pamelad is buried in a book

Hello and welcome. I'm Pam from Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, which is Australia's southernmost mainland state. My goals for 2024 are to read some of the big books that have been languishing in the tbr pile, and to read a wide variety of books and authors (I've sequestered the romances in another thread, so this thread is for everything else).

1. Books I Own



Medical Downfall of the Tudors by Sylvia Barbara Soberton
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
Best in Class: Essential Wisdom from Real Student Writing by Tim Clancy
The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings

Top of the TBR List

Segu by Marise Conde
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
Strumpet City by James Plunkett
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

2. Wish List and Book Bullets



Book Bullets

1. House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng Torontoc Completed
2. Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker DeltaQueen Completed
3. Plain Murder by C S Forester VivienneR

Wish List

The Appeal by Janice Hallett
The Chinaman by Friedrich Glauser
The Innocents by Margery Sharp

3. Big Books



The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne

4. Australia and New Zealand



1. Becoming Kirrali Lewis by Jane Harrison
2. The Visitors by Jane Harrison
3. Love and Virtue by Diana Reid
4. Abomination by Ashley Goldberg

5. Around the World


Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata Japan
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng Malaysia and Singapore
Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen Northern Ireland
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami Japan
The Chinaman by Friedrich Glauser Switzerland

6. Crime



The Secret of the Lost Pearls by Darcie Wilde
Miss Morton and the English House Party Murder by Catherine Lloyd
Miss Morton and the Spirits of the Underworld by Catherine Lloyd
A Curious Beginning by Deanna Raybourn
The Secret of the Lady's Maid by Darcie Wilde
What Angels Fear by C. S. Harris
The Appeal by Janice Hallett
Another Man's Murder by Mignon G. Eberhart
The Cases of Susan Dare by Mignon G. Eberhart
The Chinaman by Friedrich Glauser

Romantic Suspense

Whistle for the Crows by Dorothy Eden

7. Non-fiction



Medical Downfall of the Tudors by Sylvia Barbara Soberton
Curriculum Vitae by Muriel Spark

8. Books by Decade



1900 - 1919
The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett 1907
The Judgement of Eve by May Sinclair 1907

1910 - 1919
Twilight by Frank Danby 1916
William: An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton 1919

1920 - 1929
The Casuarina Tree by Somerset Maugham 1926
Tension by E. M. Delafield 1920
The Enormous room by E. E. Cummings 1922

1930 - 1939
The Cases of Susan Dare by Mignon. G. Eberhart
The Chinaman by Friedrich Glauser

1940 - 1949
Snow Country by Yusanari Kawabata
Dragonwyck by Anya Seton
The King's General by Daphne du Maurier

1950 - 1959

1960 - 1969
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
Kirkland Revels by Victoria Holt
Lady of Mallow by Dorothy Eden
Bel Lamington by D. E. Stevenson

1970 - 1979
Castle Barebane by Joan Aitken
Speak to Me of Love by Dorothy Eden
The Innocents by Margery Sharp

1980 - 1989
A Reputation Dies by Alice Chetwynd Ley
The American Heiress by Dorothy Eden

1990 - 1999

2000 - 2010
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami

2010 - 2019
Becoming Kirrali Lewis by Jane Harrison
The Green Road by Anne Enright

2020 -
The Visitors by Jane Harrison 2023
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng 2023
The Secret of the Lost Pearls by Darcie Wilde 2022
Love and Virtue by Diana Reid 2021
Abomination by Ashley Goldberg

9. CATs



CalendarCAT

January: Becoming Kirrali Lewis by Jane Harrison; The Visitors by Jane Harrison
February: Curriculum Vitae by Muriel Spark
March: The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne; The Green Road by Anne Enright
April: Madam by Margaret Oliphant
May: The Judgement of Eve by May Sinclair

PrizeCAT

January: Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata Nobel
February: Love and Virtue by Diana Reid Australian Book Industry Award (and others)
March: The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award; The Green Road by Anne Enright Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award for 2016
April: Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen Comedy Women in Print
May: Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami

Assorted KITs and CATs

ScaredyKIT and HistoryCAT: Kirkland Revels by Victoria Holt

10. Historical Fiction Challenge



1. Read a work of historical fiction set in the country you’re from
The Visitors by Jane Harrison

2. Read a work of historical fiction set in a different country to the one you’re from
Dragonwyck by Anya Seton
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
Kirkland Revels by Victoria Holt
Voyage of Innocence by Elizabeth Edmonson

3. Read a work of historical fiction set in your favorite historical time period to read about
The Secret of the Lost Pearls by Darcie Wilde Regency

4. Read a work of historical fiction set in a time period you’re less familiar with
The King's General by Daphne du Maurier Seventeenth century, British Civil War

5. Read a work of historical fiction with a speculative element
What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher

6. Read a work of historical fiction about a real historical figure or a specific historical event
The Visitors by Jane Harrison
The King's General by Daphne du Maurier

7. Read a work of historical fiction of over 500 pages
The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne

8. Read a Classic work (written/published at least 60 years ago)
The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Bonus: Read a Classic work of historical fiction (written at last 60 years ago about a time period at least sixty years before the work was written/published)
Dragonwyck by Anya Seton

11. New Authors



Becoming Kirrali Lewis by Jane Harrison
Twilight by Frank Danby
Dragonwyck by Anya Seton
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
Love and Virtue by Diana Reid
Abomination by Ashley Goldberg
A Curious Beginning by Deanna Raybourn
The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne
What Angels Fear by C. S. Harris
The Green Road by Anne Enright
The Appeal by Janice Hallett
My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
Lady of Mallow by Dorothy Eden
The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings

12. BingoDOG



1. Food or Cooking Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
2. A book with an ugly cover Unforgivable by Joanna Chambers
3. A book with nothing on the cover but the title and author The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett
4. Features twins Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
5. A topic about which you have specific knowledge Another Man's Murder by Mignon G. Eberhart
6. Published in year ending in 24 The Lady Plays with Fire by Susanna Craig 2024
7. Epistolary or diary The Appeal by Janice Hallett
8. Big or little in title The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings
9. A book from one of the libraries listed under the "Similar libraries" featured on your LT profile page Pirate Next Door by Jennifer Ashley
10. About friendship Satyr's Son by Lucinda Brant
11. Three-word title The King's General by Daphne du Maurier
12. Paper-based item in plot When the Marquess Was Mine by Caroline Linden
13. Read a CAT The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne
14. Short story collection The Casuarina Tree by Somerset Maugham
15. Person's name in title Miss Gordon's Mistake by Anita Mills
16. Set in a city The Secret of the Lady's Maid by Darcie Wilde
17. A book with fewer than 100 copies on LT Twilight by Frank Danby
18. Something written by a person of colour Becoming Kirrali Lewis by Jane Harrison
19. Written by an author 65 or older The Cuckoo's Child by Marjorie Eccles
20. Featuring water The Pirate Hunter by Jennifer Ashley
21. Involves warriors or mercenaries Sinfully Yours by Kathleen Ayers
22. Re-read a favourite book We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
23. Written in another cultural tradition Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata Japan
24. Something that takes place in multiple countries The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
25. Current or recent best-seller The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne

Wiki

13. More Historical Fiction

Gothic and Romantic-Suspense

Kirkland Revels by Victoria Holt
The Art of Love by Elizabeth Edmonston
The Frozen Lake by Elizabeth Edmonston
A Reputation Dies by Alice Chetwynd Ley
Lady of Mallow by Dorothy Eden
Ravenscroft by Dorothy Eden
Darkwater by Dorothy Eden
The American Heiress by Dorothy Eden

To be completed: from the tbr list

Segu by Marise Conde
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
Strumpet City by James Plunkett
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

14 Just in case

15 Just in case

16 Just in Case

Open for business. Welcome!

