty of them.

I found this on the Open Library.

55. While the Patient Slept by Mignon G. Eberhart

This is an early Eberhart, her second book, first published in 1930. It features Nurse Sarah Keate, who has been hired to care for the patriarch of a very odd family, full of suspect people who are waiting for the old man to wake up and tell them something very important. They live in a rambling old house with no electricity. Even during the day, the rooms are shrouded in gloom by dusty old curtains. All very gothic. This is a real period piece, a bit overwrought.

60. The first chapter of W, Or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec is fiction. A man, orphaned at six years old, with someone else's name, begins the tale of his travels to the island of W. The next chapter begins the biography of the orphaned Georges Perec, whose last name is the result of a bureaucratic misspelling. The fiction and the biography alternate, chapter by chapter, diverging further and further, then converging once again.

W is an island off Tierra del Fuego, devoted entirely to sporting contests. At first this seems a benign fantasy, but as the details build up the society reveals itself to be something much more sinister.

Perec remembers little of his early life. His parents were Polish Jews who had settled in France. His father fought for France in WWII, and was killed early. His mother disappeared, murdered in Auchwitz. The orphaned boy moved between boarding schools and boarding houses, understanding little and remembering only fragments. It is only after the war, when he is going to school, that he can fix his subsequent memories to times and places.

This short, experimental, book is well worth reading. The only other of Perec's books I have read is Life: A User's Manual which also left a big impression. I will look for more of Perec's work.

58. The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes is a history of scientists, Joseph Banks, William Herschel and Humphrey Davy, entrepreneurial balloonists, and the explorer, Mungo Park, during the Romantic Age of Science. I had not known that Joseph Banks enjoyed his sojourn in Tahiti quite so much, that Coleridge was so much more than a poet and that there was such a merging of literature and science. Recommended.

>58 bryanoz: - I think I have that book, thanks for the recommendation!

Lots of interesting reading! I've been interested in Georges Perec for a while but haven't read anything of his yet.

>55 john257hopper: It branches off from science in entertaining ways: the politics of the Royal Society; Davy's inability to recognise the achievements of his former assistant, Faraday; the contribution of Herschel's sister, Caroline, to his discoveries; the flamboyancy of the balloonists, many of them from the continent; the hedonistic life of Joseph Banks before he became President of the Royal Society; the origins of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Interestingly, Davy, Herschel and Faraday did not come from privileged backgrounds. Davy had patrons, but Herschel and Faraday made their own way.

>56 japaul22: Welcome! I'd start with Life: A User's Manual because you have to be a Perec fan to want to read W, Or the Memory of Childhood. I'm wondering about A Void, which must be an impressive feat of translation. How to translate something written in French without the letter E into something in English without the letter E?

Don't avoid A Void, an intriguing read and translation given there is no E anywhere !

>57 pamelad: - you've further intrigued me with that description, Pamelad :)

No Cinematheque, no Melbourne Film Festival, so it's good to see that Mubi has opened up its library so that you can see what you want, when you want. I've just joined for a year.

https://mubi.com/library

A bit too optimistic. Lots more films are available to watch, but not anything in the library anytime.

I have been reading Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad for ever and I am now ploughing through a section about heroic coal miners and the glorious rewards of labour. I would guess that it was inserted at the request of the Soviet editors. This article gives a current, Western perspective on Vasily Grossman's struggle with the censors.

62. I am Jonathan Scrivener by Claude Houghton

This psychological mystery was first published in 1930. The narrator, James Wrexham, although educated at one of he greater public schools, has worked as a clerk and led a sad, dreary life for the past twenty years. On a whim he responds to a job advertisement, and is surprised to be employed as the secretary of the absent Jonathan Scrivener. He meets some of Scrivener's friends, and his life becomes intertwined with theirs. All of them seem to know a different Scrivener, but all agree that he is an exceptionally talented man.

Who is Jonathan Scrivener? Where is he? Why has he employed Wrexham? Why are his friends so unlike one another? Why are his interests so disparate? Is he manipulating Wrexham and the people he has met through Scrivener, and why?

Initially I enjoyed this book, but by the time I reached the end I thought, to quote the late and great Peggy Lee, "Is that all there is?"

61. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell is the fifth book of A Dance to the Music of Time.

The narrator, Nick Jenkins, has married the aristocratic Isobel. He is moving in musical circles, and has met the musician, Moreland and the music critic, Maclintick. The theme of this volume is marriage: Nick's, about which little is said; Moreland and his wife Matilda; the warring Maclinticks.

I enjoyed this volume and have moved onto the next, The Kindly Ones.

62. Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman is the first book in the duology completed by Life and Fate. In Stalingrad we follow Hitler's advance through Russia, encirclement of the Russian armies, the occupation of Ukraine. The Soviet Army has retreated as far as Stalingrad, the southernmost city in unoccupied Russia, an industrial centre, producing steel and tanks for the Soviet Army. Beyond Stalingrad is the Kazakh steppe. Stalin has ordered that there is to be no retreat.

Stalingrad follows the fate of the Shaposhnikov family and its connections. Near the beginning of the book, in the lull before the siege, these family members and friends gather to celebrate the birthday of the matriarch, Alexandra Vladimirovna Shaposhnikova, understanding that they might never meet again. Stalingrad focuses on people: the middle-aged peasant farmers who leave their wives and children to tend the crops, expecting to die; the young boys leaving their work groups for the front; the factory workers; the coal miners; the women left destitute, trying to feed their children. By concentrating on the nobility of individuals, Grossman skirts the unpalatable truth, that many thousands were shot for desertion. This is not the reality he is free to write about in Stalin's Russia. As Marusya, daughter of Alexandra, says, "There is the truth of the reality forced on us by the accursed past. And there’s the truth of the reality which will defeat the past."

A chapter on Fascism could well be about Stalinism. Grossman was known to have equated the two.

Grossman adapted Stalingrad to the demands of the Soviet censors, who excised humour and references to real conditions, and tried to remove the main Jewish character.. Robert Chandler, the translator, has, with the aid of the researcher Yuri Bit-Yunin, restored sections from Grossman's original typescript. Chandler's introduction and his chapter on the alterations he made to the various Russian published texts are informative and well worth reading. In Life and Fate, which was 'arrested' by the Soviets, Grossman writes what he believes.

I can recommend Stalingrad, but if you haven't read Life and Fate, read that instead.

>hi Pamela, I read Life and Fate back in 2007 - a magnificent book. I will tackle Stalingrad at some point (then will probably need to re-read the former!).

67. Painting in the Shadows by Katherine Kovacic

An art restorer, employed by an important Melbourne gallery, is found dead in the conservator's room. The police say her death is suicide, but Alex Clayton, art dealer, and her friend John, another art restorer, are sceptical. In the course of investigating the death, Alex and John run into forgery, corruption, and plenty of art-world politics.

The author is an art historian, so she knows her subject. I liked being in Melbourne at a gallery that owes a great deal to the National Gallery of Victoria. The book is set in 2002, so the Australian works are still in St Kilda Road and haven't been moved to the Ian Potter Gallery. Because a friend of mine is interested in Australian art, I've accompanied him to many galleries, visited the NGV and Ian Potter many times, and am familiar with many of the artists mentioned. There are many other local references in the book, even down to clothing brands. They added to my enjoyment.

Overall, not much plot, but plenty of arty background and local colour. I've put a hold on the next book in the series.

When the pandemic is over, and people are travelling again, it's good to know that entry to public galleries is free in Victoria. I recommend visiting Ballarat, Bendigo and Benalla regional galleries.

Finished the sixth book in A Dance to the Music of Time. The Kindly Ones begins with the narrator's childhood, introducing Alfred the cook and the maid who is so obsessed by him that she has a public breakdown in the drawing room. Alfred reappears decades later in a different context, and the narrator applies his memories of the maid's breakdown to an explanation of another fragile woman. The women in this series appear to be alien beings to the male characters, which can be wearing, but I put it down to the class and the times, and move on.

I enjoyed The Kindly Ones and am happy that there are six books still to go.

