BrokenTunes's 2020 Thread

Well, hello there,
Thanks for checking out my update thread. Please feel free to say hi and comment.

This thread is mostly about books. I love them. However, I’ll also add some non-book-related updates over time because despite appearances I do have other interests, like drinking tea, travel, tennis, and general adventuring. So, if there is something that makes me smile, marvel, or think, I’ll probably write about it.
I'll use WP for reviews and post in the first place and will post a link to the WP post here.

However, I'll probably also cross-post reviews on LibraryThing. That is, I'll cross-post reviews that do not have any media content.

But back to the books…

I’m an eclectic reader, but I do go through phases of different interests and binging on books on the same theme or by the same authors. Thrillers aren’t really my cuppa and I generally stay away from Romance and YA, but there isn’t really any genre I don’t read…

Oh, and I do like a good deal of biography, history and general non-fiction.

How Do I Rate Books? —
Ratings are a very individual and somewhat arbitrary thing. I like to rate books as honestly as I can – basing my judgement solely on my reading experience and not on my expectation of the book or, heavens forbid, on how others perceive the book. As a result – and because I have been exposed to some pretty amazing reads – my ratings are pretty conservative.

Star ratings explained:
0.5 – Abysmal. Hated the book so much I would not even use it as a doorstop.
1 – Really disliked the book.
1.5 – Blergh.
2 – I don’t know how I feel about this book: I don’t like it but there are worse. This is still DNF country.
2.5 – This is nearly a good book, but there is still something missing – like depth, character development, a plot, a point, etc.
3 – I like it.
3.5 – This was really enjoyable.
4 – I really like it a lot.
4.5 – This was so great it made me think about the book for quite some time after finishing.
5 – This book has made such an impression on me that I would call it a game-changer.

>1 BrokenTune: Woo hoo, I’m glad you started a thread here!

I’m so terrible at tennis, although it’s been years since I last tried playing and I never played much to begin with. My mom and I used to play for fun sometimes, but only if both tennis courts were empty because there was no fence between them. We’d end up taking up both tennis courts because neither of us were any good at managing to aim the ball within the proper boundaries when we hit it, and least not beyond the initial serve. Most of our “tennis playing” involved running around chasing tennis balls. ;)

Sunday Update - I'll try and do weekly updates on reading.
I'm not sure whether I am still in a slump or whether my current reads are just to much like hard work but I have not read a lot this week at all. I'm also sure that work had something to do with this. It's been very busy.

To relax, I've spent a lot of time listening to the Gloomsbury series, which has really made me laugh. It's brilliant. I love following the fictional alter egos of the Bloomsbury Group through their farcical adventures.

I'm also still trying to work through The Origins of Totalitarianism. This is a buddy read over on GR. It is interesting - Arendt was a super-smart lady after all - but I am struggling with the way that Arendt presents her arguments. I feel like a lot of the analysis is based on assumptions without showing the reader the underlying data/evidence.

On the other hand, Simone Veil's A Life has been very addictive and I hope to finish it before the month is out.
Veil's writing is sparse. She does not elaborate much, especially not with dramatic flourishes, but it is exactly this which makes her writing quite powerful. She's very matter of fact and does not even try to manipulate the reader into feeling one way or another.
I very much appreciate this.

Reviews posted this week:
The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann

>2 YouKneeK: LoL. I haven't played for the best part of 2 years because of both injury and lack of fitness...but I loved playing and hope to get back to it. I'm no good at it. I just love having a blast with friends that are also in it for a bit of fun...actually managing to hit the ball is a total bonus. XD

Thanks for your words of encouragement re posting over here. I think I've got a plan that will work for me being active both here and on GR while keeping WP as my main location for posts. It's quite a change from Booklikes, but I see a lot of opportunities here for improving my review writing, thinking about other posts, tracking what I read etc.

Congratulations on your thread, BT :D.

I´m sorry that you still are in a reading slump, but you still managed to read a little bit. Maybe you need another lighthearted and fun read in between the more heavier reads to keep your reading mojo going?

The Weather in the Streets sounds so great, I really have to read that book very soon.

Thank you! Well, it's more of a writing slump, I guess. Tho, both the Arendt and Veil books are tough reads, so progress is pretty slow. Well, the Arendt is a bit of a challenge and totally fries my brain after about 40 pages...

I totally recommend The Weather in the Streets. It could easily sit on the Persephone shelf. And what I totally forgot to mention is that the book is not preachy at all. I loved that. And I love the ending... You'll see what I mean. :D

Have you started a thread here, yet? If so, where?

I guess, this thread will be very similar to the thread in GR's The Outpost, but this is inevitable. At least, I think I found a format that I am happy with without confusing myself about what was posted where. ;)

>3 BrokenTune: Regarding your opening comments on your linked review, I intentionally avoid blurbs, because I agree they can be very spoilery.

>4 BrokenTune: I’m glad you’ve figured out a plan and I hope it works out well for you!

And look at that, we seem to be getting a flood of spam. That actually doesn’t happen over here that often, so I hate that it’s happening right now when you just started your thread. As an FYI, you can flag them by clicking “More” under their post then “Flag”. Once it receives enough flags, the post will be hidden. The user may also get removed entirely as was the case with the 7th post.

>9 YouKneeK: There is nothing worse, imo, than a blurb that tells you the story...or in the case of classics, that presumes you already know the story. Gah!

Re spam - I flagged both the comments and the user. I also blocked that user. When I block a user, can they still see posts/add comments, or does it just mean that their comments will show as "hidden" on my thread?

>4 BrokenTune: It's quite a change from Booklikes, but I see a lot of opportunities here for improving my review writing, thinking about other posts, tracking what I read etc.

I've only started using LibraryThing this year, and already I've participated in a number of very interesting book discussions in the various groups, so I would say, absolutely, there are good opportunities around here to improve your writing, as well as to interact with other readers' perspective.

>10 BrokenTune: I’ve never actually blocked anybody, so I’m not sure how that works from first-hand experience, but I did find this page in the help wiki that says it hides their posts from you and prevents them from commenting on your profile page. So I think a blocked member would still be able to see posts and add comments if their account hasn’t been suspended. Somebody who's actually used the feature could probably speak to it better.

>9 YouKneeK: It´s not only blurbs that can be spoilery, forewords can be as well. The worst example I have ever encountered for this has been Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. The most pivotal scene of the whole book was spoiled in the foreword. Thankfully, I was aware of that and avoided it like the plague before reading the book.

>10 BrokenTune: Sorry about the spammers, BT. They seem to be everywhere. At least you can get of rid of them here.

>12 YouKneeK: Well, it was impressive how fast the spammers were suspended. I mean, coming from BL where spammers just basically took over ... WOW! I'm really impressed with LT here.

>11 Majel-Susan: Hi. And yes, from what I have seen of the groups etc. on LT so far, I am really looking forward to spending time here. :)

>13 Lille_lara: Oh yes, I hate that too! I avoid most introductory material now until after I’ve finished reading the actual story. It tends to be especially bad in classics where people often write scholarly sorts of introductions analyzing the work with detailed notes on major plot points. A little warning would go a long way.

>13 Lille_lara: Re spammers: Absolutely!

And re spoilers: Oh, that is so true. I've stopped reading forewords years ago because they are so spoilery! I might read them after I finish the book, tho.

>17 BrokenTune: >16 YouKneeK: I dared to read the foreword of The Black Tulip (the Penguin black spine edition) and the guy writing the foreword used it to put the story into a historical context, without spoiling a single thing about the book. That´s what forewords are for.
Honestly, people who spoil the plot should never be allowed to write another foreword again.

>18 Lille_lara: That is really good to know. I'll keep an eye out for that edition then.

>1 BrokenTune: When you block someone, they can still comment anywhere they like. You will see their name and then their comment is hidden by text saying something like "message hidden because you've blocked this member, click to view the message".
It is very similar kind of blocking to what goes on on old bulletin boards. It's not two way, unfortunately.

And just remember, this isn't YOUR thread, like a thread on booklikes. You can't edit, delete or otherwise control any comments in your thread by other users. Besides reporting and blocking, that's the limit. It took me quite some time to get used to that. Hopefully it won't take you much time :-)

Looking forward to this thread :-)

>20 BookstoogeLT: Thank you. That is very good to know. I'm not keen on blocking people and have done so on other platforms only where it was outright spam.

I very much look forward to having this thread here. :D

>18 Lille_lara: I share the majority view about spoilers in introductions here. And I have a copy of that edition of The Black Tulip on my TBR pile. So it is extremely helpful to know that I can safely tackle the Foreword.

>22 -pilgrim-: Oh, that is exciting. I´m curious what you will make of The Black Tulip, should you decide to pick it up. I really enjoyed reading this book (as I enjoyed reading the other books by Dumas I have read so far). The foreword really helped me understand the novel, because I didn´t know anything about the Dutch history in the 17th century, and you really need a bit of that for at least the first 50 pages of the novel.

>18 Lille_lara: I would love more forewords like that!

>23 Lille_lara: The problem about that is that I am in the "shielding category", and so still in lockdown, somewhere different to the majority of my book collection. So it will be a while.

I have been compsring our libraries, and note that we seem to share s soft spot for the classic adventure writers, like Dumas and Hope.

Hello! It's nice to see a new thread here in the Green Dragon! The weather in the streets is a great book. If you are a regular reader of C20th writing by women you might also be interested in the Virago Modern Classics group here on LT. Virago reprinted Rosamond Lehmann's books in the 80s, along with hundreds of other neglected women writers. There are many of us who now seek out the unmistakable green-spined editions in second hand shops!

I totally agree about reading the foreword last so as not to be spoiled. One publisher I know of kindly puts an alert at the top of the introduction to warn first time readers if plot points will be given away.

>25 -pilgrim-: I have never heard of Hope, so that is exciting. I really like a good action-adventure story and it´s always exciting to learn about a new author. Just to be clear, it´s Anthony Hope, right?

>26 Sakerfalcon: Hi! Thanks for checking in. :) And, thanks for the direction to the VMC group here. I'll be sure to drop in. I do like a good early- to mid-C20th book and I always look out for a good one by a woman writer (so over-looked). As a result I'm a big fan of the Persephone books. I've not read many of the Virago titles, or where I have, I have not made a conscious effort to seek them out as "Virago" publications, if that makes sense.

>28 BrokenTune: I´ve always got the impression that Virago publishes the more "popular" women authors, where as Persephone publishes the more forgotten authors. So in that respect, both publishers go along very well. And the Persephone books are just bloody gorgeous.

>29 Lille_lara: Agreed! Which is probably why I've not sought out Virago specifically but have sought out Persephone - they're just stunningly beautiful. :D
I believe there was a Persephone Group over here but it looks like it's dormant and the VMC group seems to also include Persephone books.

>27 Lille_lara: Yes, Anthony Hope. As in the author of The Prisoner of Zenda

>29 Lille_lara: Back in the 80s and 90s Virago published a lot of pretty obscure female authors, but due to various issues in the publishing industry since then they have had to focus on the most popular. Which is a real shame.

>30 BrokenTune: Yes, the Virago group also read Persephone, and the new Furrowed Middlebrow imprint from Dean Street Press. The latter are all available as ebooks, so much easier to get hold of if you are not in the UK.

>1 BrokenTune: Welcome! I also look forward to reading your book related musings.

>1 BrokenTune: Hello, and welcome! I don't comment a lot on reading threads here, but I try to at least skim through them (avoiding discussions of books I haven't read).

Always nice to have fresh blood views here. :)

>34 MrsLee: Hello. Thanks for the warm welcome! :D

Not entirely related to my own reading, but the Edinburgh Book Festival will largely take place online this year....They have all of the talks etc. streaming online for free.

https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/

My latest Mt. TBR Project update is now on my WP blog.

Sunday Update -
I'm definitely still in some sort of slump. I've again not read a whole lot, and I have felt even less inclined to write any reviews.

However, I did finish listening to the Gloomsbury series, which was brilliant. A reminder of Virginia Woolf's life - even if fictionalised - and her dealings with other members of the Bloomsbury Group also turned out to be a superb overture to embarking on a buddy read (with @Lille_lara over on GR) of Square Haunting which combines biographies of H.D., Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Harrison, Eileen Power, and Virginia Woolf.

I also finished Simone Veil's autobiography A Life a few nights ago and liked it. She had a very to-the-point style of writing and I mostly appreciated it, even tho I wish some events had been described on more detail. I was particularly surprised by and wanted to know more about her criticism of Hannah Arendt's writing.

Lastly, I finished Sayers' Creed or Chaos? by Dorothy L. Sayers. It was ok. Maybe it is my ongoing slumpishness or maybe it is that I just cannot muster any enthusiasm for religious fervor, but I didn't love the collection of essays. It's not Sayers' fault - she was on fire - I guess the topic just left me cold.

Just as last week, I'm still trying to work through The Origins of Totalitarianism (another buddy read over on GR). It is interesting - Arendt was a super-smart lady after all - but I am struggling with the way that Arendt presents her arguments. I feel like a lot of the analysis is based on assumptions without showing the reader the underlying data/evidence.

Reviews posted this week:
None.

>38 BrokenTune: You linked to my old, deleted profile here on Librarything ;). And because I deleted that profile, I couldn´t create a new profile with my usual username. And that´s the reason why I´m Lille_lara on this site.

>39 Lille_lara: Aaaaah! Also, I didn't even notice it created a link! So, it does work by adding an "@"... Every day is a school day. ;) I'll go and correct the link now.

Sunday Update -
Well, I am over my reading slump, but now I am faced with way too many books on my currently reading shelf. I started all of them at some point, then set them aside because of the slump.

I finished several books this week, the weakest of which was Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym. This was my second Pym (after Excellent Women) and I am sure that while Pym was an accomplished writer, her books just aren't for me. Yes, the Pym fans out there will gasp in horror, but I found both books deadly dull.

Only slightly more ... engaging, because enjoyable is the wrong word, was A.L. Kennedy's Paradise, which was interesting because it follows the journey of an alcoholic in all of its believable by gut-wrenching detail. Enjoyable it was not, and I was glad to finish the book and leave the utterly depressing world that A.L. Kennedy threw me into. "Paradise" - LoL. It seems the author has a sense of humor.

I also finished two group reads with the "Agathytes" on Goodreads: Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie was our first ever club read. At this point, all of Dame Agatha's mysteries are re-reads for me, but I loved revisiting this particular collection of Poirot stories because they show how much Dame Agatha was inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories.

Our other (non-Agatha) selection was The Secret of Greylands by Annie Haynes. Haynes was a new to me author. While the story was not what you might call sophisticated literature, I had fun following Haynes slightly dim main character across the gorgeously atmospheric Yorkshire moors. It is clear to see that Haynes was inspired by the Bronte sisters in this book, and the best part of the book for me was not the mystery (which is laughable) but all of the high drama that Haynes threw our heroine into.

I can also report that I have come to the conclusion that I do want to finish Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. We abandoned the buddy read over on GR, but I just want to finish the book.
It's not been an enjoyable or even engaging read, and I have had a lot of issues with Arendt's writing in this book. However, the third (and last) part of the book seems to have picked up, probably as a result on Arendt working within her metier or social and political theory rather than trying to present historical analysis. I hope to finish the book later tonight if only to be able to say "BE GONE!".

Without a doubt, the best book and reading experience I have had this week was a buddy read that @Lille_lara and I started last weekend. We picked Francesca Wade's Square Haunting, and both really enjoyed it. Of the five mini-biographies that Wade connects to Mecklenburgh Square, I had heard of Woolf, Sayers, and H.D., but Eileen Power and Jane Ellen Harrison were new to me.
I loved that book. I love Mecklenburgh Square, the place where Sayers created Wimsey and where her Harriet Vane resides also. Being a Sayers fan, how could I not be interested in the book. So, it was such a joy to find an author who apparently shares the same interests I have and who appreciates the same sort of details, because there were quite a few times throughout the book that I felt enlightened about issues that I had wondered about also.
Anyway, I loved the book so much that I ordered a physical copy for my shelves.


(I stopped by Mecklenburgh Square while in London last year.)

By the way, I strongly suspect that Wade’s title was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s short piece Street Haunting: A London Adventure. I may have problems with her stream of consciousness style in her novels, but I love quite a lot of her essays, and this is one of my personal favourites. Her love of second-hand books is one of the reasons why:

"But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. The very sight of the bookseller’s wife with her foot on the fender, sitting beside a good coal fire, screened from the door, is sobering and cheerful. She is never reading, or only the newspaper; her talk, when it leaves bookselling, which it does so gladly, is about hats; she likes a hat to be practical, she says, as well as pretty. 0 no, they don’t live at the shop; they live in Brixton; she must have a bit of green to look at. In summer a jar of flowers grown in her own garden is stood on the top of some dusty pile to enliven the shop. Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world."