Happy to see the movie poster theme again, and eagerly anticipating many BBs!

Love it and am looking forward to many BBs.
I actually own a DVD copy of Gold Diggers of 1933 - it is something else! And Priscilla, one of my favourite movies ever! Is that your own signed copy of the poster?
Happy reading in 2024!

Wonderful theme! I'm looking forward to following your reading again in 2024.

I love the poster at >7 pamelad:. I wonder if they practiced in front of a mirror to get the suitably evil look.

I love the movie posters and was very happy to see James Cagney's Public Enemy being used for your crime category. I am a huge fan of Cagney! Looking forward to following your reading in 2024.

Oh, movie posters! And so many movies that I loved! Great categories, and good luck with the chunksters!

I love looking at your posters. Hope you have a great reading year.

Welcome all!

>19 christina_reads: There are some really creative themes in the Category Challenge, but again I'm choosing some pictures to illustrate standard categories. I enjoy the poster search and have a few changes in mind.

>20 JayneCM: Gold Diggers of 1933 is hugely entertaining. I love the Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. But I realised that I've used it before (and Robin Hood as well) so went looking for another musical and came up with Broadway Melody of 1936. Not my Priscilla poster, unfortunately.

>21 VivienneR: It's the film with the grapefruit scene. Evil all through!

>22 DeltaQueen50: Me too. I really like Yankee Doodle Dandy, with a dancing James Cagney.

>23 MissWatson: Thank you. There are so many good books in my tbr pile that I've avoided because they're long, but I'm sure they'll be worth the effort.

>24 dudes22: Thank you, and you too!

Good luck with your reading in 2024.

Happy reading in 2024!
>6 pamelad: and >12 pamelad:: Great movies!

>26 lowelibrary:, >27 mstrust: Thank you!

For the film buffs, today is the 75th anniversary of the release of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes.

>28 pamelad: Well, now I need to rewatch today! Such a wonderful film. Maybe Black Narcissus needs a rewatch as well. I am sure I had seen The Red Shoes streaming somewhere in Australia recently and put it in my watchlist but now I cannot find it again. May need to try Youtube.

Great movie posters! I'm looking forward to meeting you in the Historical Fiction Challenge. I hope to focus more on that in the upcoming year.

>29 JayneCM: The only place I can find The Red Shoes is AppleTV where you can rent it for $1.99. I haven't tried AppleTV before because I didn't know how to access it, but I think TelstraTV or Chromecast might work. A friend gave me the next generation ChromeCast, so I'll give it a go.

Over the years I've seen most of the Powell and Pressburger films at Melbourne Cinematheque, some of them multiple times. I've been going since the seventies, when it was the Melbourne University Film Society and over the decades there have been a few Powell and Pressburger revivals. Black Narcissus is so feverish and strange!

After three years of avoiding cinemas, this year I saw couple of French film noir (films noirs?) because I've always wanted to see Quai des Orfevres. It was a bit of a disappointment, but the following week's film, Classe Tous Risques, was really good. I still don't like sitting in enclosed spaces with hundreds of people, but plan to be braver next year.

>30 MissBrangwen: We will definitely catch up at the Historical Fiction Challenge. So glad that Tanya-dogearedcopy is running it again.

>31 pamelad: I agree with you on the crowded spaces! But you know that where I live, there isn't that option. We do have a small film club that meets once a month but it is very expensive to join. So I rely on streaming, particularly SBS On Demand, for foreign films.

>28 pamelad: Red Shoes (1948) is free on prime video with ads, as well as Black Narcissus.

>33 Tess_W: Thanks Tess. Neither is available on Prime in Australia, unfortunately.

>32 JayneCM: Kanopy is also worth a look.

>34 pamelad: I always forget about Kanopy! And it is free from my library.

Do you get TCM? I saw The Red Shoes there, but it's been about a year. If you google the title, it will give you options for what networks or streaming services that carry it.

>36 mstrust: TCM used to be available on Foxtel, in an insanely expensive streaming package, but doesn't seem to be available now. Googling brought up a site about setting up a VPN so we could access the overseas site. That way lies madness!

I love your "just in case" place markers! I wish I had thought of that. I've already added one additional challenge and thinking of adding another.

>38 beccac220: I learned through experience! The other alternative when you want to add a challenge is to put two in the same thread. If there are too many touchstones in a post they seem to stop working, but twenty to thirty are usually OK.

Welcome!

>39 pamelad: Good to know! Thanks!

Hi Pam - I see you have two threads! Your categories for this one look great and the movie posters are perfect!

I love your movie posters, and how you always manage to find one that suits your categories to a T!

Looking forward to seeing what you read this year, and what lands in the just-in-case spots ;)

>41 susanj67: Welcome, Susan. This is the thread for the books I admit to reading!

>42 Jackie_K: Thanks Jackie. I enjoy the search, and hope the posters make up for my uncreative categories.

>43 rabbitprincess: Welcome, Princess. Perhaps a new challenge, or a category overflow. Crime just fills itself effortlessly.

I like the movie posters. Have fun with those categories.

>45 hailelib: Thanks Trisha.

Ready to begin with Luke Carman's An Ordinary Ecstasy, which fits into multiple categories and a Bingo Dog square:
Short stories - Bingo
CalendarCAT - January
New Author
Australia and New Zealand

And another: Becoming Kirrali Lewis by Jane Harrison
CalendarCAT - January
New Author
Australia and New Zealand

And one for the PrizeCAT: Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata Nobel).

>47 pamelad: Good luck with your 2024 reading--- may it bring you great joy! I have Snow Country on my WL. I was preparing a list of reading when I was doing the 1930's, and this made the list, but not the read!

>48 Tess_W: I've seen the 1957 film of Snow Country, so am expecting a delicately-written tragedy. A 192 page tragedy is manageable, but I don't think I could read a longer one.

Thank you for your good wishes, Tess. Wishing you a year of happiness and wonderful books.