>68 pamelad: I am glad you enjoyed The Kindly Ones.

I have read the sequence several times (am rather obsessed with it, to be honest) and remember that when I read it for the first time, although I had enjoyed the previous instalments, it was with this one that it really came alive for me.

69. The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

The first part is an investigation into the living conditions of miners and their families. The second part is about Orwell's middle-class upbringing, the gulf between the middle and working classes, and the necessity of bridging it in order to institute a socialist government. A lot of self-flagellation here!

Orwell attacks writers who think differently from him and insults middle-class socialists for sins such as wearing sandals, being feminists and drinking fruit juice, practices that show they are cranks who are not to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, Orwell himself comes across as a crank, which detracts from the important points he is making.

ETA He confuses intelligence with education, so patronises the working class, which he sees as homogenous. He sneers at educated working class men, except for autodidacts who remain in their working-class jobs. He loathes working-class writers and politicians.

71. Not So Quiet by Helen Zenna Smith

I bought this book thinking that it was a first-hand account of a female ambulance driver during WWI, but it is fiction based on a genuine diary. Helen Zenna Smith is the pseudonym of an Australian novelist, Evadne Price, who would have been looking back on quite a different life from that of the upper-middle class twenty-one year-old main character. That said, this is still a powerful anti-war novel, and the shocking details of life at the front, transporting maimed young men, ring true.

At home in England, jingoistic people score points in the patriotism competition by sacrificing their sons and daughters to the war. They serve on committees, hand out white feathers to non-combatants, and refuse to understand their children's experiences. They have no doubt or fear, unlike their doomed offspring.

The genteel young women, who have paid for the privilege of serving as ambulance drivers, are surviving on little sleep and inedible food, mercilessly punished for minor infractions by a despotic commandant. They drive all night, to attend roll-call at 7 am, and spend much of the day cleaning their ambulances and the barracks. If they fail to meet the commandant's demanding standards, they are given punishment duties. New arrivals are sent out on their very first night to transport dying men over unfamiliar ground, with no lights, never having driven an ambulance before.

This book is an indictment of the callous incompetence at the front and the thoughtless patriotism of the men and women safe at home. It gives a voice to the men and women who could never talk of their experiences because patriots did not want to listen.

72. A Lost Leader by E. Phillips Oppenheim

E. Phillips Oppenheim wrote hundreds of novels, starting in the 1890s and finishing in the 1940s. This one, dating from 1907, is a mixture of politics and romance. It is a comforting read. The good are rewarded; the malicious are punished; the loose ends are tied up neatly.

73. Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear

Not my cup of tea. I found it slow, saccharine, predictable and dull. Lots of dreary details about trivialities - eating breakfast, the clothes people are wearing. So many pages about clothes! Maisie is protected by dead people. She annoyed me greatly.

I have given up on John Buchan's The Half-Hearted. The main character is standing for election, and this is what he thinks of his potential constituents:When I see a crowd of upturned faces, crass, ignorant, unwholesome many of them, I begin to despair....They lead, most of them, unhealthy indoor lives, their minds are half-baked, and their bodies half-developed. Enough! This was first published in 1900, before universal suffrage in the UK. It was not until 1918 that all men over the age of 21 could vote, then 1928 for all women over 21.

I've recently read The Road to Wigan Pier, where Orwell, as does Buchan in this book, describes his disgust for the lower classes. And, like an Anthony Powell character in Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, Buchan's men are saddened that women have such commonplace minds. I hope these attitudes have been consigned to history.

74. Sunburn by Laura Lippman

Pauline Hansen has a past, but her husband knows noting about that when she leaves him and their little daughter in a seedy bedsit by the beach and escapes. She hitches a ride and ends up in a small town an hour or so from Baltimore, where she runs across a private investigator who has been hired to find her. Not that he lets on, and neither does she. So many secrets. Who is she running from and why? Who hired the PI, and did he tell the truth? Where's the money? Who is she, really? All we know is that she's dangerous, and men always do what she wants.

I enjoyed this, except for the ending.

75. Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

An entertaining, slightly comic account of the lives of some mega-rich people in Singapore. Lots of shopping, fabulous houses, private jets, celebrities, designer clothes. A bit of romance, some vicious bitchiness, served with snobbery.

A light and frothy read. I enjoyed it.

76. You're Not Listening by Kate Murphy

Chatty, anecdotal, short on evidence, disorganised. I was disappointed in this book, which was not nearly scientific enough for my liking. The author does not think that turn-taking in conversation is necessary, so I would not like to talk with her!

77. The Returns by Philip Salom

Trevor and Elizabeth meet when she collapses in his book shop. It's her orthorexia - Elizabeth is so obsessed with eating the right food that she hardly eats at all. She also suffers from prosopagnosia, an inability to recognise people's faces. (One ailment is enough in the main female character, I think. Two make her seem feeble.) Trevor suffers from a leg damaged in a car accident, a nasty wife, and a failed art career. When Elizabeth advertises her spare room in the book shop window, Trevor leaves his wife and moves in.

The best things about this book are: it is set in a part of Melbourne I'm very familiar with, the inner north; Trevor's politics are left-wing; he talks a lot about books; he doesn't take himself too seriously.

The tedious things are: the conclusion is predictable; Elizabeth is not a believable character - her main role turns out to be providing other perspectives on Trevor; the minor characters are caricatures.

I quite enjoyed The Returns, but would have liked more drama, more action, a lot more plot, and a little less angst.

78. The Shifting Landscape by Katherine Kovacic

This is the second mystery featuring art dealer Alex Clayton, her dog Hogarth, and her friend John, an art conservator. Alasdair MacMillan, owner of a Western District sheep station that has been passed from father to eldest son for generations, invites Alex to his property, Kinloch, to value the historic art collection. Alasdair's four adult children are also present, but this is not a happy family. There's a death, a stolen painting, and a missing child. There's also an important theme of aboriginal dispossession, imperfectly integrated into the rather fragmented plot.

I enjoyed this book for the descriptions of the art, the scenery, and the colonial and aboriginal history. I was less taken with the trivial details about food, the excessive involvement of Hogarth, and Alex herself. There's a lot of filler in this short book, and not a lot of plot.

79. China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan

Another light, amusing read from the Crazy Rich Asians series.

80. Gone by Midnight by Candice Fox

Ted Conkaffey, falsely accused of raping and assaulting a thirteen-year-old girl and leaving her for dead, is still trying to put his life back togehter. He is living on the outskirts of Cairns, working with Amanda, another outcast, who has served her time for murdering a schoolmate. Ted and Amanda have been hired by the mother of a missing eight-year-old boy who seems to have been abducted from the hotel where he was staying.

Lots of mosquitoes, crocodiles, heat and humidity. An entertaining, twisty plot. I enjoyed this book, but I think the series is getting bogged down: Amanda's quirkiness is becoming annoying; it's time for Ted to be found innocent; the outlaw bikers are losing their menace and becoming heart-warmingly paternalistic; there's a never-ending supply of violent, moronic police; Ted's pet geese are taking up too much space.

81. I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron

Ephron could stand back and find the humour in any situation. I very much enjoyed this short collection, which includes
pieces on ageing and forgetfulness, her love of journalism, her parents, and witty reflections on nothing much. Witty and amusing.

82. A Man by Keiichiro Hirano

A man named Daisuke Taniguchi settles in a small Japanese town and marries the divorced woman, Rie, who owns a stationery shop. Daisuke is well-liked by his neighbours and colleagues, and is a good father to Rie's son, Yuto, who loves him. The couple have a child, and are happy together until Daisuke dies in a forestry accident. But when Rie contacts Daisuke's estranged brother, Kyoichi, the puzzle begins. Was Rie's husband Daisuke Taniguchi? If not, where is Daisuke Taniguchi? Rie contacts Kido, the lawyer who handled her divorce, to investigate.

Everyone in Japan has a family register, which records the main events of a person's life: birth, marriage, children, criminal record. By trading family registers, a person can adopt a new identity and a new life. Kido himself is from a Korean family, an identity that is less than desirable in Japan, with its pockets of anti-Korean racism and violence.