Reviews posted this week:
None. While the reading slump has gone, the review writing has not resumed, yet.

>41 BrokenTune: Well, at least you're reading again :-D

>42 BookstoogeLT: Exactly! And I got to kick the Arendt book into touch last night, too. So all is well! :D

Sunday Update: -
I’m on vacation. For a whole week! Now, you’d think I’d have started off my long longed for break by getting stuck in a good book, but the reality of it is that last week was rather hectic and all I’ve wanted to do this weekend was chill, do some house chores, cook, and not look at screens or print.

So, time spent reading was minimal this weekend, apart from a fun buddy read. We took a trip to Ancient Greece yesterday to read Aristophanes’ Clouds.

This was my first dip into Aristophanes’ work and I really liked it. I am not convinced that Aristophanes will become a favourite of mine, tho. I liked Clouds and the questions it posed, but I still much prefer the “pompous” – as Aristophanes describes him – Aeschylus. The Oxford World Classics edition I have also contains two other plays: Frogs and Women at the Thesmophoria. As I know that Frogs will satirise Euripides as well as Aeschylus, I might read Medea before getting back to Aristophanes.

As a side note, I had a little project in August last year which developed out of a craving for stories set in Ancient Greece and Rome, and it appears that I am engaging in a similar project this year.

Earlier this week, I read The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes. I enjoyed the book and Haynes’ very different take on the story of Oedipus and Antigone. Haynes very much re-imagined the characters, the motivations, and as a result, the stories themselves. I appreciated Haynes thinking and her efforts, but ultimately felt that the book was let down by a lack of pace and by the insertion of an afterword in which Haynes explains her changes – that while Sophocles’ version of the story of Jocasta and Oedipus is the best known, the characters also appear in other sources.

"Books 9–12 of The Odyssey were a set text in my first term at college, so I was nineteen when I found out that Oedipus’ story wasn’t (and had never been) immutable. In Book 11, Homer describes the moment when Odysseus catches sight of ‘beautiful Epicaste, mother of Oedipus’ in the Underworld. Homer’s version of the Oedipus myth is sketched out in just ten lines of verse, but it’s subtly different from that of Sophocles …"

Therefore, the story of Oedipus is not set in stone. It can be viewed from other perspectives and this is what Haynes has provided in The Children of Jocasta. While I actually liked this approach, a book should be able to stand on its own. It should not need an explanatory note bolted on at the end. I would have appreciated it much more if the explanation had been worked into the text itself. Haynes is a good enough author to be able to work this in, so the absence of the authorial voice, if you, like was something that was missing for me.

In keeping with the theme of Ancient August, I have also made progress reading Mary Beard’s S.P.Q.R. I am loving this book, and I am loving how Beard applies her usual style of focusing not on battles and dates and timelines, but on the people involved, the politics, the society, and explains what events may have meant for the people living at the time. I may also have gotten side-tracked yesterday watching some of Beard’s programmes on YouTube – the Timeline episode about Pompeii was fabulous.
It will be some time before I get to finish my read of S.P.Q.R., but I am in no rush. It’s a fabulous book.

I did however finish two other books this week: Philip Larkin’s Jill, which was just … erm … dull. That’s ok. I needed to try the book and I now know that Larkin is not for me. I liked a couple of his poems, but much like the works of Barbara Pym (whom Larkin admired, but whose writing I also find dull), the thoughts that occupied Larkin’s characters’ minds were not able to interest me at all, nor did I find the humour appealing. Cringing through an entire book is exhausting.

Lastly, I finished Michael Gilbert’s Death Has Deep Roots (1951). The book started out great with a court room drama that was headed towards disaster as the defendant changed her legal advisors at the very last minute and her new barristers struggled for time to prepare a case that seemed to be a foregone conclusion. Thrilling stuff.
Unfortunately, once a little time is granted, the story changes into action mode, where we see threats, stabbings, and people digging up dirt from the past. Yep, this was so boring. I often had to flip back to a previous chapter to find out why we were where we were and what we were trying to accomplish. Seriously, this was not good.
What made the book worse was the ending. Just when I hoped we’d be able to get back to the sparkle of the first chapters, the book plunged into a diatribe on morality.
Now, I understand that this section reflected the mores of its time, or at least the mores of a certain strata middle-class England and – from what I have read – the English legal system at the time. However, as a reader I was not in the mood to put up with outright mysogyny and acceptance of double-standards that was portrayed in the story. What irked me most was that the social issues that were depicted could have been, and only a couple of decades later probably would have been!, picked up as part of the legal drama. But no. Instead of taking apart the bias toward the defendant instilled in both society inside and outside of the court room, Gilbert decided to present a pedestrian solution that seemed to have been pulled out of a hat. It was all very, very disappointing, especially because my first encounter with Gilbert’s work in Smallbone Deceased not long ago had me hope that Gilbert could be another author I would want to read more by.

Reviews posted this week:
None.

(Cross-posted on brokentuneblog.com.)

>44 BrokenTune: I hope you have a great vacation and get the chance to recharge after last week!

Sunday Update: -
It feels like I managed to read a lot this week, which is only justified as I has a week’s vacation and the city is still in a local lockdown.

I finished my foray into Aristophanes’ work via Stephen Halliwell’s translation found in the Oxford World Classics edition. The book contained Clouds, Frogs and Women at the Thesmophoria. Of the three Clouds was my favourite, followed by Women at the Thesmophoria. Surprisingly, Aristophanes’ best-known play Frogs was my least favourite. As I suspected after reading Clouds last week, I appreciate the plays, but I do not believe that I will become a fan or Aristophanes. I find his views too reactionary for my tastes, which does sound incredible odd when talking about works that are 2500 years old and when looking at his criticism of Euripides in Women at the Thesmophoria, but there was just something about Aristophanes’ plays that really disagreed with me. I can’t quite put my finger on it: I enjoyed the plays, I laughed quite a lot, but I somehow felt his witticisms also lacked circumspection. What is clear to me, tho, is that I will be coming back to Aristophanes in one way or another in the future. His plays provide much to think about.
I also want to briefly talk about the Oxford World Classics edition featuring the translation and commentary by Stephen Halliwell: this is a fantastic edition. Not only was the translation incredibly readable, it also seemed to try very hard to not gloss over nuances in meaning when choosing particular words. In parallel to reading this edition, I had a modern translation by Paul Roche at hand, which seemed to lack the level of accuracy of translation.
The Roche translation also lacked explanatory notes and introductions to the plays that would give context to Aristophanes’ life, work and the world around him. The Halliwell edition on the other excelled my expectations in this regard. A good 25% of the Halliwell edition is dedicated to providing addional information on Aristophanes, Greek drama, political and historical background, etc., all of which was well presented and utterly readable – i.e. not dull at all.

In other updates related to my “Ancient August” project (focusing on books set in or about Ancient Greece and/or Rome), I have made further progress with Mary Beard’s S.P.Q.R. and started Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. I plan to finish both books by the end of the month, but I may DNF The Song of Achilles because it is just so, so boring. This is disappointing as the author’s book Circe was one of my reading highlights last year.

Another reading highlight this week was Ali Smith’s Summer, the last instalment in her Seasonal Quartet. The book arrived a week ago, but I wanted to save it until I had time to give it my undivided attention.

From the first 1/3 I could tell that Ali Smith continues to be a chronicler and a conscience for our times, but I think much of the book may have been written before the pandemic hit, so it is not as “of the moment” as the previous books. It is, however, but it is a great reminder of the issues that have been masked or overshadowed by the pandemic.

“Everybody said: so?
As in so what? As in shoulder shrug, or what do you expect me to do about it? or I so don’t really give a fuck, or actually I approve of it, it’s fine by me.
Okay, not everybody said it. I’m speaking colloquially, like in that phrase everybody’s doing it. What I mean is, it was a clear marker, just then, of that particular time; a kind of litmus, this dismissive note. It got fashionable around then to act like you didn’t care. It got fashionable, too, to insist the people who did care, or said they cared, were either hopeless losers or were just showing off.
It’s like a lifetime ago.
But it isn’t – it’s literally only a few months since a time when people who’d lived in this country all their lives or most of their lives started to get arrested and threatened with deportation or deported: so?
And when a government shut down its own parliament because it couldn’t get the result it wanted: so?
When so many people voted people into power who looked them straight in the eye and lied to them: so? When a continent burned and another melted: so? When people in power across the world started picking off groups of people by religion, ethnicity, sexuality, intellectual or political dissent: so?
But no. True. Not everybody said it.
Not by a country mile.
Millions of people didn’t say it.
Millions and millions, all across the country and all across the world, saw the lying, and the mistreatments of people and the planet, and were vocal about it, on marches, in protests, by writing, by voting, by talking, by activism, on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page.”

What has struck me from the opening pages is that Summer makes a direct reference to Hannah Arendt, and in subsequent pages I believe there is more – a subtle discussion of the parallels between the rise of Hitler and Stalin and some of the actions of governments witnessed more recently.
How serendipitous to have read Arendt so recently! It makes me wonder whether sometimes books choose us because they “know” it is the right time.

“Opposite of the blond beast. If that was written nowadays blond beast = UK prime minister.
Yesterday the blond beast prime minister tried, like the Americans, banning some journalists and not others from being let into Downing St.
Some were told to stand on one side of the carpet and the others to stand on the other side of the carpet. On the one side they were going to be permitted. On the other they weren’t.
All the journalists boycotted the dividing of them into two.
But that won’t last.
Robert Greenlaw admires above all the adviser of the prime minister, who knows how to style politics so that it doesn’t look like politics any more, who knows full well that Stalin and Hitler were possible even though everyone in old-style politics looks aghast when anyone suggests it’s possible to act the ways they did.
The people in charge in England right now are geniuses of manipulation.
Robert Greenlaw is in awe of their performance of callousness. He is in awe of how they get away with talking about patriotism with all the fervour of 12 year olds – Robert Greenlaw still aspires to it a bit, though he’s now 13 and recognizes its pre-adolescent ventriloquisms. It is all just more genius.”

The book is not all about doom and gloom. At the same time, it is impossible to list everything that the book is about. What I do know is that, like the previous books in the series, it’s a treasure hunt: it’s packed with references to current affairs and historical events and best of all art and literature that have always acted as a record of context. And, as promised, there is some hope in this, too:

“Sacha’s chest filled with the kind of warmth that once when she was really small she’d asked her mother about because it felt so nice and her mother’d said that’s your inner summer.”

Now that is some very existential stuff right here. And, yes, I think – hope – we’re talking Camus here and his declaration of the invincible summer that exists in the depth of winter. As I said before, Smiths are literary catnip to me. That is why I needed to make time for this book.
Loved it.

As I said at the start, I read quite a lot this week. So, I also managed to finish two other books:

I reviewed Shakespeare’s Kings by John Julius Norwich earlier today, so will not go into any detail about it here.

The last book I finished this week was Planetfall by Emma Newman:
I have never been a reader of sci-fi. This is one of the genres that I have tried but just have not been able to get excited about. There is just something about the settings and world building that makes my brain go “blah, blah, blah” skipping a lot of the elements that many sci-fi lovers seem to love most. I find them confusing at worst and nice-to-haves at best. I’m reading stories for the portrayal of character or for a discussion of issues, and I need a plot to move these along. With sci-fi, I seem to get distracted by things that irrelevant to me.

However, every now and then I am in the mood to try new books in genres that are not my usual go-to places. So, when a few friends praised Planetfall online recently, I thought I’d pick it up.
I am glad I have read the book. I loved the portrayal of characters in the book and thought that the latter part of the story was really, really good. I loved the betrayal and the shift in the story and the conclusion that the lie … or rather the exposure of the lie would lead to mayhem.
I also liked the discussion of faith and the contrasting of group vs individual believes, but thought this was not really developed in the story.
There were a few things that weren’t really developed in the story and I am curious whether Newman gets around to working on this in the sequels.
Still, the book really only came to life for me in the second half (if not later) and for the first 50% or so I was rather bored.

Reviews posted this week (on my WP blog):
Shakespeare’s Kings by John Julius Norwich

Other Bookish Links:
I have probably mentioned this before but the Edinburgh Book Fest is taking place online this year. All events are free and you can watch them from anywhere. The book talks and interviews I have caught so far have all been fantastic and I think the Festival organisers have done a marvellous job.
If you’re interested, check out their website:
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/

>46 BrokenTune: I have really enjoyed reading the Planetfall books. All of them are basically stand-alone, but there are references connecting them all to earlier books so it's worth reading them in publication order. However, in none of the next three books does Newman return to the setting of the first book. All three subsequent stories happen in and around our own solar system. There is ample evidence that the fifth book, (if she writes one), might come full circle to the site of God's City, but who knows...? She might just tell more tales that each serve as stepping stones before actually getting there.

>46 BrokenTune: I’ve seen quite a few discussions about The Song of Achilles and Circe over on GR, and it seems like a lot of people really like one of the two books but not the other. I’ve not yet read either, although I am likely to get to The Song of Achilles eventually, if not both of them. Song is on the group shelf on GR that I take the vast majority of my reading selections from, so that’s why I’m more likely to try that one first, but I’ll try to keep in mind if I dislike it that I might like the other better.

I’m glad you enjoyed Planetfall, at least the second half. I haven’t read it yet myself, but hope to do so someday. If you’re ever looking for another sci-fi book to attempt, I wonder if you might enjoy The Sparrow, if you haven’t read it already. It’s very much a character-driven book. It has some discussions of faith, although probably in a different context than Planetfall did. I tend to shy away from books that feature religion heavily for fear they’ll get preachy, trying to convince their readers to believe a certain way and/or making their characters repeat common arguments I’ve already heard a million times. However, I really liked the way this book was written. I gave it 5 stars and would probably rank it among my all-time favorites.

>47 ScoLgo: That is really good to know. Tho, I am not sure if I'll return to the series. Like I said, there were points of interest but they were, imo, underdeveloped. If the other books are set in different locations, does that mean the world-building starts from scratch?

>48 YouKneeK: I finished The Song of Achilles yesterday. It was so very underwhelming. Sure, the language is nice (as I would expect). But to me it is nothing more than a very, very gushy romance. I'm not the right audience for this. What interest I could muster for it is connected to the conflicts that are brought up in the last 10-15 pages.

It's funny you should mention The Sparrow. When I bought Planetfall (in that attempt to branch out and try some other books in a genre I tend to avoid) I also picked up The Sparrow and a book called A Memory Called Empire. We'll see.

>46 BrokenTune: I also enjoyed Planetfall and appreciated the change in direction from where it first appeared the book was going. I've seen quite a number of reviews that enjoyed the first half of the book and were disappointed in the rest of it - I think they expected and wanted a "typical" SF novel rather than the deep character focus that Planetfall became.

>49 BrokenTune: I really enjoyed A memory called Empire. It's politics and diplomacy in a far future empire with well drawn characters, rather than high-tech space battles and aliens, so hopefully it will be a hit for you.

>49 BrokenTune: Book 2, After Atlas is set a few decades after the Pathfinder's departure. There are character connections with Pathfinder but they have not had any news of what actually happened to the mission. So, the story arc is almost completely separate in that respect. Book 3, Before Mars, is set on Mars with another cast of characters and a seemingly unrelated narrative. It's not until the end of the book that it dovetails with the ending of book 2. Atlas Alone is yet another story with a main character that was mostly a side character in book 2 now taking center stage. All of the world-building is actually part of the same structure - but the narratives are separate, providing differing viewpoints of the building of that structure. It's sort of like reading CJ Cherryh's Alliance-Union. Each book contains its own story, while references to events in other books abound.

The Sparrow is an excellent recommendation! I hope you like it. Russell, (much like Le Guin), has a background in anthropology and that comes through in the story. She doesn't really get the science right, but that's not the point. If The Sparrow works for you, it's worth reading the sequel, Children of God.

I have Song of Achilles on my Overdrive wish list but may have to pull it after reading your comments on it. I don't think I'm the right audience for a gushy romance either...

>49 BrokenTune: The group I’m in on GR read The Song of Achilles shortly after I’d just finished reading Homer’s Iliad a couple years ago. I almost joined that group read because the timing would have worked well with the material that inspired it fresh in my head, but I just wasn’t up for a romance, especially one with a sad ending that I already knew was coming.

That really is funny that you already picked up The Sparrow! I hope you enjoy it once you get a chance to try it, but would love to know what you think about it either way. A Memory Called Empire is on my list, but I’m not likely to get to it until the series is finished because I like to consume a series all in one gulp.

>49 BrokenTune: & >52 YouKneeK: I enjoyed Circe more than The Song of Achilles, though I didn't find the second one boring, I did feel it was a bit long for my tastes. I'm afraid I bailed on The Sparrow, though I may go back at some point.

Sorry all. It's been a taxing week and I haven't had much time to socialise online.