I also have Snow Country on my list. Look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Happy 2024!

Happy New Year and especially Happy reading!

>52 mstrust: Happy New Year to you too!

Happy new year, Pam.
Looking forward to following along. I'm hoping to get to a few chunksters this year, we'll see how well that works!

Welcome, Helen.

4. Australia and New Zealand
9. CalendarCAT January: Australia Day

Becoming Kirrali Lewis by Jane Harrison

I borrowed this from the library without realising that it was a YA book, but decided to read it anyway. Harrison is an Australian indigenous writer and this is a coming of age novel, set in 1985 with flashbacks to the sixties. Kirrali Lewis was adopted and brought up in a small country town in Victoria where she was the only Aboriginal person. She's never met another indigenous person, or encountered any overt racism, but that changes on her first day at Melbourne University, where she is enrolled to study law.

Over the course of the book Kirrali becomes involved in the Aboriginal community, starts to explore her heritage and traces her birth parents. The content is interesting, but it's more a sequence of teachable moments than a work of literature. I could see it as a set text at about year nine.

5. Around the World
9. PrizeCAT Nobel

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

The first part of Snow Country was published in 1935, but Kawabata continued to add and revise, with the final version being published in 1948. The introduction by the translator, Edward Seidensticker, is informative and well worth reading.

Shimamura is a married man from Tokyo, travelling to a hot spring in the snow country to rekindle a romance with a young geisha, Komako. He is a wealthy dilettante, a useless and superficial man. She is generous and passionate, with an aura of innocence despite her profession, but a hot springs geisha is little better than a prostitute and she is already of the road to decay. She has fallen in love with Shimamura, despite knowing that the love of a geisha for a client is futile. A theme of decay runs through the book, with the seedy surroundings of the hot springs and the poverty of the nearby villages contrasting with the majesty of the mountains. The lives of the geisha are almost feudal, a remnant of traditional Japan that cannot survive.

Kawabata's descriptions are poetic and cinematic, starting with Shimamura's night train journey into the snow country. He is fascinated by a young woman whose face is a reflection in the window, through which Shimamura watches the landscape move by. Initially I was impatient with what I saw as digressions that interrupted the narrative, but realised that you can't read quickly as though this is a straightforward story, and have to stop and picture the scenes that unfold.

ETA I used this for the Bingo square written in a different cultural tradition.

I have two BingoDOGs, one of them using only historical romances, and would be very surprised to complete them both, so at some stage I'll probably combine them. At the beginning nearly everything you read fits into a square, but towards the end it's much harder e.g. it would be hard to find an historical romance for 5. A topic about which you have specific knowledge and 3. A book with nothing on the cover but the title (it will be easy to find a free Kindle classic for this, or a Persephone would work, but I've never seen an historical romance with a cover like this), and I'd be very lucky to come across a book about twins that's not an historical romance.

>57 pamelad: Definitely want to read this.

>58 pamelad: I have quite a few possibilities for the twins square - The God of Small Things, The Thirteenth Tale, The Twins of Auschwitz, The Sisters, Beside Myself, Whisky Charlie Foxtrot, Unsettled Ground, Sing Fox To Me, Cutting For Stone, The Good Sister, The Wishing Spell.
In fact, I don't know how I will decide which one I actually want to read!

Two Sisters : Ngarta and Jukuna also comes up in my library search for twins and I am very keen to read it. Cannot tell from the blurb though if they are actually twins or just sisters.

>59 JayneCM: Thanks Jayne. I've been looking for a copy of Cutting for Stone and have found one in Booroondara, so it's definitely a possibility. Unsettled Ground looks interesting too, and won the Costa Award, so I'm thinking of reading it in March for the PrizeCAT. Then again, I could read it now, call it research and still count it. And I just discovered that I own a copy of The Good Sister.

>60 pamelad: Perfect!

>57 pamelad: Sounds lovely and I have it on my TBR. Hope to get to it this year!

>62 Tess_W: I'd forgotten the Nobel Laureates in Literature Challenge, but labfs's review of another of Yasunari Kawabata's books, The Old Capital, has reminded me. I'm adding this one to the wish list.

I had one goal for 2023: read The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore. I read two Nobel winners: The tree of Man by Patrick White and Blindness by Jose Saramago.

Tentatively on my list for 2024 are The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore again, The Occupation Trilogy by Patrick Modiano and The Old Capital.

I'm reading The Visitors by Jane Harrison, which is turning out to be longer than I expected so I just checked the page count in Amazon. This book by an aboriginal Australian is #4 in Native American Literature, and two other books by indigenous Australians, Melissa Lucashenko's Edenglassie and Tony Birch's Women and Children are numbers 2 and 3. Amazon really needs to change the category title on the Australian site, so I'll start looking for the place to let them know.

I did it through online chat.

8. Books by Decade 1911 - 1920
12. BingoDOG Fewer than 100 copies on LT

Twilight by Frank Danby

Frank Danby is the nom de plume of Julia Frankau, who wrote mainly of the London Jewish community. Her books were popular, and even scandalous, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is her last book, written in 1916 when she was dying of consumption.

"Twilight" is my swan song. I shall never write another novel. A year ago I fell into a consumption chiefly treated by morphia. I knew my De Quincey pretty well; perhaps this gave me this idea of writing my dreams. "Twilight" was written between 11 and 1 at night, after the second and before the third half-grain injection of morphia. Perhaps it is morbid; perhaps, being a genuine personal experience, it is only interesting. All my life has been happy, successful; the end has become hard and unexpected. Night and day I wish it were over, but it lags.

The only thing that vexes me in dying is the thought that my book was not brought out in time for me to read the notices. The extraordinary fluctuations of the effects of the drug seem to absorb my consciousness. I cannot write it, though I had projected an essay called "Drug Dreams." I have twitchings in my hands which prohibit holding a pen or pencil. I am told these are entirely due to morphia and omnipom. I have never been able to dictate essays or stories; thought has always seemed to flow through the pen.

To my dear American public, good-bye.

The successful novelist, Jane Vevaseur, has escaped London for a rented house on the outskirts of a small seaside village. She is suffering from neuritis and has been nursed lovingly by her sister, but wants to get away from all the care and attention and have some independence. The house she rents, Carbies, is where another writer, Margaret Capel, died twelve years earlier, and the doctor her sister sends to call, Peter Kennedy, was in love with Mrs Capel. Margaret had fallen in love with her publisher, Gabriel Stanton, but was egotistical enough to simultaneously encourage and repel Kennedy when Stanton was not about. She was waiting for her decree nisi after a gruelling and humiliating court battle with a husband she loathed. Jane has uncovered Margaret's letters and diary and is writing a book about her. She talks with the dead Margaret late at night after taking morphine. Margaret's story takes over the book and Jane makes only brief appearances as the narrator.

I was fascinated by this character-driven book and recommend it.