I found this book fascinating for its picture of Japanese society, for its philosophical reflections, and for the twists and turns of the identity search. Unfortunately the translation is rubbish in parts, but the book was interesting enough for me to keep going over the rough bits.

83. The Villa in Italy by Elizabeth Edmondson

It is the nineteen fifties and the mysterious Beatrice Malaspina has left a legacy to each of four apparently unrelated people, but only if they stay in her villa for thirty-three days. Delia, the opera singer, who has a lingering case of bronchitis and is happy to escape to the sun, brings her friend Jessica, who wants to hide away from her evil husband. George, the nuclear physicist, is riddled with guilt for his part in the development of the atomic bomb. The tactless, poverty-stricken Marjorie, hears voices that give her extraordinary insight into people. Together, they must find a codicil to Beatrice Malaspina's will.

I enjoyed this utterly undemanding, unrealistic book: lots of sunshine; pleasant, well-meaning people who get the happy ending they deserve; a puzzle; some villains who get their deserts

84. The Temptation of Gracie by Santa Montefiore

LT told me I'd like this and I was looking for something light and cheerful, so I gave it a go, but the characters never came alive for me. Pros: Sunshine, Italy, happy endings
Cons: Two-dimensional characters, silly story, dull writing

85. The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo is set in Japan in 1937, and was first published in 1946. It is a classic locked room murder with a Japanese twist, and concerns itself as much with the history and mechanics of locked room mysteries as it does with its own plot. The detective even stops mid-investigation to give a review of locked room mysteries. His own preference is for those that forego the use of mechanical contrivances, and his favourite of these is The Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux.

Back to the plot. Honjin families belong to the upper-crust and take pride in their lineage and traditions. The marriage of the oldest son of a Honjin family gives rise to the deaths in a locked annexe. He has insisted on marrying a young woman who, while capable and well-educated, comes from a family of a much lower class. His mother and brothers are unhappy, but he is the head of the family and cannot be swayed.

I liked this mystery for its glimpse into prewar Japanese society: the clothes; the buildings; the traditions; the customs; the music. I was also entertained by the writer's affection for locked room mysteries. It didn't help the plot in any way, but the oddness was appealing.

I enjoyed The Honjin Murders not for being a well-plotted mystery with believable characters, because it's not, but for its strangeness.

>86 pamelad:. I was very intrigued with your review. As it happens, I am convinced that I bought this book a while ago, but seem to have mislaid it (I have some pretty mountainous TBR piles around the house). it sounds similar to The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr which is another instance of a locked room mystery that breaks off to allow the protagonist to give a potted history of other famous locked room mysteries. I shall have to renew my search for my missing copy ... a locked room mystery of my own!

86. Line of Sight by A. C. Koning

The main character, Fred Rowlands, was blinded in WWI. He operates the telephone switchboard at a legal firm, where his employer is his former commanding officer, Gerald Willoughby. Attracted by the lovely voice of a woman who regularly rings his employer, Rowland listens in on their conversations. He becomes involved in their lives, draws some erroneous conclusions and precipitates a tragedy.

This murder mystery takes a long time to get started. There are many memories of WWI, descriptions of how Rowlands travels around London and manages his switchboard, and reflections on his marriage. Despite all of this detail, Rowlands didn't seem authentic to me, just dreary and a bit wet. The murder victim is satisfactory - he's a nasty piece of work - but the murderer is not. I groaned.

This is the first book in a series, so perhaps Rowlands improves.

In my view, it's best for writers to stick to main characters of their own gender. I think A. C. Koning gave herself too high a degree of difficulty by putting herself in the mind of a wounded WWI veteran. Another example of this is On Chesil Beach in which Ian McEwan imagines himself as a virgin girl on her wedding night.

Having enjoyed End ofTerm, I have just ordered this, but am a bit worried now.

Apparently the author’s father was blind, which inspired her to write about Rowlands, and to depict his fierce independence.

>89 Eyejaybee: I'll be interested to hear what you think of it, particularly how the early Rowlands compares with the later one.

88. Hanged for a Sheep by Frances Lockridge and Richard Lockridge.

Pamela North is staying with her elderly Aunt Flora while her publisher-husband Jerry is interstate reading the next Gone With the Wind. Flora has recovered from being poisoned and asks Pam to find the culprit. There is a large cast of potential suspects, most of them the children and grandchildren of the much-married Flora. The drama escalates with the discovery of a body.

I've read 3 of these Mr and Mrs North books now and, while they're light and undemanding reading, I find them annoying: Pam North is irritatingly scatty and fey and seems to solve crimes by accident; there's an awful lot of waffle about the two Siamese cats; they are very slow, with lots of pauses to discuss what's been happening.

87. The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell

Nick Jenkins has managed to wangle a commission in the army, which is not easy for a man in his mid-thirties. He is serving in a Welsh regiment where he is one of the few officers who was not formerly employed in a bank. The regiment is training in Northern Ireland, and no one knows where it will go next.

I very much enjoyed this volume, in which Jenkins observes, with humour and compassion, the foibles of his fellow soldiers.

90. Conviction by Denise Mina

Anna McDonald is living in Glasgow with her husband and small daughters, keeping her past a secret. On the morning that her husband leaves her for her best friend, taking the children, she has been listening to a podcast about a woman jailed for three murders she could not have committed. The crimes connect Anna to an old friend and a villain from her past. As an antidote to her suicidal despair, Anna takes off with an unlikely companion to investigate the crime. The pair career through Scotland, England, Italy and France, pursued by hired assassins with large knives.

An entertaining read. Recommended.

91. The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell

I am still very much enjoying A Dance to the Music of Time. Nick Jenkins is working for Widmerpool the DAAG (I cannot remember what this, or any of the other many acronyms, stands for, which might be the point.) so has an insider's view on the politics and power plays taking place at Divisional Headquarters. Widmerpool, who appears to be devoid of human sympathy and motivated entirely by self-interest, is in the thick of them. In my review of the previous volume I said that Jenkins observed people with humour and compassion, but on further reading I think a better description is detached and tolerant.

Many people reappear, and sadly, quite a few die on active service and in the blitz.

95. The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe Between the Wars by Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth was Austrian and Jewish. He fought in the Austrian army during WWI, then became a journalist. Much of his work was published by the left-wing paper, Frankfurter Zeitung, and he was one of the most famous and well-paid journalists in Europe. Roth left Germany permanently in 1933 when Hitler came to power and died at 48, apparently from alcoholism, in 1939. His most well-known novel is The Radetsky March.

Roth wrote thousands of these short articles, called feuilletons, some of which have been collected previously. This selection was made by Michael Hoffman,who has translated a lot of Roth's work. It includes articles about individuals, some famous and some not e.g. a hotel waiter, the prime minister of Albania. He wrote about the cities and countries where he travelled, including Albania, the USSR, and Germany. There are feuilletons about commonplace things - listening to music, observations of the inhabitants of a seaside town, a cafe, a hotel, travellers on a train. He sees past the surface and writes with precision and lightness, but the tone is melancholy, increasingly so.

This is history from someone who was there, and I recommend it. However, What I Saw, reports from Berlin 1920 -1933, is even better.

Tamar by Deborah Challinor

Challinor has a Ph.D in New Zealand history, so her books are well-researched and based on real events. In this interview she explains that she chooses a historical event that interests her, then adds characters to bring it to life. This is exactly how Tamar read to me. There were lots of interesting historical details, some of which had no relevance to the plot. Some of the characters added nothing to the story, and seemed to be there to provide historical context.

The story starts in the 1880s. Tamar, daughter of an impoverished Cornish miner and a middle-class woman who married down and was disowned, is seventeen. She and her widowed father had planned to emigrate to New Zealand to join her sister there, but both relatives died, leaving her alone in the world. With nothing to hold her in England, Tamar decided to emigrate alone. On the voyage she was fortunate to meet a prostitute with a heart of gold and a saintly doctor, who proved themselves to be true friends.