>50 Sakerfalcon: I have high hopes for A Memory Called Empire but I won't get around to it for quite some time as the next couple of months will be mostly taken up with crime and mystery books for an annual bingo book game.

The fact that Planetfall was so "not" a "typical" sci-fi book was what really impressed me about it, and is also what still motivates me to want to explore more in that genre. Not that I would really know what a "typical" sci-fi book is or if there even is such a thing. I just know that I don't enjoy books that focus on gun fights and alien overlords.

>51 ScoLgo: Thank you so much for describing the rest of the series. That gives me a good indication of what to expect. I'm still not convinced I want to rush out to get the next book (I'm not really into series...) but I will keep the series in mind for the next time that I need something intellectually stimulating with lots of character and ... just different. :)

I have read the first chapter of The Sparrow before work on Tuesday and kinda regretted doing it. I got hooked. That is a hell of a beginning. So vivid. And now I have to wait until I have time to properly read and get into the book. :(

As I said above, I've not had much time this week and won't have for the next couple of months, but I am seriously looking forward to read The Sparrow. Wow. It's starts out at the Vatican??? Why hasn't anyone told me about this???
Well, ok, I guess you all did.
Also, I really don't care if she got the science right. I wouldn't know anyway, but also the science is not what I am here for.

Re The Song of Achilles, I'm not one to talk you out of trying the book, especially if you can get it from the library and don't have to pay for it. Who knows, you might like it. However, if you know the story and you don't like reading romance, then probably not.

>52 YouKneeK: Re The Song of Achilles, knowing the story definitely works against this book. One of the questions that kept popping into my head when reading the book was whether so many people loved it "because" they didn't know the story ... or only knew the film Troy (which is kinda the same as not knowing the story). Maybe reading the story for the first time improves the book because you get to see how it all plays out?

I really don't know.

>53 clamairy: What made you abandon The Sparrow? Or would this be a spoiler?

>54 BrokenTune: I’m so glad the beginning of The Sparrow appealed to you! Regarding The Song of Achilles, I think that makes sense about one’s enjoyment being affected by whether or not the reader is already familiar with the story.

>54 BrokenTune: I actually had to go back to last year's thread in here to find out why. It looks like it was one of three books I started and abandoned in a row, which is a pretty good indication it was me and not the book. I was having some work done in my house at the time and it messed with my ability to focus. I'm glad you are enjoying it.

Sunday Update:-
Since moving away from Booklikes and finding my feet on other platforms again such as this WP blog, LibrarThing and Goodreads, I find these weekly reading updates very useful. Without them, I would find it difficult to remember what I have read in the previous week. Not all books are brilliant, and some aren't even memorable. Some books are memorable but memory of when I started or finished them may not be reliable because some books stay with me long after I have closed them.
Some books I forget almost instantly.

This week, Annie Haynes' The Bungalow Mystery was just such a book.
This was my second dip into Haynes' work and initially the book was thrilling: a doctor is called to a neighbour's house to discover that the neighbour has been killed. Then out of the blue the doctor discovers a young woman hiding behind a curtain and decides to help her make an escape. It was a thrilling start.
Unfortunately, the story then turned to a plot twist that derailed both the plot and the suspense that had started to build. The story never got on track for me. Worst of all, the solution of the story was predictable, but there was no way that the reader was given a fair chance to discover the motive that was revealed at the end. Unless of course, I missed it completely while we were chasing red herrings all over the place. That I missed it is is entirely possible. I was so bored by the middle of the story that I just wished it would end as soon as possible. Still, I believe The Bungalow Mystery was Haynes' first mystery, so it was to be expected that it would not be a polished piece of work of an experienced writer.
I still have a few of her books at hand and I will continue to explore Haynes' work. I'm intrigued to see if and how the books change over time.

I also managed to finish Mary Beard's S.P.Q.R. I've said this in previous reading updates, but I thought the book was absolutely fantastic. I love how Beard told the story of the rise of Rome not merely by listing dates and wars and the names of famous generals and consuls but also included a description of the lives of ordinary Romans, and how the political events affected the people, or didn't affect the people in some cases.

The rest of the week I focused on trying to close out other books that I had started so that I could go into this year's Halloween Bingo (starting on 1st Sept.) with as few distractions as possible.

I had started Uwe Timm's book Halbschatten a few month ago but never could get into the right mood to continue reading it. It's not an easy read. It tells the story a man who visits a graveyard in Berlin that is known to be the final resting place of mostly people associated with the military. The man meets a guide who offers to help him find the grave he is looking for: the pilot Marga von Etzdorf, the first woman hired to fly for an airline, and the first woman to fly solo across Siberia, from Germany to Tokyo, Japan, and who commited suicide under mysterious circumstances after crashing her plane in Syria in 1933.
I loved the book.
As I said, it is not an easy read, because we do not only get the story of Marga von Etzdorf, but we also get the story of the rise of Nazim, stories of the war, stories that are hard to read. However, I much appreciated what Timm did here by structuring the book as a version of Dante's Divine Comedy. So, when I finally got stuck into the book, I had to finish it in one sitting. For me, Halbschatten proved to be a perfect balance of lit fic, mystery, history, and discussion of issues. I even liked the way that Timm wrote from the women's point of view, which is not always a given.
Halbschatten was my first book by Timm and I look forward to reading more by him.

And as I still had time for another book before picking up my first Halloween Bingo book (we were allowed to pick one book as a head-start), I also read Fred Uhlman's novella Reunion, which was a perfect follow-up to Halbschatten.
Reunion tells the story of two boys who came from different backgrounds and became friends at school. However, the rise of Nazism caused a rift between them.
The novella is based on Uhlman's own life, but I am not sure whether it is entirely autobiographical.
It was Uhlman's only book, and is not well-known. It should be, tho. It was well-written, and packs a punch, even for someone who has read many similar stories.
When reading the novella, I was reminded of the style of Joseph Roth (Hiob, Radetzkymarsch, etc.) which much added to my enjoyment. I was also reminded that it is this kind of forgotten writing that makes it so difficult for me to enjoy historical fiction. I think I will always prefer fiction "of its time".
I only came across Reunion on Saturday night when Ali Smith talked about the book, or rather the author, in her interview event at the Edinburgh Book Festival this year. Uhlman's story was one of the stories that Smith incorporated into her latest book, Summer. Summer, much like the rest of Smith's Seasonal Quartet is also very much fiction "of its time", of our time.

And this is it. Most of my books for the next two months will be titles that I pick for our annual Halloween Bingo game.

Reviews posted this week (on my WP blog):
None.

My latest Mt. TBR Project update is now on my WP blog.

>54 BrokenTune: I've loathed Achilles ever since struggling to get into The Iliad, and having now read Silence of the girls I don't think I can read a whole novel about him! So thank you for the warning!

>59 Sakerfalcon: Ironically, Miller's portrayal of Achilles as a character is the most likable out of the three books (Iliad, Silence of the Girls, Song of Achilles) but it's still not worth slogging through the entire book for that aspect. (Btw, I'm not a fan of Achilles either.)

>59 Sakerfalcon: >60 BrokenTune:
On the heel of the hunt there is something here about this character showing a little weakness.

An update on my last summer book haul is now on my WP blog.

>61 pgmcc: Did whoever coined the phrase "a complete heel" have this gentleman in mind, I wonder?

Sunday Update:-
Writing this update at the end of the first week of September can only mean one thing: This update will be full of comments on books I chose for Halloween Bingo, a game played with a group of friends over on GR (since Booklikes conked out).

And so it is! I started this year’s Halloween Bingo game with a book that has been lingering on my shelves for quite a while: Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth, which is a retelling of the play as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series. I’m reading the Hogarth series as part of my Will’s World project, and so far the re-tellings have been on varying quality. Macbeth was at the bottom end of the range. Instead of spending more time reminiscing about that particular reading experience here, I wrote an actual review of it (on my WP blog - link at the end).

NEXT!

My second pick for the Halloween Bingo was John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, a classic locked-room mystery that is widely held as one of the finest of its genre.
What struck me first about the story is that it seemed to have been written in a style that aimed at emulating that of the Sherlock Holmes stories, tho ironically featuring a detective based on G.K. Chesterton. Or maybe Carr was trying to include as many tips of the hat to his literary heroes as he could and therefore expanding on a mystery treasure hunt of the literary kind. It would certainly explain why he felt the need to include the chapter about locked room mysteries where the author breaks the fourth wall to have his detective deliver a lecture on it.
While the setup and self-congratulatory references may have worked for Carr’s fellow mystery writers (who seem to praise this novel much), it did not work for me.
I liked the underlying mystery and atmosphere but found the main character to be a tiresome bore who seemed to pull unknowable facts out the ether like it was nobody’s business, and I found the delivery of the story to be overly convoluted. I was relieved by the end of the book that it had ended and that it was not my first encounter with Carr. Had it been, I would think twice about picking up another of his books.

After this experience I was well and truly set for a change of tone and pace: A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok fitted another prompt of my bingo tasks.
I really liked it. I don’t even know why. Ragnarok was really short but it was very much the opposite to Nesbo’s Macbeth, and thus perhaps exactly what I needed.
I only realised it when I started the book, but Byatt wrote the book as part of the Canongate Myths series, i.e. a retelling of a myth – so very much another similarity to Macbeth which was the retelling of a Shakespeare play as part of the Hogarth series.
Where Macbeth discouraged me from looking deeper into the retelling (because it made little sense at the heart of it), Ragnarok was a slow-burning revelation of subtleties that seemed to end in the discovery that the story was not just about the end of the world that the main character, the “thin child”, lived through when she sought to escape into Norse mythology. It was also the description of another layer of destruction that lurked or rather lurks beyond the short term vision of the stories setting.
Much like Ragnarok, once things are set in motion, it is not known whether they can be stopped.
I rather liked this. I do realise, however, that Byatt’s writing – ornate and flowery – is not something I can read a lot of.

John Crow’s Devil was my last main / serious read for this week. I have been keen for some time to try Marlon James’ book but in all honesty, the subject and length of A History of Seven Killings has always put me off. However, I picked up John Crow’s Devil this summer and it may not have been a bad choice as other readers seem to say that James’ first novel suffers by comparison to his Booker Prize winner. It sounded like a great opportunity to use the book for the bingo prompts.
There is witchcraft and magical realism. There are crimes in this book. There are unexplained deaths. And people being horrible. There is a preacher who for most of the book I was not convinced was human. And a whole lot of terror, that is very insidious.

“We’re afraid.
“We’re upset.
“We’re distraught. Even more of us are confused and just about everybody is ashamed. Be truthful before the Lord, you, we are all ashamed. I know what you’re thinking. Thou shalt not kill, I know. That night is playing over and over in your head like that Devil music they keep sending over from foreign. But, beloved, I’m only going to say this once.
“WAKE UP! What do you think this is? Pin the tail on the donkey, church? This is war! “High time some of you in here get off your blessed assurance. God didn’t come here to heal the sick, He came with a sword! We’re tearing down the kingdom of Satan! We launching D-Day on the shores of Hell. We’re going into the enemy’s and taking back what he stole. Oh Abba babba a maka desh—I wish I had a God-fearing church. The Devil is not your boyfriend. Satan is not some naked red boy with a tail and a pitchfork! The Bible says he comes to steal, kill, and destroy! Is either him or us! So what’s it going to be, Gibbeah, him or us? The Devil or the saved? But the Lord says, thou shalt not kill.
“Well, church, what if I tell you that was no man that you killed?”

The last few chapters of the book were truly horrific, especially so because the events of the book are partly based on reality (tho not on specific real events) and partly based on things that could very well happen. It was a horror story of the worst kind because the reader knows that this in not entirely fictional. It was simply chilling.

I will not review this in detail or give away much of the plot because this is a book that is best read without knowing anything about it. What I do want to say, however, is that James' writing was fantastic. The patois was difficult at first but after a while I got into the rhythm of reading the dialogues and it just added to the atmosphere.

I also managed to listen to Joan Hickson’s narration of Agatha Christies’ The Thirteen Problems. This was a re-read for me and I only want to mention the book because this is another example of how much fun it is to re-read Agatha Christie’s work: I always discover new things about the stories, the characters, and Christie herself when re-reading her stories.
Just the same with The Thirteen Problems, which is the first collection of Miss Marple short stories. The stories centre around Miss Marple and her friends meeting as the Tuesday Night Club and telling each other of criminal cases. I liked it much more than on my last read of it. There were a few times that I actually laughed out loud – in equal parts because the characters were funny and in parts because I could picture Dame Agatha having fun writing these parts.

Lastly, I finished Ngaio Marsh’s book Black as He’s Painted. It was a very interesting mystery that was based on an unusual premise: post-colonial politics. There are a number of elements of the story that have not aged well, but the majority of the book has been delightful, especially the descriptions of how Lucy Locket (the featured black cat) adopted her new human.

Other reviews posted this week (on my WP blog):
Jo Nesbo: Macbeth

>64 BrokenTune: That was an excellent explanation of why I should never bother reading Jo Nesbø's Macbeth. Thank you; I think I would have had less patience than you had.

Have you read any of her usual style of crime fiction?

>64 BrokenTune: Thank you. I read the book as part of a bingo game and I was determined not to give up claiming my bingo square. LoL. Motivation comes in all forms, I expect.

I've not read any of his other books. Macbeth was my first, and to be honest, I only picked it up because of the Hogarth Shakespeare connection. After reading Nesbo's Macbeth, several friends have commented that his other books are better, and that this one was an outlier. It is not likely that I will try his other books, tho.

Have you read any of Nesbo's other work?

>64 BrokenTune: Thank you for suffering through Nesbo's Macbeth so that we don't have to. The paraphrased quote at the beginning of the review was enough to make me cringe, and your other comments didn't change my reaction to the positive.

I am glad you enjoyed Ragnarok as that is on my TBR pile.

>66 BrokenTune: None at all.

I have the impression that a lot of writers who feel the need to modernise Shakespeare simply did not fully understand the original. But this was done as a contribution to planned project.

I was listening to a radio programme yesterday on the way home, about the importance of learning how to say "No" in the workplace. It argued that not only did agreeing to do everything leave you tired and overstretched, but it also pulls you into working outside your sphere of competence, where you end up turning in substandard work. The example given was of Jane Austen politely refusing a request (which, I think, came from the direction of the Palace) to write a "royal romance", by pointing out that whilst such a theme would undoubtedly be extremely popular, and would indeed probably earn her more than her current tales of provincial life, she did not feel that she could do it justice and had better stick to writing about the spheres of society with which she was familiar.

I am getting the impression that Jo Nesbø maybe could have learnt from Jane Austen?

>68 -pilgrim-: I feel that you are entirely right about that. I wish Nesbo had taken the same approach.

Sunday Update:-
Halloween Bingo (a game I am playing with a group of friends on Goodreads) is merrily on the way and squares are coming together. No bingo yet but potential lines are starting to make an appearance. I have updated my bingo card here.
In line with my participation in the game, this week’s reading has again focused on books that responded to the tasks/categories set by the Halloween Bingo rules.

The first book I finished was Ron Rash’s Serena. I had high hopes. The book had been on my TBR for years (way before the film – and I haven’t watched the film (not a Bradley fan)) and came highly recommended by a friend with shared reading tastes. It looked promising.

Shortly after starting Serena, I already learned something: male authors too can spend a whole lot of time describing what clothes everyone is wearing.
The book was filled with seemingly endless of descriptions of clothes. Ironically, the descriptions of clothes annoyed me more than the male gaze descriptions of Serena’s body. And we only get to know her body, even tho she is the only fascinating character in the book.

“The Plotts circled and leaped, holding onto the bear with teeth and claw a few moments before falling away only to circle and leap again, the Redbones yelping and darting in to snap at the legs. Then Pemberton felt the barrel of a rifle against his side, felt its reverberation as the weapon fired. The bear staggered two steps backward. As Pemberton fell, he turned and saw Serena place a second shot just above the bear’s eyes. The creature wavered a moment, then toppled to the ground and disappeared under a moiling quilt of dogs.”

Serena had more true grit than any of the characters in Charles Portis’ classic Western True Grit. I mean, she had to be pretty badass to shoot a bear right between the eyes.