>64 pamelad: How hard is it to get these things right? I've never looked specifically in that category but it doesn't surprise me.

>65 pamelad: Julia Frankau sounds like an interesting person. I have 2 books, published by Virago, on my TBR by her granddaughter, Pamela Frankau. I had no idea that her grandmother was a writer, too.

How did you find out about this book?

>66 JayneCM: It puts me off Amazon, for sure. The man in the chat said it would be fixed, so I hope so.

>67 kac522: It is one of the books in Reclaim Her Name https://www.marieclaire.com.au/life/reclaim-her-name/ and I think I came across it in a Facebook Group, Undervalued British Women Novelists 1930 - 1960, even though it's outside the date range.

>68 pamelad: Thank you!

>65 pamelad: Such great writing! On my WL it goes!

Just stopping by to drop a star!

My, my, you have been busy. Nice organization.

Thanks for the Julia Frankau recommendation. I'll be watching your "Books by Decade" category throughout the year!

>71 fuzzi: Welcome, and thank you for dropping in.

>72 mathgirl40: It's better than a miscellaneous category. Every book belongs in a decade! It's already encouraging me to return to long and leisurely books like The Shuttle, which was first published in 1906 and is moving along slowly.

3. Big Books

The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Shuttle is the ship carrying passengers between New York and London, and its also the tool that weaves the connection between America and England. From New York, American heiresses travel to England to find titled husbands. From England, men with noble names, debts and impoverished estates seek wives with the money to support them in lives of aristocratic leisure. One such parasite is Sir Nigel Anstruthers, who marries Rosy, the sweet, naive and not very bright eldest daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel, a multi-millionaire. Once Sir Nigel has Rosy in England, he cuts the ties between his wife and her family and makes her life a misery. Twelve years later Betty, Rosy's younger sister, who is a much stronger character than Rosy, and vastly more intelligent, sets off to find her sister.

The hero is Mount Dunstan, an impoverished earl who cannot declare his love fro Betty because he has nothing to offer her. He owns a magnificent, crumbling estate, but his forebears left him no funds to maintain it. His father and elder brother were so notoriously dissolute that they had to flee overseas to avoid retribution for a crime that is never specified. They died there, and Mount Dunstan has never been accepted by society because he is assumed to be just as dissolute.

I enjoyed this leisurely read, but at times found it too slow and too melodramatic, with a section of waffle in the middle where the hero and heroine are pining for a love that can never be. But overall, it's an interesting depiction of the times with lots of detail about the legal rights of married women regarding marital violence, divorce, inheritance and the custody of children, and a realistic, but not graphic, depiction of a marriage to a violent and controlling husband and its effects on the wife.

>74 pamelad: Definitely a BFB! (504 pages) on my ereader. I hope to get to it this year. I have so many hopes and dreams!

>75 Tess_W: It would be better shorter, but it's worth reading. I hope you enjoy it.

4. Australia And New Zealand
9. CalendarCAT
10. Historical Fiction Challenge

The Visitors by Jane Harrison

This novel began as an idea more than a decade and a half ago. Its first iteration was as a play, "The Visitors", which was developed during a 2011 writing residency at the Indigenous studies Centre at Monash University, on Wurundjeri country.....The play was workshopped at the 2013 Yellamundie Festival on Gadigal country, which .........allowed me to connect with representatives from the local community............

The novel was written on Wadawurrung country, where I live. This book is a reimagining of the events of late January 1788 from the First Nations' perspective, but many of the details were drawn from accounts by members of the first fleet and historical accounts of the first contact.

Lawrence, who is nineteen and will be a man when he completes the last stages of his initiation, is the first to see the ships on the horizon. The Messengers are sent to the neighbouring mobs, and a meeting of the Elders is called. They travel to Warrane, on the Bay, where Gary, a senior Warrane Elder, chairs the meeting. This is a strange blending of the historical and contemporary: the Elders are dressed in suits and ties, to mark the dignity of the occasion; Lawrence and the Elders have English names that were common in the thirties and forties; the meeting is run along the lines of the awful meetings we're familiar with from our own jobs. The purpose of the meeting is to decide what to do about the ships. Should the Elders welcome these people to the country according to tradition, or should they declare war?

Interspersed through the action are descriptions of the country, and descriptions of of Aboriginal culture and practices. It's well worth reading.

10. Historical Fiction Challenge Bonus: Read a Classic work of historical fiction (written at last 60 years ago about a time period at least sixty years before the work was written/published)

Dragonwyck by Anya Seton

Miranda Wells believes she is destined for a more than a life of hard work as the wife of a small farmer, so when a distant cousin offers her a position as a governess, she manages to persuade her stern, religious father to let her take it up. Nicholas Van Ryn, her cousin, and his mansion, Dragonwyck, exceed Miranda's fiction-fed fantasies and she settles into a life of luxury. However, while Nicholas is considerate, his wife Johanna is determined to keep Miranda in her place. Johanna is a sad disappointment to Nicholas: she's lethargic and greedy, she's carrying a lot of weight and, most importantly, instead of producing an heir, she gave birth to an uninteresting daughter. The young, thoughtless Miranda adopts Nicholas's point of view and feels sorry that such a dynamic, attractive man should have such a dud of a wife.

Seton throws us plenty of hints about Van Ryn's true character, so when Miranda falls in love with him we're worried for her. With good reason!

I love a good Gothic, and really enjoyed Dragonwyck, which was set in Connecticut and New York in the 1840s. While I'm familiar with the time period in Australia and Britain, I knew nothing about 1840s America. Seton provides quite a lot of historical information about the issues of the time.

I borrowed the book from the Internet Archive.

>78 pamelad: I enjoyed Dragonwyck too -- and there's a good movie adaptation with Vincent Price as Nicholas Van Ryn!

>79 christina_reads: I've found it on YouTube. Looks good.

>74 pamelad: I like the sound of The Shuttle.

>81 hailelib: It's worth a try, and you can get it for free!

2. Book Bullets
3. Around the World
10. Historical Fiction Challenge

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

In 1921 Somerset Maugham is in Penang, staying with his old university friend Robert, a well-known, successful lawyer, and Robert's much younger wife Lesley. Maugham is accompanied by Gerald, his secretary and lover, having left his demanding wife in London. His is just one of the adulterous, unhappy marriages in the book. Lesley is trying to trace Sun Yat Sen, and the implication is that she had an affair with him in 1910, when he spent time in Penang raising money and support for a revolution in China. The story switches between 1910 and 1921, and occasionally to South Africa in the forties, where Robert and Lesley had moved on Robert's retirement.

Maugham is writing the short stories that will end up in The Casuarina Tree. He is notorious for writing about real people who have shared their stories with him, so thinly disguised that they are easily recognisable, so when Lesley shares her own story with Maugham she is prepared to be disowned by the British community in Malaya. Another story Lesley tells Maugham is of her friend, Ethel Proudlock, who shot her lover. This real case is the basis of Maugham's play and story The Letter, which was subsequently made into the Bette Davis film.