This is the first book of a trilogy. It follows Tamar's life from her arrival in Auckland until the end of the Boer war.

Pros: Interesting, authentic historical detail; the story whips along entertainingly.
Cons: Two-dimensional characters.

I liked this enough to start on the next book of the trilogy: White Feathers.

97. White Feathers by Deborah Challinor

The sequel to Tamar covers WWI. Three of Tamar's sons join the NZ Army Corps, and one becomes a stretcher bearer. Tamar's daughter, Keely, and niece, Erin, serve overseas as nurses. Having read many books about WWI, I skimmed some sections because I wanted to know who survived, but didn't want to spend a lot of time on incompetent officers, trench warfare, and living conditions. I was more interested in the fervid patriotism of the New Zealanders who enlisted and the community that pressured them to, and the fate of the men and women who survived. The sheer wastage of human life in WWI is always shocking to read about, and even worse for colonial troops.

Similar pros and cons to the predecessor.

Pros: historical accuracy, particularly about the lead up to and the aftermath of WWI in NZ; eventful story.
Cons: Cardboard characters; a lot of war bits (but the series is called Children of war, so they're expected).

I have borrowed the third book in the series. Four children were born during White Feathers, so I daresay some of them are off to WWII and perhaps the Spanish Civil War.

98. Blue Smoke by Deborah Challinor is the third book in the Children of War trilogy. Tamar's grandchildren participate in WWII: a sailor; two soldiers; two airmen; one landgirl; two WAAFs; one sewing army uniforms. The men serve in England, Crete and Singapore. They don't all survive, but as in the previous volume an illegitimate child appears, looking remarkably like his dead father.

With the nine grandchildren (and a tenth who is far too young to serve), Tamar's three surviving children and their spouses, Tamar's niece and her niece's husband, Tamar's old flame, and the romantic attachments of the grandchildren, none of the characters get a lot of time. They don't have much of an inner life, and move briskly through the story, illustrating the historical events that interest the author. On the romantic side, the author pairs people up very tidily, except for one. The gay guy has a sad end.

Once again I was interested in the historical details and swept along by the story.

99. The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell

WWII continues and Nick Jenkins is now working as a liaison officer for the Free Poles under the philosophical Pennistone. At Whitehall, the more important your job, the lower in the building your office. The manipulative, ambitious Widmerpool is here, in the basement, manipulating his way up the ladder. At the very top of the building is Blackhead, possibly the most obstructive clerk in any service.

The Free French and the Poles are numerous enough to have their own liaison officers, but all the other allied military attaches are the responsibility of one man. When he is promoted, Jenkins assumes his responsibilities for the Czechs, the Belgians, the Indians, the Chinese, and quite a few more. Jenkins and his boss, Finn, herd all the attachés over to France for reasons not clear to me, where they meet the Field Marshal (the actual Montgomery).

The tone of this volume is light and humorous, and Whitehall seems isolated from the war. Even so, important things are done. Pennistone, for example, manages to evacuate thousands of Polish officers from Turkey. Many thousands more have been found dead, apparently at the hands of the Russians, but Widmerpool, who seems more monstrous with every volume, treats this as an inconvenient incident and persuades his colleagues to take no action. He is also implicated in the deaths of two of Nick's old school friends.

Many people reappear, and new characters are introduced, in particular the femme fatale, Pamela Flitton.

I enjoyed The Military Philosphers but am bemused that Powell could write about WWII without mentioning the Holocaust or the bombing of Japan. He stays in his own world.

We're in lock down in Melbourne, and restrictions won't be eased significantly until October 26th. The Federal Government and the Murdoch press are making things harder by politicising the pandemic and undermining efforts to control the spread of the virus.

In this situation, Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save is an uplifting choice. Singer puts the case for donating to overseas causes that address extreme poverty, defined as people earning under $1.90 per day, to save lives. A relatively small donation can save a life For example, $50 can pay for a cataract operation to restore a person's sight. In the US, to raise, train and match a guide dog costs $50,000. While both causes are worthwhile, the choice is between helping one person close to home, or restoring the sight of 1000 people. This is one of the issues that Singer addresses: assigning an equal value to the life of a stranger as to a someone nearer home.

I recommend this book very highly. On thelifeyoucansave.org you can get a copy for free. The site also has links to nonprofits that have been stringently investigated so that you know your donation is effective.

I am pleased to have reached 100 with such an encouraging book.

101. Blood Upon the Snow by Hilda Lawrence

Mark East, private detective, has been employed, ostensibly as a secretary, by the elderly Mr Stoneman, an amateur archaeologist. Stoneman is a guest of the Morleys, a couple with two children, who are staying at a mansion on the outskirts of a hamlet a few hours train ride from New York. There is an oppressive atmosphere in the house: Stoneman is frightened; Mrs Morley stays in her room, often in tears; there is too much silence for a house with so many people.

I enjoyed this 1940's mystery. It had entertaining characters, a bit of humour, atmosphere, and a twisty plot.

102. A Time to Die by Hilda Lawrence

Mark East is staying for a week with Perley Wilcox and his family in the little town of Bear River, and is booked in for another week with Beulah Pond. Perley is the police chief East worked with in Blood upon the Snow, and Beulah a spirited old lady who helped East and Wilcox solve the crime. When Miss Cassidy, the woman who looks after the motherless Joey Beacham, disappears, Beacham hires East to investigate. Beacham and his two daughters, 8 year-old Joey and 18 year-old Roberta, are staying at a mountain resort outside Bear River, and East moves there with relief because it's the height of summer, and East is finding the heat of Bear River hard to handle.

This was a light and entertaining mystery, but a mess: too many people, too many plot strands, too little logic.

103. Death in Fancy Dress by Anthony Gilbert is a British Library Crime Classic from the thirties. I read it because I'd mixed up Anthony Gilbert with Michael Gilbert. This mystery was entertaining enough, but none of the characters ran true and the plot was silly.

Many important people have committed suicide. The mysterious person driving them to their deaths is nick-named The Spider. For reasons not at all clear, The Spider's activities are centred on the home of the evil Ralph Feltham which is rented to Sir James Nunn, a rich businessman from humble origins, and his wife Eleanor, the widow of Percy Feltham who committed suicide after the sale of government secrets led to a massacre in WWI. Percy's daughter, Hilary, is engaged to the secret serviceman, Arthur Dennis, who is tracking down The Spider. Also investigating The spider are the narrator, a solicitor with a limp, and his old school friend, who wants to marry Hilary. Hilary acts like an idiot.

Anthony Gilbert is the pen name of Lucy Malleson. Michael Gilbert was a real person, a solicitor who served in WWII. I will keep an eye out for more of Michael's books, but not Anthony's.

104. Crossed Skis by Carol Carnac

Carol Carnac and E. C. R. Lorac are pseudonyms for the prolific Edith Caroline Rivett.

Crossed Skis is set in 1951, when rationing persisted in Britain, and there were limits on the amount of currency taken out of the country. A group of sixteen friends and acquaintances is travelling from the gloom and dreariness of winter in London to a ski resort in Austria, and everyone is looking forward to the food. The characters spend a great deal of time eating meals, looking forward to meals, and planning meals. Nothing to do with the plot, but it contributes to the atmosphere.

It was quite an effort to organise a group of sixteen. People pulled out at the last minute and organised replacements, so some of the group are friends of friends, virtually strangers. When some money disappears, no one is sure quite whom to trust. Meanwhile, back in London, the body of a murder victim is found in a burning house. Outside, someone has left the imprint of a ski pole, allowing the police to connect the crime with an unknown person on the ski trip.

Which one of the ski trippers is the murderer? Will he/she escape? Will an innocent person die?

A slow-paced but entertaining mystery. I enjoyed it.

#104 - I read one of E C R Lorac's books on holiday in July Fell Murder: A Lancashire Mystery. Very good.

>105 john257hopper: Here's another of hers. I'll keep an eye out for Fell Murder.