The story was slow to take off, and for the most part I enjoyed this meandering development and setup of the books crisis. I didn’t enjoy the writing, but it was – apart from the male gaze issue and the endless descriptions of clothes – not horrible.
The issue I had with the book is that when we finally do reach the point where the plot of the story turns into a Jacobean revenge tragedy, we get to know even less about our main character than we did in the first half of the book. This made the plot rather ridiculous. I ended up feeling very underwhelmed by this book. There was so much potential, but it was so underdeveloped.
For a book that plays obvious tributes to Greek tragedy and even more pointedly Shakespeare’s Macbeth, we do not get to see the tragic elements of the story at all because we do not get to see Serena’s internal workings. We don’t get to know her at all. For all the allusions to Macbeth (there are knives and bloodied hands etc.) Serena is missing the same internal conflict of the main character that Jo Nesbo skipped in his re-telling of Macbeth (which I whined about previously).
I’m really peeved by this, because much like Nesbo’s Macbeth it reduces the story to a quasi “Western” (except set in the late 1920s Smoky Mountains). It certainly has the feel of True Grit – and about the same number of snakes.
It didn’t work for me as well as the book should have. (2.5* out of 5*)

The second book I finished was Death Walks the Woods by Cyril Hare. I like Cyril Hare’s books. They are extremely cozy mystery fun that usually involves a small legal puzzle. As with Hare’s other books – Hare is one of the best finds for me to have come out of the rediscovery of Golden Age mysteries in recent years – I got sucked right into the story that centred on a small community. The story drags a little in the third quarter, but I liked the ending, which is similar in structure to another book by Hare – to say more might be too much, but let me say that Hare’s reference to famous English court cases again plays a part. (3* out of 5*)

The third and last book I finished this week was Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. I’ve started it and am looking to use it for the Classic Horror square of Halloween Bingo. First published in 1979, this just squeezed into the task’s requirements.

What an interesting book! It was not exactly my bag but I have to admire what Carter did here. I’ve come across re-tellings of fairy tales before that focused on a sexualised interpretation of fairy tales, but Carter’s work was the first that made this work for me. It certainly worked much better than one other retelling of fairy tales that I was particular reminded of (Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue). (I also thought it worked better than Highsmith’s Little Tales of Misogyny, which I found intriguing for different reasons.)
I think Carter succeeded where Donoghue didn’t because Carter’s use of language is gorgeous.
(3.5* out of 5*)

Other reviews posted this week:
None.

Sunday Update:-
Halloween Bingo is still dominating my reading and this will continue until the end of the game, or at least until I complete reading books for all of my squares.

This week I managed to read four books: Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie was a re-read in audiobook format. I really like this book and it is a joy to revisit it whenever I need to in the course of Halloween Bingo.
One thing that stands out in this book – apart from the force of nature that is Ariadne Oliver (Dame Agatha’s alter ego) – is that the actual story, the mystery, is rather a pedestrian affair.
The main aspect I enjoyed on this particular re-read was something that was also brought up in a discussion with fellow Agathytes the other day: that Christie was also a chronicler of her time. In her time, this is probably unintentional, but it does happen, I’m under the impression that her older characters bemoaning the modern times and hankering back to the old days is a way of dealing with the changes brought on by time passing. Some characters deal with it better than others, but they are all of their time.
What stands out in this one is the repeated observation about the changes in the criminal justice system and the abolition of capital punishment in Britain (it had been suspended in 1965 but was abolished in 1969 – when this book was published).

This is one of the books where the mystery is fairly predictable, but I think the context provided by the characters – be it social commentary or Shakespearean atmosphere (The Tempest drips off the page for me in this one) is marvellous.

And as I mentioned above, Ariadne Oliver is on top form:

Mrs Oliver, removing herself from the main group, leant against a vacant background of wall and held up a large yellow pumpkin, looking at it critically—’The last time I saw one of these,’ she said, sweeping back her grey hair from her prominent forehead, ‘was in the United States last year—hundreds of them. All over the house. I’ve never seen so many pumpkins. As a matter of fact,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘I’ve never really known the difference between a pumpkin and a vegetable marrow. What’s this one?’

What is it with Christie and vegetable marrows? Anyway, …

My second book this week was another slow read: Benighted by J.B. Priestly was advertised as a haunted house story, but having read the book, I feel this is underselling the story. It is a spooky haunted house story but it also is novel about psychology, trauma, personal conflict, and other life issues that that the characters in this book are trying to deal with as best they can. I was very much reminded of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House when reading Benighted, but I have to say that I ultimately prefer Priestley’s work.
Whichever way I look at it tho, both books are somewhat sold short by their respective screen and tv adaptations.
5* (out of 5*)

The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding.
Written in 1947, this was one of the most unusual Crime Noir stories that I have read, and probably one of the best because it was so different. Crime Noir is not a genre I enjoy much. The books I have tried in the genre seemed to have been full of macho dumbassery and ridiculous plots that I found hard to get invested in, and where I did make it through the books, I mostly remember wishing the that main characters would come to a bad end, and soon.
While The Blank Wall also included a very ridiculous plot, the more I read of the book, the more it became clear that the actual events that set the story off were merely a catalyst for the other, more important, part of the book: the character development of our “housewife” MC Lucia and her family. I was thrilled to read passages that contemplated Lucia’s own life such as this one:

“Why is it “housewife”? What should I call myself if we lived in a hotel? Nobody ever just puts down “wife,” or even just “mother.” If you haven’t got a job, and you don’t keep house, then you aren’t anything apparently. I wish I was something else. I mean, besides keeping house, I wish I was a designer, for instance. The children would think a lot more of me, if I was a designer. Maybe Tom would, too.”

These are depths of thought that I have not seen in any of the book’s contemporaries, and I loved how Sanxay Holding used the crime story to subversively introduce the opportunity for the reader to choose a completely different way of reading the book – it works as a crime caper, but it also works as a character study in a specific social context.
What also made me laugh at the end of the book is that the whole premise of the crime caper is something that truly only took off because Lucia behaves just as her teenage daughter predicts. To say more would be a spoiler, but I would say that the ending in all its subtlety shifts the focus of the book from the very question that starts off the story and this made me laugh.
(4* out of 5*)

Lastly, I read a first book in a new-to-me series by a new-to-me author: The Religious Body by Catherine Aird. This is a pretty straight-forward mystery story telling of the murder of a nun in a convent. The book was written in 1966 but it very much reads like a modernised version of a Golden Age murder mystery and I loved it for this. There was a lot of humour in this story, not least in the characters of the nuns and the police officers, and I already look forward to reading more in this series – The Calleshire Chronicles.
(4* out of 5*)

Other reviews posted this week:
None.

I read and enjoyed The blank wall last year. I'm not a big fan of crime writing or noir, but this was a really good read, perhaps because of what you note as the subversive opportunity for social commentary.

>73 Sakerfalcon: I'm not a great fan of noir crime thrillers either. But, yeah, this was different. Apparently, Raymond Chandler was quite a fan of Sanxay Holding.

>72 BrokenTune: J B Priestley is an interesting choice. I don't think he is much read now but his play An Inspector Calls had a very good run in London a while back. I have some of his essays and he tends to come across as a grumpy old Yorkshireman (which he recognised—his best book of essays is called Delight and was intended as an attempt to revise that image). I liked his late novel Found, Lost, Found which might actually be the kind of fluff that I seem to need at present.

>75 haydninvienna: I remember An Inspector Calls as the first "adult" play that I went to see (as opposed to theatre intended specifically for children). It made a great impression. The 1954 film (An Inspector Calls) had to simplify some of the nuances of the plot, of course, but Alastair Sim's performance was such that it is now his face that I envision whenever I recall the play.

>76 -pilgrim-: I remember Alastair Sim as Mr Justice Swallow in the TV series of A P Herbert’s Misleading Cases.

>77 haydninvienna: That looks like something to look out for. BBC or ITV? If the latter, I fear it may be gone for good.

>78 -pilgrim-: BBC. What, you’ve never seen it? Roy Dotrice as Albert Haddock writing a cheque on the side of a cow? You must rectify this grave oversight as soon as possible. There are some audio-only versions on YouTube, but here’s a tiny clip, with introduction by Frank Muir: https://youtu.be/uAQgWiNPpBw.

ETA The episodes may still be available somewhere in the BBC system, but I can’t get into iPlayer from here.

EATA sorry, but the little clip is all that’s left, according to Christopher Fowler: http://www.christopherfowler.co.uk/blog/2016/09/07/lost-the-misleading-cases/. (I actually have Fowler’s The Book of Forgotten Authors, and disagree that A P Herbert is forgotten.

>79 haydninvienna: Drat! That did look fun. And the book shops no signs of a re-issue either...

I agree with you that A. P. Herbert is not forgotten. The name was instantly familiar, although I suspect possibly from his song lyrics.

>75 haydninvienna: and >76 -pilgrim-: An Inspector Calls was my introduction to Priestley, too. I managed to see a performance of it in London around 2009(?)ish, and I enjoyed it very much. I've only last year come around to seeking out some of his other works, and only came to Benighted because Valancourt Books published a new edition. I have a few more of his works (Lost Empires, Time and the Conways, and The Magicians) that I am hoping to get to next year.

Sunday Update:-

This was the 4th week of Halloween Bingo and it is still a lot of fun. Again, as the game will continue until the end of October, or at least until I complete reading books for all of my squares, my reading will mostly focus on books that respond to the bingo tasks.

Most of this week – the working week part – has been insanely busy, so reading or listening to an audiobook during the day was out of the question, but what time I had for reading outside of work hours was dedicated to three truly splendid books:

My first book was a re-read of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Views the Body, a collection of short stories featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. The stories were first published in 1928 but some were written as early as 1921 (“The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran”), i.e. even before the publication of Whose Body? (1923). I think it shows in the quality of the stories, but then I am somewhat harsh in my assessment here because I am comparing Sayers’ early stories to the mastery of Sayers’ later stories. And that is just a very high bar to meet. Anyway, I managed to jot down a few thoughts about the stories on my WP blog.

My second main read this week was Caitlin Davies’ Bad Girls: A History of Rebels and Renegades, which focused on the history of Holloway Prison, some of his inmates, and the changing attitudes to women’s incarceration in the UK.
When I started the book, it had all the hallmarks of a 5* read for me. HOWEVER, … the information that Davies presents as fact about the Finchley Baby Farmers is entirely different to the information that I am familiar with about the case and – after a short Google-fu episode – also doesn’t tie up with the information that is available on the net.
Now, I know that Wikipedia cannot be trusted, but I found Davies’ portrayal of the story of Sach and Walters to be unreliable because she maintained that the women were convicted because of the death of only one child whereas the description of the trial indicates that there was evidence to suggest the number of victims may have been closer to twenty.
There is a definite disconnect here and it irked me.
I also was not convinced by the referencing, or rather lack of. There is referencing, but for example, not a lot of sources are cited for the chapter on the Finchley Baby Farmers.
Still, despite my misgivings, I ended up thoroughly engrossed in the book. There was an aspect to it that I much appreciated, and which reminded me of Caroline Criado Perez’ book Invisible Women: that women’s prisons were largely designed around the management of male prisoners. I hope to write a more in-depth review of the book later but I can already say that apart from my initial disappointment (and the resulting doubts about the veracity of some of the facts in the book) I would very much recommend the book for some of the questions it raises and for a general history of Holloway Prison, the Suffragettes, and some of the most notable criminal cases in England involving women.

Lastly, I finished Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley Under Ground earlier today. This has been a much-anticipated and much-loved buddy read as part of the Halloween Bingo game.
I love Highsmith’s work and there are not a lot of her titles left for me to discover. However, I had so far stayed away from the Ripley sequels after accidentally picking up the last in the series (The Boy Who Followed Ripley) and very much regretting it.
I won’t say too much about Ripley Under Ground as I also hope to write a more comprehensive review next week, but I can say that I enjoyed the book for Highsmith’s writing, her sense of irony, and for some of the characters, even tho the plot of this one was … full of questionable turns.

Other reviews posted this week (on my WP blog):
Michael Gilbert: Death Has Deep Roots

>76 -pilgrim-: & >75 haydninvienna:

I really enjoyed reading An Inspector Calls and I love Alastair Sims in general, but loved him in the film of An Inspector Calls.

I don't have anything to add but I hate seeing that tombstone in the Talk list.

I didn't mind the Ripley sequels. Weren't they written far after the first? I think that might account for differences in tone, pacing, character, etc. And I think Ripley himself 'aged' during that time and so Highsmith changed him as would make sense. My favorite is Ripley's Game.

>85 haydninvienna: Good call!

>82 BrokenTune: I´m so with you about the questionable turns in Ripley Under Ground. I´m still not sure why Ripley did all the things he was doing in that book. But I have to give Highsmith credit for one particular thing: I´m dying to read the next book in the series. We won´t wait till next years Halloween Bingo to read the sequel, won´t we?
And thank you for once again buddy reading a Highsmith with me :D

>88 Lille_lara: Reading Highsmith with friends is way more fun than experiencing her mad characters alone and trying to explain them to people.

I also hope we'll get to the next book way before the next HW Bingo. My Everyman's Library edition has Ripley's Game in it, so I am good to go whenever you need that next Highsmith fix. ;)

My latest Mt. TBR Project update is now on my WP blog.

Oh, no. I forgot to post my weekly reading update here.

Tuesday Reading Update:

Most of this week – the working week part – has again been insanely busy, so I had little time for finishing books. However, a spell of bad weather meant that I could make up for my missed reading time this weekend.

All in all, this has been an excellent reading week, packed with new-to-me authors that I already know I want to read more of, as well as some solid offerings from authors that I already love.

My first pick was Gladys Mitchell’s Laurels are Poison (1942). This is book # 14 in the Mrs. Bradley series. Some may be familiar with the tv adaptation of The Mrs Bradley Mysteries of the same title (starring the glorious Diana Rigg), but sadly the tv series has nothing in common with the original title by Mitchell. Laurels are Poison is set at a training college, where one of the wardens has disappeared and a lot of strange goings on have led to a lot of discontent.

This was an odd book, but I really liked it. Had it not been for one aspect that made no sense and that offended my 21st-century sensibilities, Laurels are Poison would have been a solid 4* offering. Mrs Bradley is on top form, but she is absolutely up-staged by the young woman, who will join the series later as her assistant.

Death in Fancy Dress (1933) took me most of the week to finish, partly because I had little time to read in the evenings, and partly because I very much enjoyed spending time in the story and with the characters.

This was not my first book by the author, but it was my first one written under the Anthony Gilbert pen name. Lucy Malleson also wrote under the name Anne Meredith and her book Portrait of a Murderer was one of my reading highlights in the run-up to Christmas in 2018. It was an odd story in some ways, but I really, really liked it. The reveal and conclusion felt a little abrupt, but I loved the setup and the underlying story, and most of the characters.
I felt there was a John Dickson Carr feel to the story, but it was executed so much better than anything I have read by Carr. I also loved that parts of the story reminded me of a favourite Sherlock Holmes story involving a master criminal of the worst kind, and I do not mean Moriarty. However, to say more would be a spoiler.
There was also something that puzzled me about the writing: Tony and Jeremy, the two main characters who could have walked in right out of a Wodehouse novel, had some very odd ideas about women, and for parts of the story it was really confusing me that a woman writer using a male pen name wrote some dialogues which have male characters talk in stereotypes about women. It was just really, really odd. Mind you, the male characters in question are also stereotypes.

The book redeemed itself, tho. There is a female main character, Hilary, who cracked me up. She was a delight to read about and, even more, to follow in dialogues with other characters. For example, her interview with the coroner made me laugh out loud :

“You were on intimate terms, I think, with Sir Ralph Feltham?” he began without preamble.
“He was my cousin.”
“And there were times when you contemplated marrying him?”
Hilary said sweetly, “There are times when one contemplates marrying anything, one’s so bored.”
“But he was in earnest, even if you were not.”
“Of course he was. Men are.”
“And ladies are usually flippant?”
“I don’t know about that. It depends on how keen they are, I suppose. But it stands to reason a man doesn’t talk about getting married unless he’s serious, because he might be taken seriously, and think what fix he’s be in then.”

I already look forward to reading more by Anthony Gilbert.

The next new-to-me author I encountered this week was Margaret Millar. Her book Beast in View (1955) had been recommended to me some time ago but I had put off reading it because I thought it would be similar to other books in the hard-boiled detective story genre. I had previously read The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, and none of these worked for me. So, imagine my surprise when I instantly clicked with Millar’s story. Maybe it was that the story managed to create a level of suspense from the first page, but I was gripped from very early on and I finished the book the same day.

Maybe women noir writers were just so much more interested in characters and dark and twisted psychology than their male counterparts? Or rather, at least the ones I’ve read?
I’m open to being convinced that there is some worthwhile classic noir out there, but so far the Hammets and Chandlers are not what works for me. Also, step aside Dorothy B. Hughes!

Despite my excitement, the book was not perfect. It had problems…but given the 1950s publication date this was to be expected. In a way, I commend Millar for including some of these “aspects” even if they now read dated, such as the portrayal of LGBT characters and the description of mental health conditions. I much rather see these “aspects” portrayed in book in a well-meaning way than have them erased out or used as a cliche.

Anyway, Millar will be my new go-to author for gripping noir.

Yesterday I finished The Stately Home Murder by Catherine Aird, which was a charming instalment in the Callashire Chronicles.