There's a lot going on in this book, perhaps too much. The themes include Sun Yat Sen's revolution; the British laws against homosexuality and their impact on people's lives; the Ethel Proudfoot murder trial; the prejudice of the British towards the Chinese and other races. I liked the writing style which was straightforward, perhaps after the style of Somerset Maugham, and the book held my attention all the way through.

>78 pamelad: For sure going to secure this one at some point in time. I read Seton's Avalon and loved it, even though I'm not an Arthurian fan.

>83 pamelad: Two BB's from you, Pam, in two minutes! Dangerous coming around here!

>78 pamelad: >79 christina_reads: I saw the movie just a few months ago and I think it's my favorite performance from Vincent Price.

>84 Tess_W: Katherine is already on my wish list, and I'm adding Avalon as well. I liked Anya Seton's writing.

>86 mstrust: I thought Vincent Price would be suitably creepy but perhaps not handsome enough to play Nicholas Van Ryn, but he's looking good here!

>87 pamelad: not bad.

I liked Vincent in a favorite Film Noir, Laura.

>88 fuzzi: Me too! I think that was the first movie I saw him in, and I didn't realize he was playing strongly against type!

>89 christina_reads: At that point in his career, Laura wasn't particularly against type for Price. In the early-to-mid '40s, he was a respected character actor, playing a wide variety of supporting roles. At the end of the decade, he did a lot of villains in films noir. He did a few minor horror movies in that era, but it wasn't until the 1950s that he would become the campy horror icon that now dominates our image of him.

2. Book Bullets DeltaQueen
12. BingoDOG Twins

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Cassandra and Judith are identical twins. Judith is getting married but Cassandra knows that her sister is making a mistake and is ignoring her destiny, which is to be tied forever to Cassandra. The twins are special people with no need for others, Cassandra believes, so she makes a mercy dash to her family's Californian citrus farm to stop the wedding.

The first section of this short book is written from Cassandra's perspective. Since Judith left their shared apartment in San Francisco to move to New York, Cassandra has stopped eating in favour of drinking and is taking an assortment of pills. She is seeing an analyst and contemplating jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Cassandra is a highly intelligent, neurotic, self-absorbed mess but she's not bleak; she's erudite and entertaining.

The second section is Judith's and we see how skewed Cassandra's perspective is. Though devoted to her twin, Judith has no intention of spending her life with Cassandra. Her fiance, whose name Cassandra persists in forgetting, is a newly-qualified doctor, and it's just as well.

The other members of the family are the girls' father, a hard-drinking ex-philosophy professor who ignores the mundane details of daily life, and their grandmother, an affectionate, conventional woman who is doing her best to fill the gap left by the death two years ago of the twins' much-loved, eccentric mother.

I enjoyed this idiosyncratic, entertaining book. It was first published in 1962.

>90 KeithChaffee: Interesting! I hadn't known that timeline. "Campy horror icon" is definitely my dominant perception of him now!

12. BingoDOG Short Stories

The Casuarina Tree by Somerset Maugham

In The House of Doors Maugham is writing the short stories that will be eventually published in this volume. I started with The Letter, the last story in the collection, because it is about the Ethel Proudfoot case, then went back to the beginning. Apart from the story P&O, which had a gleam of hope, these are gloomy stories about British colonists in Asia. Some of them take wives from the local population; some become alcoholics; some go to ludicrous lengths to maintain British standards in jungle outposts. The postscript castigates the British community for assuming that the characters in these stories are real people.

I like Maugham's writing and am engaged by his descriptions of travel in the Asia of the twenties, and his character studies of the people he meets, but he seems to dislike almost everyone, which becomes wearing after a while.

>9 pamelad: The decades are filling up nicely. I'd like to find something from the thirties.

>94 pamelad: I've been keeping track of the books I've read by year since 2019. Here are some of my favorites that I've read from each year in the 1930s (a lot of Agatha Christie, because I've been reading in chronological order):

1930 Private Lives, Noel Coward
1930 Diary of a Provincial Lady, E. M. Delafield
1930 Miss Mole, E. H. Young
1931 Father, Elizabeth von Arnim
1931 The Fortnight in September, R. C. Sherriff
1931 All Passion Spent, Vita Sackville-West
1932 The Tuesday Club Murders, short stories, Agatha Christie
1932 The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life, Virginia Woolf
1933 Lord Edgware Dies, Agatha Christie
1933 Good-Bye, Mr Chips, James Hilton
1934 Miss Buncle's Book, D. E. Stevenson
1934 Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie
1934 Parker Pyne Investigates, Agatha Christie
1934 Now in November, Josephine Johnson
*1934 A London Child of the 1870s, Molly Hughes; memoir
1935 Death in the Air, Agatha Christie
1935 Caddie Woodlawn, Carol Ryrie Brink
1936 Miss Buncle Married, D. E. Stevenson
1937 Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie
1938 Rebecca, Daphne DuMaurier
1939 And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

*Just read this one this month and enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a memoir of the author's London childhood.

>95 kac522: Thank you! I've found A London Child of the Seventies in KoboPlus and downloaded it. I also have some crime novels from the thirties by Ethel Lina White, Friedrich Glauser and Seishi Yokomizo.

>91 pamelad: I'm glad that you enjoyed Cassandra At the Wedding and I enjoyed your review of the book.

>96 pamelad: I'm fortunate to have obtained a Persephone Books copy from LTer Liz1564 (Elaine); the endpapers and bookmark are a William Morris wallpaper design from 1864:

>90 KeithChaffee: Perfectly said.
>95 kac522: I haven't read Miss Buncle's Book, but always thought it was a recent publication. Shows what I know.

>98 kac522: Persephone Books are very attractive and I've bought some in the past. Now though, I'm giving books away. It's good to find the right home for them. The Makioka Sisters is my latest successful re-homing and I'm awaiting reports on Palace Walk.

>79 christina_reads:, >86 mstrust: Last night I watched Dragonwyck on YouTube and enjoyed it. It's only loosely based on the book - difficult to fit the whole story into less than 2 hours I suppose, and perhaps some aspects of Nicholas Van Ryn's character were deemed to sordid for a mainstream audience. In the book he's more sadistic, and Miranda is less self-possessed.

>97 DeltaQueen50: I'm going to look for some of Dorothy Baker's other books e.g. Young Man with a Horn (I've seen the film) and Trio. Thank you for the book bullet. She's a good find.

>99 mstrust: I can recommend Miss Buncle's Book. It's probably the D. E. Stevenson book I've liked most. Mrs Tim of the Regiment was another good one.

>99 mstrust: I loved Miss Buncle's Book, and have enjoyed the author's other works, too.