Checkmate to Murder by E. C. R. Lorac

The blitz is past the worst, and people are no longer having to race off to air raid shelters. People have left London to escape the bombing, but accommodation is scarce because so many houses have been destroyed. The blackout is rigidly enforced, and fog blankets London. Brother and sister, Bruce and Rosanne Manaton, rent a decrepit studio from an old miser. Bruce is a painter and Rosanne an etcher, but she has no time or space to work because her life is dedicated to looking after the selfish, bad-tempered Bruce. One night Bruce is painting a portrait of his friend Delaudier, who is dressed as a cardinal, Rosanne is in the combination kitchen/bathroom cooking a stew and two men are playing chess, when a pompous special constable bursts into the studio clutching a Canadian serviceman whom he accuses of murder. The old man upstairs has been shot.

An enjoyable mystery with plenty of atmosphere. Dark and foggy outside, arty and colourful inside. The nasty people have alibis, and the nice people are too unlikely, but Inspector Macdonald solves the case.

Manaton is such an odd name so, inspired by Lorac's reversal of her name Carol, I reversed it. Notaman! Also thinking that Delaudier is Deluder with a few extra letters.

106. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Still thinking about it, and will come back later to write a review. Mann recommends reading it twice in order to "penetrate and enjoy its musical association of ideas. The first time, the reader learns the thematic material.."

This was my second read, and I couldn't say I've learned the thematic material, though I saw a lot more this time.

107. The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards

Long, trivial and gossipy, this pretended to be an investigation of the inaugural members of The Detection Club. Edwards created his book from a few facts and a lot of speculation. I appreciate his efforts to review and republish forgotten examples of Golden Age detection, but I think he should leave biography alone.

Belated congrats on reaching 100! Your reviews are making me want to reread The Dance to the Music of Time books...

>108 jfetting: Thank you. I've enjoyed reading them again, and have remembered so little that it's almost like reading them for the first time!

110. Postscript to Poison by Dorothy Bowers

Jenny and Carol are cousins, the granddaughters of Cornelia Lackland's late husband. Their parents, the daughters of Mr Lackland, died young, in poverty, leaving their children to be brought up by their autocratic father. He provided well for them financially, but since his death his second wife has been parsimonious and even more autocratic. She deliberately makes the girls' lives miserable. Someone poisons her. was it Jenny, or Jenny's secret fiance, a successful Polish actor? Could it have been Carol? Perhaps it was the doctor, devilishly handsome but going to seed.

Good writing, atmospheric. I will look for more of Bower's books. Unfortunately there aren't many.

111. The Robthorne Mystery by John Rhode

This one depends on ingenious methods of murder. The Robthorne brothers are identical twins. One dies, apparently a suicide. Which twin was he? Was it really suicide? Not much characterisation here, just a puzzle. I'm not a big fan of the impossible crime genre, but if you are, this is probably a good example.

109. Nothing to Do with the Case by Elizabeth Lemarchand

The main character, Virginia Gould, is a drip, worried about being blackmailed by her cousin when she hasn't even done anything. She wants to avoid unpleasantness. The cousin, Nigel Kerslake, is a shifty art dealer. He expected to inherit absolutely everything from his uncle, but the old man leaves the money to Nigel, and the house to Virginia. Virginia sells up and moves to an idyllic village, but Nigel finds her there. There's a murder. Did Nigel do it? I didn't much care. This book was dull.

110. Distress Signals by Catherine Ryan Howard is written from the perspectives of three characters, initially unconnected.

Adam and Sarah have been together for ten years, since they were 20 and 19. Sarah has been supporting Adam financially while he writes a screenplay but when Adam is on the brink of success she disappears.

Corinne is a woman in her sixties who has taken a job on a cruise ship in order to find someone. At one time she was infamous, but she has been living for years in anonymity.

Romain's story starts in childhood. He cannot understand why his mother loves her younger son Jean, but not him.

As Adam reaches the end of his search for Sarah, the three stories converge.

I was a bit disappointed in the ending, but overall this was a gripping read. If the pandemic hasn't put you off cruising, this book might.

111. They Liked Entwhistle by R. A. J. Walling

The businessman Entwhistle hires Tolefree, a private detective, to spy on a woman holidaying in a French seaside village and report back on who speaks to her. Tolefree and his associate Farrar are held up on their return by fog in the Channel, and arrive at Entwhistle's house to find him murdered and the police in attendance. Tolefree is invited to help in the investigation.

There is a confusion of motives: a potential divorce; a great deal of cash; a will that is about to be changed. The friends and associates present at Entwhistle's house on the night of the murder are all suspects, as is the elusive man who communicated with the woman in France. Everyone is hiding something.

An entertaining mystery, with a breezy tone and a traditionally know-all detective.

112. Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic is set partly in Melbourne, which is why I read it. Caleb Zelic, a detective, discovers his childhood friend Gary, a cop, tortured and murdered by a sadistic knife-wielding killer. Caleb, who has been deaf since a childhood bout of meningitis, works with a partner, Frannie, an alcoholic ex-cop. In their investigation of Gary's death they encounter corrupt police and multiple murder victims. Everyone connected to Gary, Caleb and Frannie is in danger, and Caleb barely escapes with his life, more than once.

I disliked this book, mainly because of the graphic descriptions of wounded bodies and torture. Also, it's a big ask for a hearing woman to write from the perspective of a deaf man, and I don't think the attempt succeeded. However, there are many positive reviews, and the book has won prizes, so I could be on my own.

106. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Hans Castorp, a conventional young middle-class man from Hamburg, has finished his engineering studies and is feeling run down, so he decides to make a three-week visit to his cousin Joachim who is undergoing treatment in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Swiss mountains. The head of the sanitarium, the Hofrat, finds a moist spot on Hans' lung, and a slightly raised temperature, and advises that he stay a few months until it is cured, but the spot remains moist, the temperature remains high, and Hans stays on, never really ill, but never quite well. Perhaps the Hofrat is drumming up business; perhaps Hans prefers the ease and luxury of the sanitarium to work and responsibility; perhaps Hans genuinely has TB. Hans' stay stretches to seven years, ending with the outbreak of WWI.

The sanitarium is many things. It is a microcosm of pre-war Europe, with patients from many countries; a sanctuary, a place remote from the troubles of the real world; a hospital, where tuberculous patients seek treatment to postpone their early deaths; a resort, where the young patients seek entertainment and excitement. Hans becomes more and more attached to life in the sanitarium, and to a fellow patient, the sensuous Russian Mme Chauchat, and begins to cut the ties with his former life.

Hans arrives at the sanitarium an indolent, thoughtless young man, whose unexamined opinions are those of his upbringing. During his sojourn on the mountain he is introduced to other ideas, and learns to think for himself. Settembrini, a fellow-patient, lectures to Hans on his philosophy of humanism, and urges Hans to leave the passivity of the sanitarium and return to an active life in the real the world. Naphta, a Jewish Jesuit, preaches a philosophy of disengagement with life, where illness and death are to be desired and the flesh mortified. The long philosophical arguments between Settembrini and Naphta often went over Hans' head, and mine as well.

There are so many threads in The Magic Mountain, and so many ideas, that you could read it again and again and find more and more each time. A knowledge of music would be a help, as would an acquaintance with classical mythology. Fortunately it is a comedy so when you are bogged down in abstraction, light relief is not far away.

115. Dorothy Bowers wrote only five books, so I'm going to read all of them. Fear and Miss Betony isn't as good as Postscript to Poison because the plot strains credulity and the characters are weaker, but it was readable enough. I like that Bowers characters struggle to earn a living, just like real people. Sometimes when I'm reading a British Golden Age mystery where people are carrying on about inheritances and being poor, I think to myself, "Get a job!"

Miss Betony is a spinster in her sixties, with no family and no real friends. She had worked as a governess and hadn't managed to put much money aside for her old age. When an ex-student asks for help and offers her a job, Miss Betony accepts. The action takes place in a school cum nursing home in a small seaside town, and involves poisoning, the occult, and a story from the past. It doesn't hang together very well. Miss Betony, however, is an engaging character, and gratifyingly competent.

116. Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell

In the tenth book of A Dance to the Music of Time the narrator, Nick Jenkins, is the head reviewer at a new magazine, Fission, whose editor, Bagshaw is known as Books (do furnish a room) for coming up with that cliche in a famously inappropriate situation, or possibly two. The humourless, ambitious, manipulative Widmerpoole, now an MP married to the scandalous Pamela Fitton, contributes political articles. A new character, the eccentric, self-destructive, perpetually broke writer, X Trapnel, contributes reviews. Trapnel, who is central to the plot, is apparently based on Julian Maclaren-Ross. I've ordered his only novel, Of Love and Hunger, and am expecting tragedy because it has been compared to Patrick Hamilton's bleak and depressingly realistic Hangover Square.

Books do Furnish A room, however, is far from depressing, not just because of Powell's dry wit, but because of his detachment. He's the observer on the edge of the crowd, playing a minor role, never becoming too involved. I very much enjoyed this book.

I've made numerous attempts to type the e acute for cliche, but no go. If anyone has an easy, foolproof method, please tell.

I thought I'd read Hangover Square, but it was the first volume of The Gorse Trilogy, which was so depressing that I couldn't face reading the second.

117. The Bells at Old Bailey by Dorothy Bowers

Once again Bowers' characters are working women. Unfortunately there are too many to keep track of, particularly since a lot of of them are called sometimes by their given names and sometimes by their married names. The plot involves suicides, murders, secrets and poison pen letters. Once again I liked Bowers' writing, but found the plot inadequate.

It was my plan this year to "read" one cookery book a month by cooking at least two recipes from it. I started in November with The Silver Spoon: Quick and Easy Italian Recipes. I have cooked three recipes: linguine with broccoli and pancetta; spicy broccoli with yoghurt; zucchini frittata. The linguine was a winner, and I'll cook it again. The other two were OK, but nothing to write home about. I'll probably cook a few more recipes, so would recommend this book.

The second book I planned to cook from was The Lebanese Kitchen, but there are great lists of ingredients and many steps, so I've found an alternative: Claudia Roden's Invitation to Mediterranean Cooking, and have made quite a list of possibilities.

It's almost summer here, so Italy and the Mediterranean are the go.

I've also checked out Simplissime, which is described as "the easiest French cookbook in the world". It's not though, because it relies on you having easy access to ingredients like duck confit, roast beef (that you don't have to cook yourself) and a wide variety of French cheese. Plus there's a lot of cream, which I don't much like. I'll put this one aside and, when the Op Shops re-open, will donate it.

119. The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman

This is an antidote to those self-help books about positive thinking. Since I don't read self-help books, I'm not sure why I bought this. It must have been a Kindle Daily Deal.

It touches on stoicism, buddhist meditation, and some other philosophies that made little impression but support the author's contention that the road to happiness lies more through negative thinking than positive. There's no real need to read this book.

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich is more interesting.

120. Consolation by Garry Disher

Paul Hirschhausen is the only police constable in the fictional town of Tiverton, in South Australia somewhere between Adelaide and Broken Hill. The author was born in Burra, a little town just like Tiverton, so he knows the place and the people well. A big part of Hirsch's job is checking on isolated people in the bush: the old man looking after his wife who suffers from dementia; the single mother whose car has been repossessed; the caretakers of a big, understaffed sheep station. He's a kind man, making an effort to become part of the community.

Hirsch likes to know what's going on around Tiverton so he can prevent small crimes from escalating. He's investigating a snowdropper who is stealing old ladies' underwear from clotheslines and, with the cooperation of the old ladies, has set a trap. He's the one people come to when they're worried about a child's welfare, the one who investigates environmental complaints, who follows up suspicions of fraud. He's chasing a group of Irish scammers who are gypping old people for roof repairs.

I really enjoyed this book. Disher is my favourite Australian crime writer, and as soon as I saw he had a new book out, I bought it. That was yesterday, and I finished it the same day.

121. Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell

The series is going downhill now. It appears to me that Powell is using Widmerpool as a vehicle for an attack on the Labour Party, and Labour peers in particular. Is there no limit to the depths to which Widmerpool will descend? I found this volume depressingly seedy. Pamela Flitton's behaviour is ludicrous, and the frequent references to her "frigidity" reminded me of the seventies, when it was used as a term of abuse. So, while I enjoyed aspects of the book, I had an overall impression of bitterness and sleaze.

122. Inspector Frost and Lady Brassingham by Herbert Maynard Smith

I enjoyed this short British crime novel, first published in 1930. It's light and cheerful, and nobody dies. Inspector Frost is jovial and good-natured, and the intimidating Lady Brassingham is an amusing off-sider. They're investigating the disappearance of Lady Brassingham's niece, Dorothy.

123. Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins

Dee is being questioned by two police detectives about the disappearance of the little girl she is employed to look after. The child, Felicity, has suffered from selective muteness since the death of her mother four years ago. She speaks to her father and, initially, no one else. As Dee reflects on her life, we find out just how unhappy Felicity is with her selfish father and thoughtless stepmother, and how Dee, a promising mathematician, ended up looking after other people's children in Oxford.

Is Felicity still alive? Does Dee know what's happened to her? Is Felicity's stepmother the culprit?

This was a bit slow, but entertaining overall. Lots of bits and pieces about Oxford.

124. Lady of Quality

Annis is 29 years old, and single. Her father's will has left her comfortably off, and she doesn't want to give up her independence. On her way to set up her independent household in Bath, she comes across a two young people whose carriage has lost a wheel, so she gives the girl, Lucilla, a lift. Lucilla ends up staying with Annis, which is how Annis meets Lucilla's rude, overbearing guardian.

This is a later Heyer, a little tired, but still entertaining.

125. Cotillion

Kitty's parents died when she was small. She was adopted by a friend of her father's, Great-uncle Matthew, a rich old misery who has become even more parsimonious as the years go by. Kitty is now of marriageable age and the old man plans to marry her off to one of his great-nephews, on whom he will settle his fortune. If Kitty refuses to go along, she will be cut off without a penny and left destitute. Only two of the great-nephews turn up on time to propose, and Jack, the favourite of both Kitty and the old man, is not one of them. She is left to choose between a kind but sanctimonious churchman and a mentally deficient earl. Fortunately, when Kitty runs away to find work as a governess, or even a maid, anything being better than her two cousins, she meets up with her good-natured cousin Freddy and persuades him to help her out.

Amusing, as always, and livelier than Lady of Quality

I am now reading Angela Thirkell's Cheerfulness Breaks In because too much froth is never enough. It's available for free on Faded Page.

Just read about Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage Project, untapped.org.au, which is digitising out-of-print Australian books and making them available to borrow and to buy. The authors are paid, and out of work arts workers are employed for proof reading.

I'm planning to start with Frank Hardy's The Unlucky Australians.

The website also mentions The Ligature Collection, another source of previously out-of-print books that will be made available for borrowing. https://www.ligatu.re/

126. Cheerfulness Breaks In by Angela Thirkell begins just before Britain enters WWII. Rationing hasn't yet started, and the type of person no one wants to know is hoarding petrol. Families are making arrangements to move out of London, so the writer, Mrs Morland, moves in with the Brandons and lets her house to her publisher's family. Children are evacuated from London and billeted with local families. A London boys' school, Hosiers, is merged with the local Southbridge School. Hosiers' principal, Mr Bissell, and his wife, move into the cottage next door to a hard-drinking female couple, Miss Hampton and Miss Bent, and become friends.

Sons and nephews are going off to war. Daughters are working as nurses. Mrs Brandon's social circle is doing good works. The lower middle class, embodied by the Bissells, and the upper middle classes, Mrs Brandon and her cronies, learn to appreciate and accept each other. Romances unfold. The book ends on a cliff-hanger, with a man trapped in Dunkirk, and a telegram about to be opened. (I knew the outcome because I've been reading the series out of order. Such a relief!)

I enjoyed this book by suspending judgment. Thirkell wrote some of the speech of the Bissells in dialect, and was scathing about the evacuees and their parents. When characters carried on about how badly the evacuee children smelt, I was reminded of last year's Academy Award Winner, Parasite, though no one in Thirkell's book was punished so severely.