I liked it. I liked it a lot. The tone was the same as in The Religious Body – humourous and in the style of a Golden Age mystery (even though the setting is in the late 60s/early 70s), with the odd tip of a hat to actual Golden Age mysteries. In this one, someone leaves a body in the library and the Inspector draws the obvious parallels.

This is only my second book by the author but Aird will be an author I will read more by. The tone of narration is worth it. It is absolute comfort reading, even if the plots are not particularly twisted.

“Like Miss Mavis Palmer and her young man, Bernard, she came from Paradise Row, Luston. Any student of industrial philanthropy would immediately recognize this as a particularly grimy part of that particularly grimy town. By some Victorian quirk of self-righteousness the street names there varied in inverse proportion to their amenity.”


Lastly, I finished my re-read of Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It is very hard to believe that this book was published 100 years ago this month. It is such an iconic book and, of course, it is the book that started Christie’s famous Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot. Even for this alone, I recommend the book to anyone who has ever wondered about Christie’s writing. However, I do so with the following words of caution:

This was her first novel, and let’s just say that it is good (certainly better than many other author’s first novels), but it is nowhere near at the level of quality as her later books.
On my fourth (?) re-read, I still do not love the book as much as the later ones, but I loved it more than when I first read it. Apart from the mystery, which is not a favourite of mine in this book, the book thrives on the interaction between Hastings and Poirot. It is worth reading for this alone. Also, readers should not be put off by Hastings’ behaving like a puppy. It is a recurring joke in the series and there is a point to it once one gets to know Hastings as a character.

>91 BrokenTune: I enjoy the Mrs Bradley mysteries a lot (the books; never seen the TV series). I like that Mitchell tends to spend a lot of time building up to the actual crime so that you really know the characters and what is at stake when it finally happens. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley is such a great character too. But I do have to try and overlook some of the more dated attitudes that sometimes appear.

>92 Sakerfalcon: I enjoy the books, too, by and large. Usually, I am able to take comments of their time for what they are, but in this book I found one really jarring. It really irked me because there was no call for the character to even be included other than to poke fun at a stereotype. It just didn't work and for me it detracted from the book in this instance.

I do know what you mean about Mitchell setting the scene and letting the reader get to know the characters. It is a lot of fun to picture each character and then see what happens.

Sunday Update:-

In Halloween Bingo news, I have two causes for celebration:
1. I was able to call my first bingo this week!
2. I finished my last book for the game and blacked out my card yesterday, and I could not have picked a better book to do it, even if it was a re-read.
That means, that I will be able to read a bit more widely than I have in the last 6 weeks.

As for the books I managed to read this week, most of them have been re-reads. Half of them have been favourites of mine for a while.
Most of them have been fantastic.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938) is still one of the books that I regard as perfect. With every re-read, I discover something new, or manage to catch a different nuance of the writing.
In this particular re-read, I’m just really focusing on Frank Crawley for some reason. Perhaps this is as a distraction from the character of our nameless main character, who is still really annoying, silly, and so, so, … well, intriguing, because the narrative voice at the start of the book is quite changed from the childish character we get to meet at Monte.
I love this book because it defies genres and times. It is was written in 1938, and feels like it was set a decade earlier, but it also has this incredible Gothic feel to it. And, yet, one can easily imagine the central conflicts to occur in our time, too. It’s a story about glamour and about decay.
It’s both a coming-of-age story and a story of decline. It’s a mystery and a ghost story but it’s also a psychological thriller about some very, very messed up people.
I love this book.

I was also prompted by one of the Goodreads group challenges to read something by Oscar Wilde and as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) fit in with one of the Halloween Bingo tasks, I opted to revisit the book via the audiobook narrated by the wonderful Edward Petherbridge.
Oscar Wilde has long been a favourite author of mine, but I have never been able to love Dorian Gray.
The concept underlying Dorian Gray is phenomenal. And yes, I am also a big fan of Faust, which some of the main elements in Dorian Gray are based on. So, Dorian Gray should have been a better fit with me, but the truth is that I simply don’t care for Wilde’s writing in Dorian Gray.
Wilde’s witticisms work best in pieces that heavily rely on dialogue and short exchanges. His plays are perfect as a mode of communicating this particular art-form of his. However, in the novel format, I found the constant interjections of one-liners and puns rather annoying.

Tragedy at Law (1942) is supposed to be Cyril Hare’s best-known work. It is also the first book in his Francis Pettigrew series. However, this is the fourth book by Hare that I have read. I have thoroughly enjoyed this book.

I am hoping to write a separate review of the book shortly, so let me just say that this is not your usual Golden Age mystery, and that I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a classic whodunnit and has an interest in the English court system. Cyril Hare was a lawyer and it shows in his writing. It is an element that I find hugely entertaining in his novels. (4.5* out of 5*)

Lastly, I engaged in a re-read of Strong Poison (1930) by Dorothy L. Sayers as my last book for Halloween Bingo. There is little that I can or want to say about this book that has not already been said.
It is a fantastic Golden Age mystery, that even plays fair with the readers as a vital clue is already planted within the first 10 pages of the book.
But of course, we also get the story of Peter and Harriet, and we get to know more about characters that we already met in previous books. I always seem to forget that this is the book where the Hon. Freddie discloses some of his own thoughts to the reader.
And this also the book that revisits Peter’s relationship with his sister, Lady Mary, and where we get the immortal lines of:

‘My God!’ said the Duke, ‘you’re not going to marry a policewoman?’
‘Not quite,’ said Wimsey.

I love this book. It and its sequels are some very firm favourites of mine.

Other reviews posted this week (on my WP blog):
Eddie Thomas Petersen: After the Death of Ellen Keldberg

>94 BrokenTune: Two of those books are my favorites, the Sayers and Du Mauier, I recently read the Wilde book and although it isn't my favorite, it is certainly worth a read. I've yet to read the Tragedy at Law, although it has been highly recommended by at least two very trustworthy members here. :)

The last time I read Rebecca I actually found myself feeling more tolerant of the narrator. Funny how time and experience change the way you read a book.

>94 BrokenTune: Congrats on your bingo! :)

>96 YouKneeK: Thank you. I love the Halloween Bingo game, but I really struggle with feeling like I am restricted to only certain books/genres. I loved most of the books I ended up with this year (and there have been some great new discoveries), but I also really looking forward to reading something that is NOT a supernatural/horror/crime/mystery book.

Btw, is anyone else having issues with the "reply" button? It keeps eating my replies. Whereas, if I type in the ">#" myself, it seems to work fine.

>97 BrokenTune: That is a large part of the reason why I never participate in the various games/challenges, even though they often sound and look like fun. I just want to read what I want to read without having to try to meet certain criteria. I can see why people have so much fun with it though!

I actually never use the Reply button. It's only been in the past few weeks that they added the functionality to include the >#, and I've always been in the habit of just typing in a separate Word doc then copying and pasting. But this time I used the Reply option, so we'll see what happens. :) (I've copied my text from my Message box here before clicking to post it so that if it does eat it, at least all I have to do is paste to get it back!)

>98 YouKneeK: Nope, no eating took place in my case, although that was only one attempt.

>95 MrsLee: It really is odd how different characters in Rebecca come to the fore and how perception of them changes on re-reads. The narrator never used to grate on me, but the Monte, or rather the "before the fire" narrator really annoyed me on this occasion. I also noticed the shift in her tone much more on this re-read. She almost seemed to have become a copy of Rebecca in the "after the fire" parts, the way that she talked of M.

I just love that book.

If you ever pick up Tragedy at Law, the middle bit drags a bit, but it is well worth sticking with it. ;)

>99 YouKneeK: Hm. Well, I'm glad it doesn't seem to happen consistently. But I regret to have lost a few comments to this.

>101 BrokenTune: That would surely be frustrating! There is a bug report group you could check to see if anybody else has experienced that and reported it already, or else you could report it there. https://www.librarything.com/groups/bugcollectors

Even after I copy my text from Word, I usually end up editing it some here before I post it. It has long been a habit of mine from years ago when I had posts eaten on other sites that I copy the text of my post just before I post it, so that if anything happens to cause my post to get lost I have it stored in my clipboard and can just paste to get it back.

>94 BrokenTune: I read Rebecca last October and enjoyed it immensely. It was definitely one of my reading highlights for the year. What's-her-name's narrative voice didn't bother me much, but among many things, she felt herself so irrelevant to the narrative that the stark lack of reference to her own name was really quite astonishing to me. That kid seriously undervalued herself.

It's funny how before this year when I started using LT, I had never heard of Sayers and now I keep running into Lord Peter Wimsey reviews everywhere on LT. As you seem to enjoy the books, the Lord Peter Wimsey Group read might be of interest to you, even if it's just to read the discussions.

As a big fan myself of Tragedy at Law, I have to say that the legal world described there is pretty much gone now. English judges no longer travel around the country to dispense justice—that system disappeared in 1971, and the book is very much of its time and place. The best bit, IMHO, is in the last couple of pages, where Pettigrew sends a message consisting of an arcane series of letters and numbers, and its result. That's just for me though, a piece of legal nerdery.

>94 BrokenTune: Your post contains so much that I like.

I loved Rebecca and found so many things of interest. At the beginning I found her philosophising about being a different person as every moment passed relevant to something I was doing at the time of reading the book. I also felt at the end that we were being asked to empathise with someone who suppressed information about a death. The main character was a confidence void.

It is years since I read The Picture of Dorian Gray. I loved it at the time. More recently I read Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. Charles Maturin was Oscar Wilde's great-uncle by marriage and Wilde would have been familiar with his work. Wilde actually used the name "Melmoth" when he was living in France. Also, and this is the reason I mention Melmoth the Wanderer, the idea behind The Picture of Dorian Gray is in the early pages of Maturin's novel. The ageing painting and the ever-young subject is not a Wilde original. He grabbed it from Great-uncle Charlie.

Tragedy at Law is a love gentle murder mystery. It was recommended to my by GD member @jillmwo. I have also read and enjoyed Hare's When the Wind Blows and An English Murder the latter also going by the title The Christmas Murder I believe. Touchstones appears to confirm my recollection.

Dorothy L Sayers is another favourite of mine. A few years ago I read The Nine Tailors as a recommendation from someone here. I have been aware of Lord Peter Whimsy for years from the screen adaptations with Ian Carmichael but had never read any of the books. Once I read The Nine Tailors, which is also a Gothic novel which includes many allusions to M. R. James's ghost stories, I was hooked and decided to read the Lord Peter books in sequence. I have not reached Strong Poison but am looking forward to it.

Congratulations on reaching your Bingo full-house.

I've only ever used the ># way to reply, so wasn't aware that hitting the reply button was giving people issues.

>106 BookstoogeLT: The intended advantage of hitting Reply is that it puts the reply box directly below the post you’re replying to instead of at the end. So if you’re replying to a post 15 messages up from the bottom, you don’t have to scroll up to remind yourself what it said, then back down to the comment box to type, then back up, etc. I’d probably use it if I typed my replies directly in the browser, but I tend to forget it’s even there.

>101 BrokenTune: Typing my previous reply just made me think. Is it possible that your post is actually being submitted, but you're expecting it to show up where your reply box currently is (possibly a few posts above the end) and it's showing up at the end where you can't see it? I'm not 100% sure if that's how it works, but I'm typing this reply up in the reply box under post 101 now and I can't see quite the end of the thread, so I'll see what happens when I send it. :)

Edit: Yeah, this might have nothing to do with what you're seeing, but when I posted my message, there was a small yellow banner telling me my message was posted at the bottom of the topic, and I had to scroll down to see my reply.

>102 YouKneeK: & >106 BookstoogeLT: & >108 YouKneeK::

It appears the "reply" now automatically adds the ">#" for me, but as I mentioned it doesn't seem to work well as it does seem to eat my comments.
And thanks for checking but I did not expect the reply to appear underneath the original comment. I checked both locations, tho, and it still eats the comment entirely.

So, I'm back to manually adding ">" and have also taken to copying my comment before hitting "Post Message", so I can quickly try again if it does disappear into the ether.

Thanks for the link to the bug report site also. I'll make sure to check out whether other users have experienced the same. :)

>103 Majel-Susan: Did you also perceive a shift in the narrator's / second Mrs.' tone? She absolutely was a "confidence void" (as pgmcc calls it in >105 pgmcc: ) but I felt that had shifted by the end of the book and she somehow seemed to have taken some command over M..

Also, many thanks for the link to the Wimsey Group. I have to admit that these are books that I am unlikely to seek a group read for. When I re-read the series now, I usually add in cross-referencing across the series and across other Sayers works (my plan is to read her collected letters next year). I rarely read them for the "mystery" element anymore, which by the nature of groups always seems to feature more than elements that I am looking to explore.
I was glad to learn that there is a current group of fellow enthusiasts, tho. :)

>104 haydninvienna: I loved having that insight into the circuit system of yore, and I, too, delighted in the notation at the end - and I also let my inner nerd take over to rush off to browse the quotation in the All ER. And I was fascinated to find that the case was cited in several other articles - even as far afield as Canada - about statutory time bars.

The fact that Hare included similar "Easter eggs" in the other books I have read by him (except Tenant for Death, iirc), has been a one of the factors that has made me seek out more by the author.

>105 pgmcc: Thank you. :) I found some really good books through the game this year, but 2020 is an odd year and I mostly stuck to comfort reads. This was not the year to push my comfort boundaries into the horror genre.

The way that Rebecca is utterly messing with the reader is one of the things I love about it. Most of the characters are very persuasive psychopaths, including our butter-wouldn't-melt narrator.

I also share your liking of When the Wind Blows (aka The Wind Blows Death) and An English Murder. When the Wind Blows made me laugh because the squabbles between the musicians were just delightful. And An English Murder very much got my nerd-bumps up because I have an interest William Pitt (both Snr. and Jnr.). So, much like Tragedy at Law, Hare's reference to somewhat obscure trivia just really, really worked for me in that one, too.

And I love your dedication to the Wimsey series. Which book are you at? This is one series where the books just keep getting better (with the exception of The Five Red Herrings...I don't know what DLS was thinking with that one), so you have a lot to look forward to.
The Ian Carmichael series is very good, too. Tho, I prefer Edward Petherbridge as Wimsey - his Wimsey is too old, but he does portray the melancholy moments a tad better. I always find Carmichael's Wimsey a bit too cheerful, if that makes sense. However, there are pros and cons with both and overall both are very, very good.

Thanks for the background to Melmoth the Wanderer. I knew about the family connection and that Wilde used "Melmoth" as his alias, but I have not read the book (Melmoth the Wanderer, I mean) so was not aware that Maturin had used the painting twist originally.
I guess I should move the book up on my TBR. Would you recommend it for other reasons also (apart from the Wilde connection)?

Hey, I liked Five Red Herrings! Possibly to do with it introducing me to Dumfries & Galloway, one of my favourite bits of the world (and of course the site of Shaun Bythell's legendary bookshop at Wigtown.

The best bit (at the moment anyway) in all of the Wimsey stories is the cricket match in Murder Must Advertise, and specifically the moment when Wimsey, who had played for Oxford, suddenly decides that he is wearing white flannel and holding a bat, and that seeing off the oaf who is bowling bumpers at him is more important than protecting his Seekrit Identity. And just to show that Sayers knew what she was writing about, his batting partner realises that a miracle has happened and that nothing in the world is more important than letting "Bredon" have the strike for as long as possible. The second bit is the charm, when "Bredon" says "Bless you, you're a cricketer", which was a high compliment.

>114 haydninvienna: Yah, it just goes to show that there is something for most of us in these books. While I grant you that the setting of Five Red Herrings was lovely (and I had great fun reading the local characters aloud) (I'm based in Scotland, btw.), the "bicycles" drove me nuts. ;)

As for the cricket, ... Well, I'm glad you enjoyed that. This is the chapter I deliberately skip on re-reads. There is nothing at all that can make cricket appeal to me in any way. Not.Even.Bredon. ;)

>110 BrokenTune: The narrator, in Rebecca seems to grow up overnight when Maxim tells her that he hated Rebecca and she realises that she is loved after all. From there, she does become more active, filling the shoes of his wife and equal, whereas before, Maxim treats her like a bit more of a helpless child-bride and not much of a helpmate. She fills the role or the need that she sees, and so while I would agree that she does eventually take command of Maxim, who appears to have had a kind of mental breakdown, I wouldn't say that she becomes a copy of Rebecca, especially as she continues to reflect on him with much more tenderness than Rebecca would, or really that he deserved.

>116 Majel-Susan: Fair point. I've probably read too much into some of it on this re-read. But I liked wondering: if she did turn into a second Rebecca, would the realisation that he married a second Rebecca be a just punishment for M. You know, be haunted by the ghost/memory of his first wife and the reality of his second... *insert evil laugh*

>117 BrokenTune: Haha, yes, he would deserve it, but you know how they say, The first time is always the hardest... It's funny, though, reading it, I found myself gradually rooting for the de Winters to get away with it, at the same time as feeling that an injustice was happening and even pitying Mrs Danvers, whom really I seriously, seriously hated.