1. Books I Own
10. Historical Fiction Challenge 4. Unfamiliar time period

The King's General by Daphne du Maurier

This historical romance is set during the British Civil War, about which I knew little more than this quote from 1066 and All That:

With the ascension of Charles I to the throne we come at last to the Central Period of English History (not to be confused with the Middle Ages, of course), consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).

The book begins with the crippled narrator, Honor Harris, reflecting on the war and on her love affair with Richard Grenvile, the King's General. Honor lives with her brother Robin, who is just as sad and disappointed as she is, on the charity of Jonathon Rashleigh, her brother-in-law. Du Maurier painstakingly researched the Civil War, so the historical background is authentic, and many of the characters are real people, including Honor, Richard and Jonathon. But perhaps only their names are real, because du Maurier has imagined their actions, thoughts and motivations as though they are her contemporaries. She is writing during WWII, which may explain the gloom and hopelessness of the book. I found it a difficult read, not because it was badly written, because it isn't, but because of the unrelenting misery. Because Honor is so resigned to unhappiness she makes a dull narrator. And because the romance between Richard and Honor was doomed almost from the start, it's hard to care about it.

There are gothic elements in that the bulk of the book is set at Menabilly, the centuries-old house still owned in du Maurier's day by the Rashleigh family. She based the Manderley of Rebecca on Menabilly. The house has hidden passages and a secret room, which are integral to the plot. As already mentioned, there's a central romance as well, but I wouldn't classify the book as a gothic romance. It's mainly an historical novel, and I thought that the historical and romantic themes did not marry well.

Pros: I learned a lot about aspects of the Civil War, particularly in Cornwall.
Cons: It's long and miserable, and the characters don't come to life.

>102 pamelad: Boy, that quote from 1066 sounds like current politics! I do have this one on my TBR pile!

>103 Tess_W: I might have been unfair to it because it's about a war that was lost by the narrator's side, so the misery and gloom are fitting. It wasn't what I felt like reading. I hope you like it.

6. Crime

The Secret of the Lost Pearls by Darcie Wilde

A light, trivial and entertaining read. What a relief!

Rosalind Thorne, who since her father's desertion has been supporting herself as a useful woman. She takes on all sorts of tasks, from training newcomers to manage in society to solving murders. An old school friend, Bethany Douglas, has employed her to investigate the theft of an extremely valuable and unusual pearl necklace. Once staying with the Douglas family, Rosalind becomes aware that the theft of the pearls is just one of the disasters confronting the Douglases.

Rosalind's romance with Adam Harkness, the Bow street runner, is moving along slowly. Adam, who is becoming disgusted by political interference and corruption that affect his work, helps Rosalind solve the crime. Crimes, actually, because they snowball.

My predictions for this series:
1. Adam will leave the Bow Street Runners and become a private investigator.
2. Rosalind and Adam will work together as private investigators.
3. After much angst, because she has never wanted to marry, Rosalind will marry Adam.

I've added this to the Historical Fiction Challenge as favourite time period, which leaves me with two categories: speculative and >500 pages.

In the tbr pile I have Kindred for speculative and a couple that are over 500 pages: The Books of Jacob and Strumpet City.

I've put a library hold on the next Rosalind Wilde book: The Secret of the Lady's Maid. Four weeks' away is good, because these mysteries don't hold up well if you read to many too close together. Applies to most series, I suspect.

>106 pamelad: I'm glad you enjoyed The Secret of the Lost Pearls and are planning to continue. I'm done with the series, personally, but I'll be interested to see your reviews moving forward! And I think leaving a month between each installment of a series is optimal, at least for me -- long enough that you don't get bored, but short enough that you don't forget crucial characters or plot points.

>107 christina_reads: I skipped a couple in the middle of the series because I was bored, but after a long break I enjoyed this one.

Adding a book bullet from VivienneR: Plain Murder by C S Forester. It's free on KoboPlus.

>106 pamelad: I've put a hold on a Darcie Wilde book, although I'm well down the list. A Regency mystery sounds like fun.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/357752
People here are discussing films on Kanopy. Here are some I've watched recently:
Dragonwyck 1946
Barbary Coast 1935
Jamaica Inn 1939

>110 pamelad: thanks for the link.

>105 pamelad: I loved Kindred and I'm basically not into the genre.

>100 pamelad: >101 fuzzi: Thanks for the rec!

1. Books I Own
7. Non-fiction

Medical Downfall of the Tudors by Sylvia Barbara Soberton

I am familiar only with snippets of British history, few of them gained from primary or secondary education. We hopped around from country to country and century to century until, if you wanted to study science, you had to drop History altogether. I found the Medical Downfall of the Tudors to be both interesting and informative, but I wonder what anyone who was more familiar with British history would make of it.

Lots of irregular menstrual cycles, stillborn babies, infant deaths. Henry VIII was quite possibly passing along something that caused the still births. Not much evidence though. Mainly speculation, except on how hazardous he was to wives. Brutal people, the Tudors.

I read Medical Downfall of the Tudors last month. I found the theory that he carried the Kell antigen and might have suffered from McLeod syndrome an interesting idea but unless they agree to DNA test his body, which is very unlikely, it will just remain a theory.

>115 Zozette: I came across it in your thread then saw it in Book Bub, or perhaps as a daily deal, so I bought it. The medical aspect attracted me, but that was probably the least satisfactory part of the book. Overall I enjoyed it, despite that. Thank you.

7. Non-fiction
9. CalendarCAT

Curriculum Vitae by Muriel Spark

Half of this short autobiography is taken up with Spark's reminiscences of her childhood and the rest skates through the years up to her first novel, published when she was forty. She spends much of the second half paying back the men who disappointed her. I think that, if you want to continue to enjoy Spark's books, the less you know the better.

9. PrizeCAT

Love and Virtue by Diana Reid

Michaela and Eve are first year students, living at Foundation College and attending lectures at Sydney University. Michaela's father died when she was a child and her mother has supported them ever since, so there isn't a lot of money to spare and Michaela, who is from Canberra, is grateful to have won a scholarship to Foundation, which pays her accommodation and board. Eve, in the room next door, also has a scholarship but its value to her is the prestige, because she's certainly not short of cash. Most of the other characters come from backgrounds like Eve's: expensive private schools, family mansions on the harbour, magnificent beach houses, holidays in Europe. The girls live at Foundation and the boys live at St Thomas's. (Less privileged students live at home with their parents and do not feature in this story, which is a problem to me.) They're away from the scrutiny of their parents and are doing a lot of socialising, drinking and sex. It's the combination of booze, sex and naivete that causes the drama that ensues, helped along by the misogynistic culture of the men's colleges and private schools, and the competitive drinking of O Week. (Orientation Week for first-years - lots of social activities involving vast quantities of alcohol.)

Michaela is initially madly impressed by Eve, who is two years older and always the centre of attention, and she thinks they have a close friendship so she confides in her, which could be a mistake. Is Eve the caring person she makes herself out to be?