Overall, a light and amusing read, interesting for the picture of England preparing for war, and how a segment of the population felt and thought.

>125 pamelad: Interesting! I'll enjoy seeing if you find any gems!

>127 japaul22: You can also suggest books, which is tempting. Sometimes I look for a book and find that it's been out of print for decades and the cheapest second-hand copy costs hundreds of dollars.

127. The Black Moth and 128. These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer

The Black Moth was Heyer's first published book and, while I enjoyed it, it's much more melodramatic that her later books. The hero has been banished from society for cheating at cards, and has become a highwayman. He saves the heroine from abduction at the hands of an evil duke, Devil Belmanoir. Hero and heroine fall in love, but scruples forbid the hero from offering his hand. Entertaining but silly.

These Old Shades is a sort-of-sequel to The Black Moth, with the main characters renamed. The evil duke, Devil Belmanoir, has become Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon, nicknamed Satanas. He has a reputation for vice, but appears benign in this book, even kindly and good-humoured. The character change is necessary because, had the duke remained evil, he would not have deserved to win the heroine.

On his way home from the house of his mistress, Alastair saves a boy from being beaten by his brutal brother. Taken by the boy's red hair, which reminds Alastair of a man on whom he has resolved to take revenge, Alastair buys the boy and makes him his page. Alastair becomes very attached to his page, who turns out to be a girl. She, in turn, is devoted to him. Another entertaining read, with the spirited heroine we expect from Heyer.

129. Devil's Cub by Georgette Heyer

This is a sequel to These Old Shades, featuring the Marquis of Vidal, the son of the Duke of Avon. He is a libertine, as his father once was, with a wild temper inherited from his mother. He is far too handy with the pistols and has killed men in duels for trivial reasons. He needs a good woman to sort him out, and Mary Challoner could be the one!

130. The Convenient Marriage by Georgette Heyer

Lord Rule, an earl, has proposed marriage to Lizzie, the oldest and most beautiful of the Winwood sisters. Despite being in love with Edward Herron, a poor lieutenant, she feels she must accept in order to restore the family finances. Her youngest sister, Horatia, offers herself to Rule instead. Despite the age gap (Rule is 35 and Horatia 17), Rule is impressed by Horatia's energy and forthrightness and agrees to marry her, but Horatia's youth and inexperience, together with a former mistress and an enemy of Rules', impede the romance.

131. A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer

Captain Adam Deveril's profligate father has died in debt, his fortune, including his daughters' dowries, spent and his property heavily mortgaged. Adam, the new Lord Lynton, had had to leave the army to support his mother and sisters. He has to choose between selling his ancestral property, Fontley Priory, leaving himself with nothing and his younger sister unmarrriageable, and marrying a rich heiress. He marries the short, plump Jenny, the daughter of a vulgar businessman. The prosaic and practical Jenny is a sad contrast to the love of Adam's life, the beautiful and sensitive Julia. Will Adam come to terms with his choice, learn to love Jenny and stop pining for Julia?

Six Georgette Heyers in less than a fortnight! I'm about to start the seventh.

132. Arabella by Georgette Heyer

Arabella is one of eight children, the eldest girl. Her father, a younger son, is a vicar, so the family has no money for extravagances, but her mother has been putting money aside for years to give her daughter a season, and has persuaded an old school friend to present her. On the way to London, the carriage breaks down and Arabella and her companion seek shelter at the nearest house, where she meets the nonpareil, Mr Beaumaris, who thinks that she has schemed an introduction because he has a large fortune. The insulted Arabella pretends that she is an enormously rich heiress.

Another enjoyable read.

133. Frederica by Georgette Heyer

Frederica who at 24 fancies herself a spinster, has brought up her younger brothers and sisters since the deaths of her parents. She has come to London to launch her beautiful sister, Charis, upon society. Her only London relative, a distant connection, is the Marquis of Alverstoke, a man of the world whom she has never met. Alverstoke agrees to help in order to annoy his overbearing sisters, but becomes attached not just to Frederica, but to her young brothers, Felix and Jessamy.

Another good one.

134. Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer

The Austrian Harrer was mountaineering in the Himalayas with some compatriots when war was declared. The British imprisoned them in a prisoner of war camp in the Indian Himalayas. Harrer took part in three escape attempts and the last one was successful. He and his companions made the perilous journey on foot, ill-equipped, frozen and often hungry. They walked and climbed for years, some of them determined to get to India, others to Japan and Harrer, with fellow Austrian Peter Aufschnaiter, to Lhasa. They made themselves useful, particularly Aufschnaiter, an agricultural engineer, and were allowed to stay. Harrer ended up as a tutor to the young Dalai Lama.

The book is interesting for its descriptions of a world that no longer exists. There were no roads through the mountains, and Tibet was almost isolated from the world. Harrer describes the palaces, the gardens, the pageants, a way of life dominated by religion.

The Austrians stayed in Tibet until 1950, when the Chinese invaded and the Dalai Lama escaped to India.

Worth a read.

135. Cousin Kate by Georgette Heyer

Not one of her best.

Kate Malvern's improvident father has died and left her penniless. She has jus lost her governess position because the boss' little brother proposed to her and is having trouble finding another. When Kate decides that she'd be better off as a servant than a governess, her old nurse writes to Kate's only known relative, her father's half sister, Lady Broome, who swoops in and carries Kate off to the Broome's Elizabethan mansion. There Kate meets her cousin Torquil who is subject to sudden rages. Is the nineteen-year-old merely petulant and childish, or is he as mad as a cut snake? Why is Kate locked in her room? Who screamed in the night? What is Lady Broome's plan for Kate?

Heyer didn't get the Gothic atmosphere quite right, and the book gets bogged down in waffle as she tries to explain why a person as capable as Kate doesn't just leave. Worth reading if you've run out of Heyers.

136. Regency Buck by Georgette Heyer

Judith Taverner, twenty, and her brother Perry, nineteen, are on their way to London for the first time. Their father died recently, leaving his children to the guardianship of an old friend, Lord Worth. At an overnight posting stop, Perry learns that an unmissable prize fight is scheduled the next day, so he persuades Judith to stay longer. While Perry is at the fight Judith, who is used to independent country ways, wanders the town alone, where she is accosted by a tall, dark, arrogant stranger who does not realise she is a gentlewoman, worthy of respect. Guess who!

Judith also runs across her estranged cousin. Her father had fallen out with his brother, so Judith and Perry had never met their uncle and his son. Should Perry die, the uncle would be heir to the family estate and title, and Judith would inherit the unentailed property, a huge fortune. The cousin insinuates himself into the lives of the young Taverners.

Perry narrowly escapes death on a number of occasions. Who is responsible? Is it the charming cousin, or is it the cold, lip-curling Lord Worth?

An average Heyer, but enjoyable all the same.

137. Venetia by Georgette Heyer

At twenty-five, Venetia has never been away from home. With her father dead and her brother in the army, she manages the family estate and looks after her younger brother Aubrey. She is beautiful and well-off, but has never met anyone she wants to marry, her two suitors being a dramatic adolescent and a pompous bore. Then she meets the depraved, dissolute rake, Dameral, and they strike up a friendship.

Venetia is an excellent heroine, so I enjoyed this one a lot.

138. Hearing Secret Harmonies by Anthony Powell is the twelfth and final volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The harmony in the foreground is a slogan used by a pagan cult led in the present by a new character, Scorpio Murtlock, which recalls the less sinister cult led by Doctor Trelawny many years ago.

Kenneth Widmerpool continues along his downward path. At the start of the book he is a university chancellor of the King of the Kids variety. By the end he is suffering unspeakable degradation at the hands of Scorpio Murtlock. I find Powell's speculations on the sexual proclivities of his characters distasteful, and could have done without the necrophilia and voyeurism of the previous volume, so was disheartened by the sadistic rituals.

There were some entertaining sections, including a literary committee, a local conservation committee and an art exhibition, but overall I found this volume depressingly sad and sordid. My guess is that the entertaining parts relate to Powell's own experience and the rest is second-hand.