>118 Majel-Susan: Yes, same here! I think this is also why it is such a great book to re-read for me: you get to the point of "wait, what?" where you realise how you're being manipulated into hoping there is a happy end for them. All the while, the happy end is a nightmare. I still feel sorry for Danny, tho. She's just a pawn in everyone's game. She's utterly hateful, but I do feel a little sorry for her.

You both are making me want to reread Rebecca :)

>120 Narilka: And me!

>120 Narilka: & >121 Sakerfalcon: Well, that is just the best outcome one can hope for! :D

>113 BrokenTune:
... the Wimsey series. Which book are you at?
I am still quite early in the series. As I mentioned above I started with The Nine Tailors. I spotted the references to M. R. James stories and was intrigued by her putting those in the story. That is a tale for another day.

Then I read Murder Must Advertise. After reading that I did some research and discovered Sayers had been an advertising agent and was responsible for some very famous accounts including Guinness. It turns out she is responsible for the Toucan in Guinness ads and for many of the well known Guinness advertising slogans, such as, "Guinness is Good For You!"

At that point is started reading them in what I believed to be publication sequence starting with Whose Body? and following on with Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Strong Poison and Five Red Herrings. I have not read the short stories yet. :-(

I am not familiar with the series featuring Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter.

You mentioned your interest in Cyril Hare's referring to topics in the passing. I have to admit I did not get many of Hare's references, but I love Sayers's books for the same reason. She is doing so much more than telling a story; she is having fun hiding references in the text.

The piece of work she was proudest of was her translation of Dante's Inferno. In his book Mouse or Rat: Translation as negotiation Umberto Eco referred to it as one of the best translations of the work.

If you are going to read Melmoth the Wanderer prepare yourself for a long read. I loved it for many reasons but I recognise that Maturin does labour a point and the book would not have been damaged by a bit more editing. It was not that he was long winded but that he tended to give three or four examples to make a point when one would suffice. I was wondering if he was hoping to sell it as a serialised story and the word count would extend its run thus giving him more money.

I was fascinated with book for the following reasons:

It has many aspects that reflect the geo-political context of the time and the place it was written, Dublin.

It was published in 1820, just 22 years after the 1798 Rising. Maturin and his audience were members of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and the 1798 Rising would have been very much on their mind. While the Rising failed it did leave a sense that another rising could happen. Melmoth the Wanderer, like Matthew Lewis's The Monk published in 1796, was one of a number of Gothic books of the time that demonised the Catholic Church, in particular the Catholic Church in Spain. These books tended to demonise the Spanish Catholic Church. By proxy, Maturin was criticising Catholicism in Ireland.

Maturin was a Church of Ireland minister. He was, apparently a great orator and his church was packed when he gave his sermons. There is a series of sermons (which are all readily available on-line) entitled, Five Sermons on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church. This type of polemic would have very much satisfied his congregations and also his Clerical superiors. (More on this under his personal circumstances.)

Maturin's circumstances have a great influence on the story

Maturin had been writing Gothic stories and plays under a pseudonym and had quite a success selling one of his plays to a London theatre that performed it and paid him the princely sum of £1,000. Maturin had been using his pen name to keep it from his Church of Ireland superiors that he was writing Gothic tales. He knew they would not consider his writings to be suitable material to have been written by a cleric of the Church of Ireland. Unfortunately for Maturin he had to use his real name when cashing his earnings from his play.

He had been right about the hierarchy not smiling on his hobby and this resulted in his never rising above the rank of curate and having a limited income from his clerical duties.

Further misfortune was to befall him. His father, who worked in the General Post Office, was accused and found guilty of theft leading to his imprisonment and the support of Charles Maturin's father's household falling on him. As it turned out, the case against his father was found to be inaccurate and the real culprit was apprehended, but Maturin's father had spent some years in prison before he was released and re-instated in his job.

At the same time, a friend of Maturin's asked him to guarantee a loan. The load was defaulted and Maturin had to pay the debt. Between this debt, supporting his own family, his siblings and his mother, the £1,000 disappeared and was no great benefit to Charles himself. This left him dependent on the annual stipend of £10 a year from his curate's position.

Ironically, his hobby of writing Gothic stories got him into trouble with his Church masters which put him in an impecunious position which led him to write more Gothic stories in order to earn money to support his family.

As any writer will tell you, income from writing, unless you are J. K. Rowling, Stephen King, Dan Brown, or the Late Terry Pratchett, is not a totally reliable source of finance. For this reason Maturin still needed the security of his curate's position and I believe his hard hitting sermons were part of his efforts to placate his superiors and appear a fervent advocate of the Church of Ireland and its superiority over the Church of Rome. I think this is also a reason why his novel demonises the Catholic Church.

Maturin, according all accounts, was a Calvinist, i.e. he was quite the puritan. It is well known, however, that he loved parties and dancing, which does not sound very Calvinistic. In addition, he married the leading singer of the time in Dublin. I suspect he may not have been as Calvinistic as he would like people to believe, but that once again, he had to portray that image in his clerical work, and in his writings, to make his position as curate as secure as possible. It is no secret that he was in severe financial difficulties and was desperate to support his family.

I can see many examples in Melmoth the Wanderer where Maturin is subversively criticising the members of The Church of Ireland by proxy through members of the Roman Catholic Church, demonising the Catholic Church to appeal to his readers, and putting forward theological arguments that his superiors would consider heretical, but being careful enough to put them into the mouth of his evil character so that he could claim these were not his views but the hypothetical views of the villain.

I have probably said enough, but as you can see there is enough in the book, its historic context, and Maturin's own struggles, to make the book fascinating to me. Someone once said it is impossible to find a book that is not is some way intertwined with the life and times of the author. As you can see, I would very much support that idea in relation to Melmoth the Wanderer.

Apologies for rambling on. I hope if you read the book you enjoy it as much as I did.

> 123 Thank you for expanded comment on Melmoth etc. That was very interesting background to the book and to Maturin. It certainly helped to move the book up my TBR. I much appreciated the comparison to The Monk as this is another book that I enjoyed.

By coincidence, you were the second person this week to mention Eco's Mouse or Rat. A friend on GR mentioned it also, but not in the context of Sayers. And if I remember correctly (I read the book when I was at uni, so quite some time ago now), Mouse or Rat included one essay that cited fabulous examples of how Babelfish got translations quite wrong. Was this in the same essay as the reference to Sayers? I read it before my Sayers exploits so can't remember.
Dorothy was indeed proudest of her translation of Dante, and I was delighted to see a couple of years ago that her translation is still widely available. I just haven't gotten around to cracking them open, yet. My first read of Dante was not a pleasant experience. Still, as a Sayers fan I felt the need to revisit them at some point.

Once you get to Strong Poison, your knowledge of the Guinness connection with probably make you smile within the first few pages, as she actually includes the slogan in the book ... and the circumstances in which she does make it a little ironic. :)

>124 BrokenTune:
Eco refers to Sayers's translation of Dante in the essay on "From Rewording to Translating Substance", the sixth in the book.

included one essay that cited fabulous examples of how Babelfish got translations quite wrong.

Babelfih's errors were in the first essay called "The Plants of Shakespeare. He was giving the Babelfish examples when discussing the success, or otherwise, of automated translation.

Some thoughts about 2021 reading:
Is it too early? – 2021 Reading Plans

>126 BrokenTune: Were there supposed to be words with that link, or does the picture encapsulate all the thoughts? :)

>127 YouKneeK: LoL. In a way, the picture does encapsulate many of the plans...but there should have been words. Thanks for letting me know. I think it is now fixed.

>127 YouKneeK: Btw, my copy of the Chaucer has arrived. I'll probably be able to make a start next week. :)

>128 BrokenTune: Haha, thanks, I enjoyed reading the words portion of the post too! And nope, definitely not too early for 2021 reading plans. :) I keep a running schedule of tentative reading plans that go at least a few months out. I’m currently out to about summer of next year.

>129 BrokenTune: Oh, wonderful, I can’t wait to read your impressions of it! :)

Sunday Update:-

This will be a very brief reading update: After finishing my last read for Halloween Bingo, I took a couple of days off from reading and then read at a very leisurely pace for the rest of the week. I would not call it a slump as such, but I just feel like I wanted a change from mainly plot-driven mysteries.

I only finished one novel this week and it was part of a Goodreads group read: The Chinese Orange Mystery by Ellery Queen (1934), was my first taste of American pseudo-author Ellery Queen, who seems to have been renowned for writing mysteries with a leaning towards the hard-boiled police drama.
In this story, Ellery Queen, who is also the main character of the series, is called to solve a mystery involving a body found wearing his clothes back to front.
I did not enjoy this book at all, but it did give me pause to examine why I struggled with the book. I added a link to my review below.

The second book I finished was Carol Ann Duffy’s collection Sincerity (2019). This was the last collection of poetry that Duffy published in her role as Poet Laureate, and having finished the collection in only a few sittings, I got the feeling that she wanted to take the opportunity to clear the air about certain subjects. Parting shots, so to speak.
I loved it.
Of course, not all poems spoke to me, not all were accessible to me, but those that were packed a punch.

One of the most powerful ones was her poem A Formal Complaint, which also seems to have resonated with Mike. I hope he won’t mind that I add a link here to his blog post that includes the text of the poem.

Lastly, I also finished Zadie Smith’s Feel Free: Essays, which was my first read of Smith’s work. I really, really enjoyed her essays, but not so much her art criticism. This collection includes both.
The essays included in this collection were written a few years ago and now feel curiously dated in places, which is more of a sign of the speed at which the world around us changes than a sign that there is a lack of applicability in Smith’s writing.

I particularly enjoyed the essay about Justin Bieber and philosopher Martin Buber (the title of the essay is “Meet Justin Bieber!”), in which she explores the meaning of “meetings” and the way that identity is both shaped and reflected in meeting others.
This was not the only essay I enjoyed, tho. There are so, so many of them that I finished the book this morning (I started it just before Halloween Bingo) with a slight regret that I have left it so long to pick up anything by Smith.
I definitely want to read more by her.

“We were free! In memory, freedom is obvious. In the present moment it’s harder to appreciate, or recognize as a form of responsibility.” - from the essay “The Shadow of Ideas”

Other reviews posted this week (on my WP blog):
Ellery Queen: The Chinese Orange Mystery

>131 BrokenTune: I recently re-read a few of my old Ellery Queen mysteries, and turfed the lot of them. They hadn't aged well at all. I read your review and agree with your points. Also the sexism and racism (although EQ wasn't as bad as some from that era) and the complete lack of series continuity was annoying.

>132 tardis: LoL. I had noticed that there were some comments in this one about one of the female characters' cleavage, and those comments were not contributing anything to the plot. I guess by the time I finished the book, I didn't even care anymore.

So you turfed the lot?

Are there any that you might recommend that might be better than others?

Honestly, I am in no rush to try another but this series seems to be hugely loved and successful by many, so I still have that niggling feeling that I might be missing something.

>133 BrokenTune: I only had 5 or 6 EQ books. My notes (not really reviews) are somewhere in my reading thread, but I wouldn't waste your time. You'd be far better to write off EQ and go with Rex Stout - better mysteries, better characters. Wolfe's vocabulary is also large, but the reader just follow's Archie's lead and finds a dictionary :)

>131 BrokenTune: I didn´t dislike The Chinese Orange Mystery as much as you did, BT. But I didn´t love it either. Throughout the whole book I kept asking myself why the father doesn´t tell his son to shut up. I´m not a big fan of father/son combos in mysteries.

I tend to struggle with almost all of the American "golden age"/"noir" mystery writers. James M. Cain, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Dashiell Hammett ... not really impressed by those authors. I have to say, though, that I really enjoyed the Perry Mason novel I have read recently.

Hi BT,

I only discovered LT Threads today and yours was at the top of my list. I've been spending my time here tidying up my library, which had a slightly messy transfer from GR so i haven't get to grips with the social side of LT yet. Now I have to figure out how to set up a thread and see who else is around here.

BTW - I saw you comments on American Golden Age noir. Have you read much Chandler? It seemed to me that he had style and self-awareness.

> 130 Oh, that is a really interesting way to plan your reading too. And the "tentative" aspect allows you to change things according to mood, too. I like it.

>134 tardis: Thanks for the recommendation. I've not tried Rex Stout but have been wondering if his stories are close to the old tv series. If they are, then they will probably not work for me either.
I am encouraged to hear that Stout endowed Woolf with the ability to use a more complex vocabulary. It will make a great change from The Chinese Orange Mystery.

> 135 I seem to have the same issue with most American "golden age"/"noir" mystery writers, which was also why I was delighted to have liked The Beast in View by Margaret Millar so much recently.
I shall add Perry Mason to my list. :)

>136 MikeFinnFiction: Hi Mike. I'm glad you found us. :) I like the thread system here on LT (even if it is not as great as the BL dash) but I find it difficult to find people's threads. I.e. there is no link on the LT member's profile that links to their threads (unless they add the link themselves in their profile description).

I'm sure I've read The Big Sleep but haven't felt the wish to pick up more. That was a long time ago, tho. Maybe I should give Chandler another shot.

>140 BrokenTune: Oh yes, Millar is excellent as well. I actually forgot about her :)

>141 BrokenTune: If it helps, the Green Dragon has a wiki where people can add links to their threads. It will only display GD members though, not people who might have similar threads in a different group.

Plus it’s something we each do ourselves, so not everybody might be on there if they're a newer member who isn't aware of it yet. I just added you on there to give you a starting point. I forget the wiki is even there to be honest, usually until somebody mentions it around the beginning of the year so we can all update our links.

>141 BrokenTune: See, that is something that would be really handy to know about when first joining LT, and that would be really handy for non-GD threads, too.

Thanks for adding me. I'll make sure to keep it updated. :)

Another thought on finding threads for people who are in other groups is that you could use the “Search LibraryThing” box in the top right corner of the screen. It searches everything, including Talk, not just books. There are a couple “gotchas” to using this method though:

• This will only work if the person used a name you’re familiar with in their thread title. Some people use their real life name rather than their LT user name.


• You'll have trouble if they didn't type their user name the way you expect. I first tried searching for “BrokenTune” and was confused when I didn’t find your thread. Then I realized you had an extra ‘s’ before the apostrophe, not just after it: BrokenTunes's. Searching for BrokenTunes does work.

So for example:
1. Search for BrokenTunes in the top-right corner.


2. The left-hand menu lists all the many areas of LT you can look at for your search results. In this example, you’d want to look under the Social section and select “Talk”.


3. And your thread will show up in the result list.


If by chance you were searching for a name that had a lot of results because it’s found in several messages too, you could further refine your search by selecting “Topics” under Talk on the left menu bar. This limits the results to only those with the search word in the topic title.

>145 YouKneeK: Neat! Thank you!

>139 BrokenTune: I guess it depends on which old Nero Wolfe tv series you mean :) The one starring Timothy Hutton as Archie is probably the closest to the books. I'm fond of that one. On the whole, though, I suspect few tv series do the books justice.

>126 BrokenTune: You have some interesting reading plans! I like that you explore such a wide range of topics, periods and authors, something I should try to do myself. I really enjoyed The waves when I read it a couple of years ago. I too hope to read more Stella Gibbons next year, because I own several unread books by her and because Furrowed Middlebrow are going to reprint some of her harder-to-find titles in January. See here

>139 BrokenTune: It was the Timothy Hutton adaptation I was thinking of. It's good to know that it is close to the books as that gives me an idea of what to expect. However, there's nothing like reading the actual book(s) to find out. :)

>148 Sakerfalcon: Thank you. I saw the Furrowed Middlebrow/DSP editions when I stocked up on Gibbons a few days ago after finishing Starlight. Which Gibbons titles are you looking to read next year? Starlight and Cold Comfort Farm are the only books I have read by her (so far), are there any others that you would recommend?

Reading update - The Canterbury Tales - p.26/504:
That was a fine Prologue. I got sucked right in. BUT...I'm still debating whether I am disappointed that the Penguin edition I bought is a translation into modern English.

>151 BrokenTune: It sounds like having a modern edition is at least making a difference in readability! I read half of the prologue, shook my head in confusion, and started over from the beginning again. :) I understood what was going on, but I had a lot of trouble retaining all the characteristics we were given about the different pilgrims while also trying to get used to reading the language. I was frustrated by my inability to remember more of the details, something I usually do better with in a normal prose book. I started following things much better when the first tale started. It helped that it was a very simplistic tale, easy to follow while I got used to the language.