Overall, this is a pretty good book with a few iffy bits including an affair between Michaela and a philosophy lecturer. The relationship doesn't ring true. The central theme is the issue of consent, which is seen quite differently by Michaela and Eve. Michaela is trying to puzzle things out. Unlike Eve, she accepts that making mistakes is part of being human.

9. Assorted KITs and CATs

ScaredyKIT and HistoryCAT: Kirkland Revels by Victoria Holt

Catherine's young husband, Gabriel, dies only a week after their return to his home, Kirkland Revels. The family thinks it's suicide, but Catherine doesn't believe it. Gabriel had been dreading his return home, and his fear was linked to the ruined Kirkland Abbey, not far from Kirkland Revels.

This is a classic Gothic: a spectre in monks robes, a family history of suicides, hidden passages, a strange aunt, a mad mother, an untrustworthy mother-in-law, multiple men with motives for getting rid of Gabriel, the heir. Catherine is in danger and doesn't know who she can trust. Safer to trust no one!

Victoriia Holt writes a good gothic. I enjoyed this one.

4. Australia and New Zealand
11. New Authors

Abomination by Ashley Goldberg

Told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of Ezra, a non-observant Jew, and his school-friend Yonatan, who is frum (strictly follows religious observances). They last met twenty years ago at Ezra's Bar Mitzvah. Up until then they had been close, but Rabbi Hirsch from the yeshiva both boys attended had been accused of molesting his primary school students, so Ezra's father had withdrawn Ezra from the school. Yonatan and his family were far more enmeshed in the Orthodox community where his father was an important and well-respected rabbi, and the community closed ranks. Hirsch's superiors spirited him out of the country so that he would not have to stand trial.

Yonatan is now a rabbi, married to the daughter of a highly regarded Talmudic scholar. He believed that, as much as possible, a Yehudi should live as their European ancestors did. On Shabbat, a fur-trimmed shtreimel on your head, your feet stockinged and a long black bekishe hanging past your knees. Ezra is a lawyer, working for a government department, where he subjugates his own values in order to implement the policies of a government he does not agree with.

It has been twenty years since Hirsch was accused of child abuse, but he has finally been extradited from Israel and is back in Melbourne to stand trial. Avraham Kliger, the brother of one of the victims, took the case to the police, and has spent years campaigning for Hirsch's prosecution. As a result he and his family were banished from the community. Yonatan is now questioning his beliefs and Ezra is falling apart. They meet again at a rally organised by Kliger.

This was really interesting, with lots of information about Orthodox Jewish beliefs and practices. The author drew on the reports from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which was set up by Julia Gillard's Labor Government, as a result of the activism of people like Manny Waks, Kliger's real-life counterpart. Waks, who was abused by two members of staff at the Melbourne Yeshiva Centre, was once a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox Jewish Hasidic community in Melbourne. He and his family were ostracised for making the abuse public.

Abomination won the Debut Fiction Award at the 72nd National Jewish Book Awards, a US award. It's quite a Melbourne book though, set in inner-city Carlton and the south-eastern suburbs where the Hasidic community lives.

Melbourne's eruv, one of the largest in the world thanks to urban sprawl, was ''built'' in 1997, enclosing St Kilda East and Caulfield within a continuous wire boundary. Later it was expanded to include Bentleigh, Carnegie and Moorabbin. The Council of Orthodox Synagogues is responsible for maintaining the eruv, and it is funded by a levy on synagogue members. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/cable-loop-lets-melbournes-orthodox-...

Hello pamelad and glad to finally see you on your new thread. Kudos for taking on the big books on your TBR list. I feel ya!

I've already added to my Wishlist with Seton's Avalon as a possible add-in to my Arthurian list for this year, and Cassandra at the Wedding. Boy, does this one sound interesting. And the idea of there being a medical reason for the downfall of the Tudors is fascinating. I've read more books than I ever intended about that era and medical problems would not surprise me.

Hope you have a good reading year and continued success with your tomes!

>120 pamelad: I have had this on my list for a while. Very interested in it as we know the area well - my mother in law lives in Carnegie.

>122 JayneCM: It's well worth reading, though I didn't have a lot of sympathy for Ezra. The Hasidic culture was interesting and a bit frightening. Hard on women.

>121 threadnsong: Welcome! I thought Medical Downfall of the Tudors promised more than it delivered, because there wasn't enough evidence. But since I knew so little about the Tudors, I was happy to learn more about them.

>114 pamelad: Fascinating theory about the Tudors!

6. Crime

Miss Morton and the English House Party Murder and Miss Morton and the Spirits of the Underworld by Catherine Lloyd

The first two books in a new series.

Miss Morton and the English House Party Murder

Miss Morton is actually Lady Caroline, but she doesn't use her title because she earns her own living as a companion. Her employer is the wealthy factory owner, Mrs Frogerton, who has employed Caroline to launch the well-dowered, beautiful Dorothy Frogerton into the ton. Caroline's aunt, Lady Eleanor, has invited her niece to a house party, and under sufferance has invited the Frogertons too. But something is very wrong at Lady Eleanor's home: the butler is missing and there is a suspicion that some of Lady Eleanor's guests are implicated in his disappearance. Then a body is discovered. Mrs Frogerton and Caroline investigate.

Mrs Frogerton, Caroline and Dorothy are the ongoing series characters. Another is the local doctor, the brusque and overly honest Doctor Harris. I predict that he and Caroline will fall in love but they are nowhere near it yet. I enjoyed the book, although as a mystery it is a bit of a mess.

Miss Morton and the Spirits of the Underworld

Mrs Frogerton has become interested in spiritualism and is attending seances run by Madame Lavinia. Concerned that her employer is donating too much money, Caroline attends a seance to see for herself. She invites Dr Harris as a back-up. Madame Lavinia reveals knowledge that leads Dr Harris to believe she could be a blackmailer, so he and Caroline return the next day, only to find Madame Lavinia dead. Again, Mrs Frogerton and Caroline investigate. Mrs Frogerton is an entertaining character, and so is her strong-minded daughter Dotty, but Caroline is a bit bland. Perhaps she will improve as the series goes on.

Once again, I enjoyed the book but the mystery was sub-par.

>125 pamelad: Glad to see your thoughts on Catherine Lloyd's other series! I'm enjoying the Kurland St. Mary books enough to finish the series, but I'm not sure I'll be tempted to seek out more by the author.

>126 christina_reads: They are free with KoboPlus, so they don’t need to be brilliant!

I forgot I was hosting the CalendarCAT, but remembered in time! It's tomorrow here.