139. The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

Sophie's father, Sir Horace, parks his daughter at his sister's house while he goes to Brazil on a diplomatic mission. She's an energetic, capable, managing young woman who takes it upon herself to fix up the lives of her cousins Charles, Hubert and Cecilia. I quite enjoyed this except for a burst of anti-semitism, and a romance between first cousins. Both would have been common in Regency England, I suppose, but Heyer wrote this in the 1950s.

140. Sylvester or the Wicked Uncle by Georgette Heyer

Sylvester, Duke of Salford, has decided that it is time for him to marry, so he takes the advice of his godmother and heads of to meet her granddaughter Phoebe, who lives with her nasty stepmother and indolent father. Neither Sylvester nor Phoebe are at all impressed with one another, which is a surprise to the Duke because he is used to having young women fall at his feet. Realising that, should Sylvester offer, she will be made to accept, Phoebe escapes with her childhood friend, the son of the local squire.

I quite enjoyed this, but saw no need for Sylvester to be a duke. Such an unlikely match!

141. The Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer

Unmarried at twenty-eight, Abigail Wendover lives in Bath with her older sister Selina. Together they have brought up their orphaned niece Fanny, who is about to embark on her first London season. Fanny fancies herself in love with the charming Stacy Calverleigh, who has a reputation as a fortune-hunter. Calverleigh's uncle, Miles, the black sheep of the title, was banished to India twenty years ago, but has arrived in Bath in the company of a young man, son of a friend of Abigail's, who was taken so ill in India that he could have died on the voyage had not Miles looked after him. Miles and Abigail strike up a friendship, which excites the ire of Abigail's stuffy brother, and drives Selina, a hypochondriac, into a decline. Will Fanny elope with the wicked fortune hunter? Will Abby go against her families wishes and marry Miles?

Not one of Heyer's best. Miles didn't really come alive, and there was too much repetitive explanatory waffle.

>139 pamelad:. I agree that the final volumes are not up to the same calibre as some of the earlier books in the series. I think that the three books covering Nick Jenkins’ war experiences are possibly the strongest section.
I have often wondered what Powell’s expectations were when he started writing the sequence. After all, it was about twenty-five years between the publication of the first and final volumes, which represented more than a third of Powell’s life up to that point. So much must have changed during the period in which he wrote the books.
I am also struck by the difference between his pre- and post-war books. I don’t think he would be remembered now at all if it had not been for the Dance sequence. His earlier books have many of the same traits as the sequence but are nowhere near as accomplished or well finished.

>143 Eyejaybee: Yes, I also thought The Kindly Ones, The Valley of Bones and The Soldier's Art were the high point, and wonder whether the planned four season structure compelled him to keep writing after the inspiration and energy had died. The tone of the last two volumes was repellent. As you say, the world had changed a great deal over the twenty-five years between the publication of the first book and the last, and to me the last two books suggest that Powell's distaste for some of these changes had left him unable to maintain his humorous detachment.

142. Peace, Perfect Peace by Josephine Kamm

Giles and June spent the war years with their grandmother in the country while their mother worked in London and their father fought overseas. When the time comes for the children to return to London to live with their parents, the grandmother tries to persuade Giles to stay with her. She is a manipulative woman who can see no one's point of view but her own and believes that everything she does is for the best. Life is difficult enough in London, with substandard housing, and shortages of nearly everything, including food, fuel and clothing, so the grandmother's attempts to cause conflict between her son and his wife just add to the bleakness.

This was interesting for the description of domestic life in Britain immediately after WWII and strangeness felt by families reuniting after years apart.

143, The Corinthian and 144. The Talisman Ring by Georgette Heyer

These two were similar in that they featured naive young heroines in search of adventure, escaping from unwanted betrothals. Lots of comedy. Enjoyed them.

145. Friday's Child by Georgette Heyer

The young Viscount Sheringam cannot get control of his fortune until he turns twenty-five, or marries. Embarrassed by gambling debts, he proposes to his childhood friend, the beautiful Isabella Milborne. When Isabella refuses him he resolves to marry the first young woman he sees, who turns out to be his devoted young friend Hero, an orphan living with an irritable, penny-pinching aunt who plans to send Hero off to work as a governess. Sherry makes it clear that this is to be a marriage of convenience, and that he and Hero should lead independent lives, but Hero is far too naive and inexperienced to handle society on her own, and makes many mistakes.

At 420 pages, this was too long for a frothy romance. It sagged in the middle instead of bubbling along. Not that I disliked it, but shorter is better.

146. Jutland Cottage by Angela Thirkell

The comforting thing about Thirkell's books is their sameness. I've read her Barchester series out of order, and have mixed up many of the characters because they are so similar. People meet over dinner and say witty things to one another. There's always an engagement, sometimes two or three. There's no suspense, nothing to worry about. They're a good choice for reading in bed because nothing much happens, so you don't have to keep reading until the end. This one is about Margot Phelps, the fortyish daughter of Admiral and Mrs Phelps. The family's only income is the admiral's meagre pension, so there is not quite enough money to live on, not enough to buy new clothes, afford a telephone service, go on a holiday. When her parents die, Margot will be destitute. She needs a husband, pronto!

147. Charity Girl by Georgette Heyer

Cherry Steane lives with her nasty aunt who treats her like a servant and never has a kind word. Her mother died years ago, and her father disappeared. The aunt goes too far, even for the docile Cherry, so the poor girl runs away to her grandfather. Viscount Desford, a dashing young neighbour who is on his way to London in his curricle, finds her on the road trying to walk there and, after listening to her miserable story, promises to take her to her grandfather's house.

Desford is 29 and unmarried. Ten years ago, his father had tried to marry him off to his friend's daughter, Henrietta. Neither wanted to marry, but they have remained good friends. Desford calls on Henrietta to help look after the gormless Cherry, whose ill-considered flight has put the reputations of herself and Desford at risk.

Nice and short. Enjoyed it.

148. The Masqueraders is an early Georgette Heyer, 1928. It's set after the Jacobite rebellion, which ended in 1746, so seventy years or so before the Regency period. Society people wear face patches, powder and elaborate wigs and, in this book at least, speak a form of English that is more jarringly historical than the language of Heyer's Regency novels. The Marriots, initially Peter and Kate, turn out to be the cross-dressing siblings Prue and Robin, who are in disguise because they are Jacobites, and at risk of execution if found out. They are also protecting their father, a mysterious and manipulative individual. None of this makes a lot of sense, but it's a necessary complication because otherwise the road to romance would be easy and dull.

I quite enjoyed this, but most of the characters were caricatures and the plot was nonsensical. A bridge too far!

Best of 2020

Books I rated at 4.5 -5 stars

L’Étranger by Albert Camus 5*
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann 5*
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk 5*
Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard
I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron
Our Women on the Ground by Zahra Hankir
The Long Prospect by Elizabeth Harrower
See What You Made Me Do by Jess Hill
The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
The Kindly Ones, The Valley of Bones, The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell
Good Morning Midnight by Jean Rhys

The three five star books are by Nobel Prize winners, so it looks as though I've given a Nobel half-star premium.

Worst of 2020

Books I rated at less than 3 stars

Nothing to Do with the Case by Elizabeth Lemarchand
The Lucky Stiff by Craig Rice
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi
The Rub of Time by Martin Amis
The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield
Private Enterprise by Angela Thirkell
Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear

The lowest rating I gave was 2 stars. In 2021 I'll try to spread the ratings out more.

Books I Didn't Finish

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz (Convoluted and tricksy)
The Private Face of Murder by John Bonet (Wrong politics)
The Passing Bells by Philip Rock (Americanisms in a book about Britain)
The Half-hearted by John Buchan (Wrong politics)
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Perez (Dull)

Sex and Suffering Women's Health and a Women's Hospital: The Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne, 1856-1996 by Janet McCalman (Dull)
The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund De Waal (Dull)
The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson (Too much moaning)
Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger (Gave up when he started talking about Economics)