I can see some advantages to reading it in the modern English for the first time. If I’d thought there was any true possibility that I’d be willing to read it more than once, I might have read it in a modern version the first time and the original middle English the second time. But I rarely even read books I like twice. :) I do wonder though if some of the shock value that some of the stories have will be muted, or even censored, in a more modern version. I think part of the shock for me was simply due to the language. There I was reading along in this archaic language, and suddenly I was reading about things I never expected to be reading about! The first time it happened I did a major double-take and re-read the passage, thinking I had surely misunderstood.

>113 BrokenTune: I am still catching up, after regaining Internet access!

I always took Carmichael's cheerfulness as part of Wimsey's "Bertie Wooster" act. It seemed to have the brittle, slightly forced quality of the man with PTSD who is assuring the world that he is "quite alright, no, nothing wrong with me at all".

>123 pgmcc: You have made me bump Melmoth the Wanderer up my TBR pile. I had not been feeling much like reading the Gothic recently, but you are drawing me in...

>154 -pilgrim-: T'is the season!

Bwahahahahahahahahaah...

>151 BrokenTune: I ended up finding a cheap kindle version of the original text so I can have them side by side. It' is working well this way. The original language is pretty fab, but so much more demanding. I'm rather glad to have the modern translation as an option.

If there are any passages that you are curious about seeing in modern translation, let me know what they are. I'm sure I can look them up and share.

>153 -pilgrim-: I know what you mean about the Bertie Wooster act. I think that works better tho if one has read the books and knows it is an act. I just never felt the tv series showed the gloomier side to Wimsey, so it isn't as obvious that it is an act. (The Edward Petherbridge/Harriet Walter episodes included the gloomier sides, and I much admire them for it, even if they kind of short-changed Gaudy Night.) The gloomier side is certainly in the books, tho, and was actually what really made me fall for the series when I first read it - the fact that Peter had a history and an inner life.

Reading update - The Canterbury Tales - p.86/504:
I read The Knight's Tale tonight. It was lovely. A chivalric romance, but what I had not encountered before was such a tale set in Ancient Greece. Is this a common setting for English chivalric poetry? I've only read German medieval poetry before, and it is not a theme I've come across there.

>151 BrokenTune: That sounds like a good way to do it. I’ll avoid asking you to look anything up until you’ve had a chance to read it for yourself lest I spoil the fun, but I appreciate the offer! I’ll be interested in your take on how the Miller’s Tale (the next one coming up I think) compares between the two versions.

My edition has notes explaining a lot of the words, so that helped me a lot, especially in the beginning. It gets easier as one goes, because I’m barely glancing at the notes anymore. I think my biggest issue was remembering to interpret the gender of the pronouns correctly.

>159 YouKneeK: I hope to read The Miller's Tale tonight, and now I'm full of anticipation. :D

Btw, Mike gave me some background on the classical setting: Apparently, Chaucer copied some parts from Boccaccio, which does have (apparently - I have not read the Decameron) the classical background.
So, that would explain it.

But to me that makes this even more fascinating because it sort of shows exactly how the influence of classical themes was introduced.
I.e. to me - and I am no expert here, medieval/renaissance literature is not my forte - Chaucer seems to be still at the early point in the Renaissance, whereas Shakespeare (whose work I'm more familiar with) to me seems to be at the tail end...being 200 years later.
When Shakespeare uses classical themes, it seems natural and I almost expect them to appear. Seeing a mash-up between medieval chivalric poetry and a Greek setting seemed somewhat jarring and out of place, but there is also something beautiful and just novel about it. A bit like the old (1980s?) Beethoven/Syncho-pop mixes...or this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HuSx3z0E6g

>145 YouKneeK: Should that post go somewhere in a thread where we'll find it later, perhaps in the 'how to do things on LT' thread?

>162 Karlstar: Do we have a thread like that? The only “How To” thread along those lines that I’m aware of in the Green Dragon is the How to Do Fancy Things In Your Posts thread which is geared toward HTML and other such things that one would do inside their own posts, not for general LT functionality. I guess we could always create one, but I think most of the people in this group are such long-time members that I'm not sure many would find it useful.

But in the process of searching for a thread like that in our group, I did find informative threads about how to behave when getting mugged and how to use a fork… you just never know what you’ll find when you search I guess! :)

>150 BrokenTune: I haven't read many of Gibbons's books myself, and Starlight is one of those on my TBR pile. I very much enjoyed Nightingale Wood - I first read it a few years ago but rehomed my copy, but found myself regretting that decision as I kept being reminded of good things from the book. So I recently bought it again, second hand, and reread it and it was just as delightful as before. I also thought Westwood was very good, and I have a soft spot for the rather awful protagonist of The weather at Tregulla. Gibbons is very good at writing characters you love to hate!

>164 Sakerfalcon: I have a few paperbacks coming my way and am planning a buddy read of one of them (I think Westwood) with another friend on GR next year. I really am looking forward to reading more by Gibbons.

Nightingale Wood is one of the books that I have just ordered. I was originally put off by the description and by the very chick-lit pastel cover, which made this look like a girly romance. I am told it is not. At least not in the traditional sense.
Would you agree with that?

I'll need to check out The Weather at Tregulla. That sounds fabulous!

I've been rushed off my feet this week at work, trying to close out projects or delegate them before my week off next week. As a result, I've barely had any time to read. I have found that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is the perfect book to relax to before bedtime, tho. Short chapters, but challenging enough to stop thinking about work.

Reading update - The Canterbury Tales - p.157/504:

This week I read The Miller's Tale, The Reeve's Tale, The Cook's Tale, and The Man of Law's Tale.

Basically, the stories just spiralled downward from The Knight's Tale into a drunken mess (The Cook's Tale). The Man of Law's Tale broke that cycle, but it seems to have been in a different fragment, so it may not have been intended as a continuation of the "theme" of the first stories.

And see THAT is what I really like about the stories so far: There is a clear structure to them (so far) and it creates a lot of space for ideas and interpretation.
I'm really enjoying the ride so far.

>166 BrokenTune: I’m glad you’re still enjoying Canterbury so much! The Miller’s Tale had my first “what?!” moment. :) Did the modern version describe what happened as explicitly as the original version did?

I’ve just finished the entire book a bit ago and plan to write up my review soon. I’m so glad to be done with it as I didn’t enjoy it nearly as well as you are. The last “tale” was especially torturous for me.

>167 YouKneeK: Yes, it was very explicit. The modern translation seems to follow very closely the descriptive wording of the original.

I'm not a fan of the bawdy tales, and of course, 21st century sensibilities need to be switched off (I've lost count of the rape scenes already), but I am enjoying the choice of story, the sequencing, and some of the messages that Chauces seems to smuggle in here and seem a little subversive for the time:

"Laws are for all, and he who seeks to lay them
On others should by rights himself obey them."
(from The Man of Law's Tale)

Quite startling for a public servant and favourite of the royal court.

Also, in the epilogue to The Man of Law's Tale, the Priest starts with a sermon which is then swiftly opposed by the more common request to stop preaching and get on with the stories. This made me laugh considering that they are all supposed to be "pilgrims".

So, yes, I really like it, but maybe for reasons that aren't really connected to the tales themselves.

In what way was the last tale torturous?

>168 BrokenTune: Thanks, at least I know readers of the modern translation aren’t missing out on the shock value. Haha, yeah, most of those pilgrims didn’t seem terribly devout!

You might more enjoy being surprised by the last tale when you get to it, but I’ll put my answer in spoiler tags and you can read it either now or later as you choose. :) It’s essentially a very, very long sermon on repentance and all of the various sins one might need to repent of and why they’re sins and what virtues can counteract them. It’s not an actual sermon according to the commentator because it’s not in the proper sermonly format, but it sure as heck read like a sermon to me. If it hadn’t been the last tale, giving me motivation to push through to the end, I might very well have stalled out for good on that one.

>169 YouKneeK: LoL. It makes me wonder whether Chaucer was using satire here.

>170 BrokenTune: Haha, yeah, I thought you might appreciate that after your comments in >168 BrokenTune:!

>171 YouKneeK: Well, from what I have read so far, I'm not sure Chaucer took things very seriously. I mean, he even makes fun himself by mentioning that "clumsy poet" Chaucer.

>172 BrokenTune: Yes, Chaucer definitely had a good sense of humour. My understanding of the tale that pressed @YouKneek's buttons is that it is a reductio as absurdam satire on the popular tales then current that had that moral stance.

>173 -pilgrim-: I'm really looking forward to finding out! From YouKneek's description, it sounds like satire to me. From what I have read so far, there are parts of the tales where I think I can see Chaucer's legal training come through, and so the concept of holding a sermon to be invalid because it is delivered in the wrong form, kind of makes me laugh. It is something that still exists - "oh sorry, we can't process your claim / application, because you filled in the wrong form".

>174 BrokenTune: Just to clarify, the one that pushed my buttons was the Clerk’s tale. I could see the term reductio as absurdam fitting that. After I Googled to find out what that meant. ;)

The last story (the Parson’s tale) didn’t push any particular buttons for me aside from the ones that wanted to make my eyes close. The bit about the sermon not being a sermon was in the commentary, not the actual text.

>175 YouKneeK:
Reductio as absurdam is a standard rhetorical technique. Chaucer will have studied formal rhetoric, so it would be in his lawyer's toolkit, as it were, for how to win a debate.

I know a somewhat similar tale appears in the Decameron (although I have not read that), by Bocaccio, whom Chaucer had met. So the existence of a possible target for the satire is known.

And all this is making me want to either go back to the Canterbury Tales, or access my copy of The Parliament of Fowles. Although maybe The Book of Good Women could be interesting...

>165 BrokenTune: No, it's not, although there are romances in it. It has the acid edge that you'd expect from Gibbons which undercuts any potential to cloy.

Tuesday Update:-

I’m late, I’m late, I’m late…. I’m on vacation and apparently my drive to not spend time in front of a pc was greater than my attention to detail when scheduling my “weekly” reading update. Even if it is ever so brief.

Work has been madly busy last week as I tried to close out projects before going on leave for a week. So even when I had the head-space, I haven’t had as much time to read as usually. Of course, this didn’t keep me from starting a few new books - *cough*The Canterbury Tales*cough* - but I only managed to finish two:

My first book was Stella Gibbons’ Starlight, originally published in 1967 (but with a setting that feels more like the 1950s than the late 1960s).

Until last week, I had only read Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm, which is a favourite comfort read of mine when suffering from the flu. Her other books were something I was faintly aware of but hadn’t looked into because – mainly – the descriptions and the covers (especially the one for Nightingale Wood) made them sound like chick-lit romance novels, and this is a genre that I just have no interest in. Apparently, this is entirely misleading when it comes to Gibbons.
Anyway, I added a separate review for Starlight (link at the end) and am already looking forward to reading more by Gibbons.

The second book I finished was Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read (2019), which is a collection of articles introduced by Francesca Wade (and with a foreword by Ali Smith) that Woolf wrote (originally) for the Times Literary Supplement, and some of which (if not most of) were later reworked by Woolf in her collection The Common Reader. I have a lovely Hogarth edition of The Common Reader (both parts) on my shelf, but haven’t read them, yet. I’m taking my time with Woolf.
Judging by the fact that I’ve read half of this book in one afternoon, I think it supports my theory that Woolf’s non-fiction is a) brilliantly clear, and b) just so much easier on the reader than her fiction.
I say this from a place of love. I have a buddy read lined up for Night and Day next week.

The downside of basically having ploughed through this is that I need to go back through and extract the many fun quotations that I failed to mark with sticky notes because I was having so much fun reading.

What has struck me about her TLS (Times Literary Supplement) articles is that it must have been odd at times to combine a defense of traditional classics (that she loved) with an equal passion for new writing which sought to abandon the structures and themes of the past.
There are quite a few references to literary criticism of her contemporaries, which it must have been odd to write: does one review a book by a friend (or another author fighting her corner) honestly even if one doesn’t like it, or does one feel the need to be generous?
It seems that reviewing issues have not changed.

Some of her very diplomatic put-downs were hilarious, though:
“The diary, for whose sake we are remembering his three-hundredth birthday, is sometimes composed like a memoir, sometimes jotted down like a calendar. But he never used its pages to reveal the secrets of his heart, and all he wrote might have been read aloud in the evening to his children. If we wonder, then, why we still trouble to read what we must consider the uninspired work of a good man, we have to confess what everybody knows – that it is impossible to read works of genius all day long.”
(in “John Evelyn” p.81/82)

Finally, I need to find out whether the TLS essay “Hours in a Library” (the title of which is borrowed from her one of her father’s books) is available on the Internet somewhere for free because it is basically a love letter to reading and deserves to be shared. Woolf even mentions TBRs (as “lists”, not as “tbrs”) and how much fun it is to compile them!

Other reviews posted this week (on my WP blog):
Stella Gibbons: Starlight

I've been remiss of posting updates about The Canterbury Tales. It's not that I've lost steam with it, but I've enjoyed my days off work by not sitting in front of a screen all day. I also got a lot of reading done.

Reading update - The Canterbury Tales - p. 388/504:

I've made it to the last quarter of the book.

Some stories are clearly better than others. Some have a moral, some are just pure entertainment.

The Tale of Mellibee was omitted in Coghill's translation so I had to read it in its entirety in the Middle English version. I am kind of baffled as to why this was left out from the modern translation? Apparently, it was deemed to boring.
I found it quite remarkable.

What I love about this story is that is an argument between a man and his wife, and the wife is taking the role of a learned advocate, whereas the husband largely starts his arguments from the point that he should not take counsel from his wife because women are ignorant and silly and prone to emotional decisionmaking.
(Luckily, he is persuaded by his wife in the end.)

The role reversal seems to be pure satire in that women rarely had an education such as Prudence displays constucting argument after argument based on principles set forth in classical texts (Cicero, Seneca, the Bible) that very much resemble the arguments of a political theorist or lawyer.
Chaucer had a legal background, and I think it comes through in the construction of this and other tales.

Anyway, further satire is added when the Host counters the tales moral by declaring that his personal experience based on his own wife makes him doubt the veracity of the Tale of Mellibee.

The other recurring theme I've noticed is that of crime and punishment/revenge and the focus on Christianity as the moral ideal (which was to be expected in a medieval text).

However, after Mellibee, the stories seemed somewhat lackluster:

The Monk's Tale had me baffled because it seemed pointless and not much of a tale. It seemed to exist solely to facilitate the discussions of the other pilgrims afterwards.

The Nun's Priest's Tale was worse. I don't like fables at the best of times, and this one just bored me stiff.

The Physician's Tale was interesting, but it had all the same WTF elements that I hated in Titus Andronicus.

The Pardoner's Tale was excellent. It reminded me of J.K. Rowling's story of the Deathly Hallows. Add to it the irony of the pardoner demanding payment at the end of it and the fully deserved bawdy response, it made me laugh.

Then I got to The Wife Bath's Tale, and I have to say that it made me laugh so hard. This book is worth it just for that tale alone.

But having read one of the funniest pieces in the book, it set up The Friar and The Summoner's tales for failure. The stories that followed were no better, and The Clark's Tale was just awful. What was the moral here? It is in such stark contrast to the "better" stories in this collection.

I hope to finish the book tomorrow. It's time to move on, I think.

>179 BrokenTune: You’re making it through very quickly, especially considering you’re reading two versions! I’m really glad you seem to be enjoying them more or less.

When I was trying to decide on an edition to get, I noticed several editions didn’t have all the tales. I spent a ridiculous amount of time researching to try to make sure I found a version that was both in Middle English and had all the tales. Even though I didn’t enjoy them, I would have been annoyed to learn I hadn’t read them all, even the unfinished ones.

The Clerk’s Tale was based on Grisilde/Griselda according to the commentary in my edition. It's the one Pilgrim was explaining in >173 -pilgrim-: and >176 -pilgrim-:. And also in my thread, post #52.

>179 BrokenTune: What can I say, I've been on holiday since Friday night and today was the first day that it didn't rain all day. ;) Also, I mainly read the translation but consulted the Middle English version for parts of the stories to look up details.

Having finished the last tale, I'm wondering whether The Clerk's Tale was included in part also so Chaucer could play it off against the Franklin's Tale. The Franklin's Tale was cute.

Overall, the sermons and "religious" stories were my least favourite.

Reading back over your thread, I took a bullet not for a book, but for Gloomsbury. My family and I were huge fans of the Bleak Expectations series, and I hope this will be as giggle-inducing.

>182 Marissa_Doyle: I thought it was hilarious, especially if you know something about the characters that are mentioned. Every time the D.H. Lawrence character came on the scene I was in giggles. Bleak Expectations was fantastic, too.
There is also one about the romantic poets ... The Wordsmiths at Gorsemere. This one was ok but not as funny as Bleak Expectations or Gloomsbury.

My latest Mt. TBR Project update is now on my WP blog.

>184 BrokenTune: It looks like you had a great reading month! As much fun as some of the reading challenges and games look, I always balk at the idea of having to confine my reading selections so strictly, and especially having to learn so much about a book in advance to know if it will even fit an intended category. I probably feel more relief on your behalf than is warranted that you’re back to being able to read whatever you want. :)

>185 YouKneeK: And that "stress" is why I never participated in games like that. It was a real amount of work, work that I wouldn't have enjoyed.

>185 YouKneeK: & >186 BookstoogeLT: I can understand that. This is the only themed reading game I participate in all year because I also balk at the mere thought of being limited to read from certain genres. Every year, I get an itch half-way through the game to read something else - preferably non-fiction. And after the game, every year, I read something completely different - this year it explains the dive into poetry, Chaucer, and Woolf.
But...

1. Mystery and crime are my go-to genres, so for me this is not "work".
2. The buddy reads are brilliant fun.
3. The categories in this are broad enough to fit in books that you might not think of immediately. For example, haunted house or ghost stories often allow for more literary works (which I like) than your run-of-the-mill ghost story (or slasher story - whihc I abhor). I loved reading Benighted by J.B. Priestley this year.
4. There are options to include non-fiction.
5. I enjoy finding a justification of why books that are not obvious candidates fit a particular task. And it is all meant to be fun, so usually, the justification works.
6. I have found some fantastic books and authors through this game. I'd never have picked up Michael McDowell if it had not been for Halloween Bingo, and now I am sad to be running out of books by him.
7. The game helps me to "weed out" some of my crime/mystery tbr. This in itself is a big help.
8. I really enjoy the planning element of the game. I like a bit of strategy.

The one thing that I do really struggle with is knowing which book works for which square. You're right that learning things in advance about a book can be a spoiler - and I don't like reading blurbs at the best of times. But again there is help at hand: either I plan those reads in for the start of the game, so I can pick a book that "might" fit. If it doesn't I just use it for another task.
Also, there are lists of books that work for each square, and other players might be able to help, too.

But again, it is all meant to be fun, and if it causes any stress, then it probably isn't fun. I was quite busy work-wise at the beginning of the game and briefly contemplate just nominating a row/column to read to at least get a bingo. I would have been fine with that.

>187 BrokenTune: Yeah, all the setup and stuff is what I was referring to as "work". Plus, I simply don't like any outside influence re-working my reading rotation, hahahahaa :-D

I think it's a brilliant idea though, as it kept the bl community together much longer than I think they would have on their own. I'm also glad to see it keep going. When something works, it's worth the investment to keep it going.

Sorry if I came across as saying the game was a bad thing. That wasn't my intention at all.

>188 BookstoogeLT: No worries. I didn't understand your comment as saying it was a bad thing. I fully know that what is fun for some may not work for others. Equally, I'm just saying that, once in the swing of it, I found ways to work with many of the restrictions and interpret them more widely.
Again, this works for me, as I tend to not plan my reading. (Even for the game, I had options for each task.)

I am somewhere between you two. I prefer to read what I want, as the mood takes me, without constraints (except those of my location vs. book location, eyesight and health (and consequent concentrating level)!)

But I can also enjoy the category matching challenge as mental game of its own. So this year my solution has been to try the Helmet Reading Challenge. I rarely select a book to fulfill the Challenge, but after I read one, I note which categories it fills.

That keeps me aware of whether I am getting stuck in a rut. And I suppose in December I may have to pick books to fit remaining categories...

>190 -pilgrim-: I had to look up the Helmet Reading Challenge. It looks like a great way to add some diversity to one's reading.
Have you discovered any favourites among the categories/tasks?

Sunday Update:

After the hurly-burly of Halloween Bingo, I’ve relaxed into a very comfortable reading speed. I love it, but it means that I don’t have a lot of new books to update on again this week. However, I’ve been on staycation for a week and managed to dive into some "serious" reads:

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales had been on my radar for a long time, but it took YouKneek's reading updates to intrigue me enough to order a copy.
As I hadn’t checked the details, I ended up with a modern translation of the tales, which initially caused me some concern. So, I also found a version of the text in the original Middle English. It was fun to compare the two. I liked the Middle English version for the poetry, but I preferred the modern translation for readability.
Much has been written about The Canterbury Tales already and I’m not sure whether to try and add a review later this week. However, I would like to say that – once I switched off my 21st-century reader’s outlook – I enjoyed many of the tales for quite a variety of reasons – some were funny, some were thoughtful, some seemed way ahead of their time (late 1300s). I’m not sure I’ll read more medieval poetry anytime soon, but I am glad I read The Canterbury Tales.

The second book I finished was Sandi Toksvig’s memoir Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus (2019). I really loved this book. This wasn’t just a great memoir delivered in an unusual – and to me very appealing – style, I loved that we got to see sides of Sandi Toksvig that are very much understated in her tv appearances mostly because they are glossed over by an obvious comedic performance. In this book, “performance” took a backseat, and the more serious – though still hilarious – side of the author came to the fore. We follow her on her commute by bus (yes, she takes the bus) from her home in South London to her place of work near Oxford Street. On the way, the author stops to highlight London landmarks and embark on discourses of memories and thoughts that she associates with them. It is an unusual memoir in that way but it works – whether it was because I could relate to some of the landmarks or whether it was because many of her points about feminism (she co-founded the Women’s Equality Party) and society struck home, I don’t know. I am just glad I finally got to read the book in full after hearing snippets of it at a talk by the author in Edinburgh last year.

Finally, I finished reading a collection of W.H. Auden‘s poetry. I started reading this collection in June and I am so glad that this has been my companion over this summer. I don’t know what it is about Auden, but his poems speak to me. It may be that it stood out to me how much he emphasised the impermanence of everything. It may be that I appreciated his experimenting with different styles – some worked better than others. It may be that I appreciated that he didn’t hide behind euphemisms. Something just works for me in Auden’s poetry and I am not even all that keen to dissect what that something is.
As many others, I was introduced to Auden through John Hannah’s rendition of Funeral Blues in Four Weddings and a Funeral (“Stop all the clocks, …”), but over time he’s become one of my favourite modern poets.

Other reviews posted this week (on my WP blog):
None.

Currently reading:
Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson – Laura Beers
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works – William Shakespeare (as part of The Will’s World Project)

>192 BrokenTune: You might find What W H Auden Can Do for You by Alexander McCall Smith interesting. As I recall it (my copy is on the high seas somewhere) he concentrates on the strengths Auden’s poetry can bring without doing too much analysis.

>191 BrokenTune: The Sami author one drew me into exploring the topic. Am currently reading a novella by Matti Aiko that I doubt I would otherwise have come across.

>193 haydninvienna: Thanks for the recommendation. Does one need to like McCall Smith's writing to appreciate the book?

>194 -pilgrim-: Is the novella any good?

>196 BrokenTune: Will reserve judgment until I see how it concludes. It has a very unusual narrative style and I am fascinated.

Sunday Update:

Another busy week at work, another week where I didn’t feel like reading any of my go-to genres or authors but wanted engaging and intellectually interesting books rather than comfort reads. What I’m trying to say is that I’m reading at a snail’s pace at the moment. It is Remembrance Sunday in the UK today which makes this week’s reading updates somewhat topical:

Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth has been on my shleves for five years and I am slightly disappointed that I have left reading it for so long. It is an excellent book. It is a sad and infuriating read, but I loved every page of it.
Even though Testament of Youth is known as a book about WW1, there is a lot more to it. The WW1 story only takes up half of the book. My edition had 612 pages. There is a lot of content. The second half zooms in on how Brittain dealt with her own experiences but part of this process was that she actively engaged in politics (first as a Liberal, later supporting Labour) and it was fascinating to read her first-hand accounts of meeting Lady Rhondda just after she was refused admittance to her rightful seat in the House of Lords, how she experienced the first time that Oxford adjusted to women graduates (Cambridge apparently resisted the change in law for as long as they could), how women were sacked from professions in which their contribution were previously deemed to be “essential work” (borrowing here from the 2020 terminology).
There is a lot to the book and I found the second half just as fascinating as the first.

The second book I finished was Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, a slim novella about a soldier returning home from the trenches and because he’s been suffering from amnesia. He does not recognise his wife. He does however remember the woman he was in love with 15 years ago and believes in his state of mental confusion that they are still an item.
What an extraordianry book this was.
West doesn’t provide us with gory details of the front, but the questions she does make the reader ask are just as chilling. I can’t believe she was only 24 when she wrote this book.

Other reviews posted this week (on my WP blog):
William Shakespeare: Love’s Labour’s Lost

Currently reading:
Thirteen Guests – J. Jefferson Farjeon (re-read)
Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson – Laura Beers
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works – William Shakespeare (as part of The Will’s World Project)

>198 BrokenTune: I read both Testament of Youth and The return of the soldier with the Virago group when we had a year of WWI reading. I agree that both are stunning in their own ways. Soldier is slim but really packs a punch as it reveals the emotional and mental devastation of the war. Brittain's memoir was, as you found, so much more than just a record of the war years. I was shocked at how it became shameful to mention the war, or to show that you had been impacted by it in the years that followed. I need to read her other two volumes of memoir now.

>199 Sakerfalcon: Yes, that struck me too about Testament. I'm still thinking about jotting down my thoughts in a "proper" review, but just didn't have the energy on finishing the book.
I definitely want to read her other books, too. That includes The Dark Tide, even if she herself says that it isn't very good. Brittain was someone who had a lot to say about a lot of topics that still seem to be relevant and I was kind of annoyed with myself that I too thought Testament was just another "war memoir".
And Return of the Soldier, oh my, a punch describes it very well. I have to admit tho that it only really struck me after I finished the book. It took me a while to think about the ending and the whole setup and how much this book deals with.

I've really come to like the Virago books, but I can't read a lot of them in a row. Have you read any of Rose Macauley's books? She's my next Virago author to try?

>196 BrokenTune: I have now finished the novella. I needed to reserve judgment until I saw how it concludes. Yes, I would recommend it.

>201 -pilgrim-: Excellent. Thank you. I'll have a look for it.

Sunday Update:

First off, apologies: I forgot to cross-post my reading update last week. By the time I noticed, it was too late.
I came down with something on Wednesday which resulted in a migraine and threw me off looking at screens and print for a while. I did manage to finish a couple of my current reads on audiobook, but to be fair, neither of these two impressed me much – and I don’t think I can blame the headache:

Duell (2011) by Arnaldur Indridason – I read the book in German, and am not sure if there is an English translation.
It is part of the Erlendur series but is set just before Erlendur arrives on the scene. I.e. Erlendur is not in it. He literaaly arrives on the last page of the book.
The setting of this book is fantastic: Island/Denmark, height of the Cold War, Chess World Championship game betwee Spasskij and Fischer, and an unexplained murder of a boy are at the foreground of this.

However, we also get flashbacks to the past of the main investigator Marian Briem (some translations seem to name the investigator “Marion”). I think the author tried to keep us guessing whether Marian is a man or woman, which is interesting, but seems very jarring and gimmicky for the first half of the book. By the second half, it was no longer something I noticed. I guess I stopped caring.

The flashbacks are the parts that nearly made me DNF the book: Not only does it slow down the pace of the book, which is already glacial, but the background also describes Marian dealing with tuberculosis in his/her childhood and describes the various deaths of Marian’s childhood friends from TB. It’s a bit like Mann’s The Magic Mountain, but with children. It’s really slow and really grim.

The rest of the book was … better. There is an espionage element which kept me reading.
Overall, tho, this is not a series or author that I will come back to.

The other book I finished was Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts (2020) by Kathryn Harkup. This was utterly disappointing, and I tried to summarise my thoughts in a review (see link below).
I guess, part of my disappointment stems from knowing that Harkup is a skilled writer and explainer of science and this is not on show in this book.

All that disappointment over Death by Shakespeare made me miss Shakespeare, so I finally read/watched The Merry Wives of Windsor yesterday to check off another title in my Will’s World Project.
It was the last of the comedies that I hadn’t read (I think … or hope), and I liked it.

Other reviews posted this week (on my WP blog):
William Shakespeare – The Merry Wives of Windsor
Kathryn Harkup – Death by Shakespeare


Currently reading:
Cheri – Colette
Buying Time – E. M. Brown
Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson – Laura Beers
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works – William Shakespeare (as part of The Will’s World Project)

>203 BrokenTune: I hope you're feeling better! The Merry Wives of Windsor is one of the many Shakespeare plays I haven’t read yet. Aside from a few in high school, I’ve only read 6 of them as an adult, when I started trying to fit him in once or twice a year starting in 2017. Maybe I’ll pick this as one of my selections for 2021.

>200 BrokenTune: I realised the other day that someone had asked me about Rose Macaulay and I had never replied, but I'd forgotten whose thread it was on!

I very much like the books of hers that I've read. She is great at creating characters who don't really fit into society- they are most at home in their own worlds and can't adapt when forced into "normal" company. The world my wilderness is set in the post-war ruins of London, and the protagonist is a girl who was used to running wild in France with the Maqis. Crewe Train tells of Denham who, upon her father's death, is taken up by sophisticated relatives and forced to try and conform to their way of life. Both books contain humour and pathos and I enjoyed them a lot. I have several more of her novels on my TBR pile.

>204 YouKneeK: This is pure entertainment. A rom-com for days when you need something that requires no intellectual investment. :)

>205 Sakerfalcon: I really hope to get to Macauley soon. I have both The World My Wilderness and Crewe Train. Would you recommend one over the other to start with?

>207 BrokenTune: No, I thought highly of them both. It's been a few years since I read either of them.

Reading Update:

On a Tuesday. Because I knew there was something I meant to do on Sunday but I got caught up in ejoying my newly put up Christmas decorations. Then I ran out steam typing last night.

So, yeah, … In keeping with the start of the festive season, I have also started my annual seasonal reads. That is to say, from here on you’ll see a lot more Golden Age of Crime titles featuring snow, Santa, and murder. But before we dive into those, let me just summarise the titles I finished in the last week:

First off, I finally read Cheri (1920) by Colette. It’s a short novel that has been on my shelves for years. I don’t know why it took me so long to finally read it. All I can say is that the story of the aging courtesan and her younger lover didn’t really grab me at all.
Still, I liked the feel of the story and setting. I’ll definitely try something else by Colette. (2* out of 5*)

I also re-read The Magician’s Nephew (1955) by C.S. Lewis, and by re-read I mean I listened to Kenneth Branagh reading the audiobook. I don’t know what it is about this book. I liked it when I first read it but over time I have come to really dislike the heavihandedness with which Lewis adds Christian allegory left right and centre of the story. At the end, I almost felt sorry for the witch. (2* out of 5*)

Buying Time (2018) E. M. Brown was a very surprising book. I don’t normally read dystopia, sci-fi or time travel, so this book was way out of my comfort zone but I liked it. I liked it so much that I wrote a separate review for the book. What I want to say to anyone looking at this book, tho, is, the first chapter is pretty lame. It gets better after that. I’m still not sure whether it was a political thriller, sci-fi, or romance at the heart of this story. (3.5* out of 5*)

And I’ll finish this post with the two season reads that I picked up over the weekend:

Murder Most Festive (2020) by Ada Moncrieff was one of those impulse buys that are purely down to a gorgeous cover design. I don’t usually read Golden Age of Crime pastiche, but this is exactly what this charming little book was. Also, it was charming. Alas, it was not for me. I penned a separate review to talk more about why this was not a hit with me, but let me also say that this was a debut novel (apparently) and I would not hesitate to pick up a sequel. (2.5* out of 5*)

Lastly, my star read of this week was Another Little Christmas Murder (1947) by Lorna Nichol Morgan. Now, I usally shake my fist when a book title is changed for the sake of a marketing ploy, but I even forgive the publishers for changing the from the original Another Little Murder, even tho the story doesn’t have a Christmas setting. This is murder mystery set before Christmas in a wintry Yorkshire, where a snow storm causes havoc on the roads and leaves several parties to abandon their car and seek shelter in a house far off from the nearest town or village. What can possibly go wrong? LoL.
I really loved this story, because parts of it made me laugh, parts of it reminded me of J.B. Priestley’s Benighted (one of my 5*-reads this year), and parts of it were just a straight-forward great mystery. I particularly liked the main character, Dilys, a commercial traveller who doesn’t put up with a lot of nonsense. This was absolutely delightful. (4* out of 5*)

Reviews posted this week (on my WP blog):
Ada Moncrieff – Murder Most Festive
E.M. Brown – Buying Time

Currently reading:
Round the Fire Stories – Arthur Conan Doyle
The Crime at the Noah’s Ark – Molly Thynne
Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson – Laura Beers
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works – William Shakespeare (as part of The Will’s World Project)

I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while. Life's been busy and exhausting and I fell into a posting slump both here and on my blog.

Anyway,...

And to you.