6. Crime

A Curious Beginning by Deanna Raybourn

The first book in the Veronica Speedwell Victorian mystery series. Veronica owes a debt to Barbara Michaels' Amelia Peabody - the forthright personality, the competence, the adventurousness, the odd, practical clothing. Unlike Amelia, she's aggressively charmless and not at all a woman of Victorian times. She has been brought up by two elderly women who moved around a lot, and has always believed that she was a foundling, but on the death of her remaining guardian she becomes the centre of a nefarious plot and is in danger of kidnapping and possible murder. A kind Teutonic baron saves her from a kidnapping attempt and delivers her to his trusted friend Stoker, a man with a desperate past and many secrets that will be revealed over the series.

I didn't like this much because it consisted of a series of exciting but irrelevant events. Why do travel with a circus run by a resentful Siamese twin? Seems to be a lot of risk for not much reward, and doesn't add anything to the plot. Couldn't the author come up with a more likely mystery father than the Prince of Wales? I just groaned.

Raybourn has written another series, Lady Julia Grey. I'll give it a try in the hope that it's better than this one.

This book is available in KoboPlus.

According to this article in the Conversation it's the centenary of Yevgeny Zamatin's We.

I'm contemplating reading it again, because it's a very good book. Here's my review from 2011.

We by Yevegeny Zamyatin

I don't read a lot of science fiction, but this one is a classic. Like Doctor Zhivago it was banned in Russia, smuggled out, and published in Europe.

Zamyatin's book is a dystopian satire of life in Russia after the revolution. It is set 600 years in the future, in the land of One State, where the citizens are happy because they have no freedom. Where there is no freedom there is no crime. People live and work in glass buildings. There is no envy because everyone is equal, a cell in the collective organism of the One State.

The narrator is D-503, a mathematician and the builder of the Integral. His life is mathematically predictable, and therefore happy, until he meets I-303, falls in love and discovers the remnants of a soul. Can they escape the repression of the One state?

Zamyatin's book was the precursor of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was first published in 1921, in the early years of the revolution. It is well worth reading, and not just because it is the first satire on totalitarianism. Zamyatin has a sense of humour and a lightness of touch. Apparently he had synaesthesia, so the book is swamped in colour, odour and texture. He eliminates unnecessary words by recruiting old words for new functions. When you read that a functionary's eyes "javelined", you know just what Zamyatin means.

Highly recommended 4.5*

>130 pamelad: I read this book as part of a dystopian fiction class in university. Great review! I've pulled out the book for a re-read.

>130 pamelad: Interesting article, and it gives me another contender for the “Published in year ending in 24” BingoDog. I’m embarrassed to admit that this book first came to my attention only a couple of years ago.

>131 rabbitprincess: Thanks! I've started, and it's even better than I remember.

>132 Charon07: I hope you enjoy We. I'm going to count it as a re-read, and have lined up Joseph Roth's Hotel Savoy for the 24 square.

I started Anne Enright's The Wren, the Wren, but am giving up because the main character of the first section is abasing herself in a degrading relationship with an awful man and I don't want to read about it. I checked some reviews, and this theme appears to thread through three generations of women. I'll look for another of Enright's books. Any recommendations?

9. CATs February HistoryCAT

A Journey from this World to the Next by Henry Fielding

A man has just died and his spirit is in transit, making its way to the final judgement. On its way it meets spirits going the other way, back to earth to live a better life so that they can be accepted into heaven next time. One of them is Julian the Apostate, who has been sent back numerous times and lived many lives and another is Anne Boleyn. They tell their stories.

Fielding was a magistrate, known for compassion and incorruptibility. His satire wittily describes politics and corruption through history. It's incomplete and meandering, but in parts it is very funny.

It was published in 1749.

>130 pamelad: I enjoyed We when I read it a few years ago. I still think that I'd like to read the story from O-90's perspective.

>135 Jackie_K: I’ll keep O-90 in mind.

8. Books by Decade

Tension by E. M. Delafield 1920

I enjoyed this short, character-driven novel. The main character Edna, Lady Rossiter, is a snobbish, malicious, self-satisfied monster who delights in being the centre of attention. Her husband, Sir Julian, treats her with sardonic disdain. He is one of the directors of a commercial and technical college that has been set up to help working people advance themselves, and has just employed a young woman, Pauline Marchmont, as the Lady Superintendent. Edna has heard of Miss Marchmont, has judged her harshly, and wants her gone.

Edna is an appalling woman, and her machinations are both fascinating and horrifying. As she creates misery and havoc, she deludes herself that she's acting for the best. The other characters, even the minor ones, are also well-drawn.

Most of E. M. Delafield's husbands, including Sir Julian, are disappointing. People in her books marry people they don't much like because that's all there is to do, or because they refuse to look beneath the surface. So many of Delafield's married couples dislike one another. Sir Julian is disgusted by his wife's behaviour but does nothing to stop her.

1. Books I Own
12. BingoDOG Re-read a favourite book

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

2024 is the 100th anniversary of the publication of We, which was completed in 1921, smuggled out of Russia and first published in English. On this second reading the imagery made even more of an impression than it did the first time, with the hard straight lines and the cold blueness and transparency of the One State contrasting with the colourful chaos of the Ancient House and the world outside the walls. I thought of the assembly lines of the Charlie Chaplin film, Modern Times and the futuristic city of Fritz Lang's Metropolis because We isn't just a satire of totalitarianism, it's about industrialisation. Henry Ford's factories had adopted the principles of Taylorism, a system of scientific management, and his were the principles underlying the One State. Zamyatin took them further, by eradicating or minimising any human quality that did not directly contribute to the efficiency of the system.

George Orwell based 1984 on We. Orwell's review from 1946, manages to denigrate both We and Brave New World. It reminds me of the literary backbiting in Yellowface and does not give either book enough credit.

This Guardian article 1984 thoughtcrime? Does it matter that George Orwell pinched the plot? concludes that if Nineteen Eighty-Four had never existed, it is extremely doubtful Zamyatin's book would have come to fill the unique place Orwell's work now occupies. This may be true, but once again gives too little credit to We, without which 1984 might not have existed. More than two decades after Zamyatin's ground-breaking and prophetic book, after Stalin's purges and the Holocaust, Orwell built Brave New World on the foundation of We.

>138 pamelad: I hope to get to that one this year!

6. Crime

The Secret of the Lady's Maid by Darcie Wilde

The seventh book in the Rosalind Thorne series. Rosalind and her maid Amelia are out shopping when they come across a young woman, Cate Levitton, who appears to be known to Amelia. Cate collapses and Rosalind later finds out that she has been poisoned. Through Cate, Rosalind is drawn into the investigation of another poisoning, and a murder. Meanwhile, Adam Harkness, Bow street Runner and who is in love with Cate but far too poor to marry her, is caught up in a case of treason and because he is an honest man, his career, and perhaps even his life, is in danger.

The book took a long time to get going, with too many plot threads entwining, and too many characters. Rosalind is becoming annoying, and the romance with Adam looks like it will be drifting along forever.

3. Big Books
9. CalendarCAT and PrizeCAT
10. Historical Fiction Challenge

The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne

In 1945, during mass, the priest of a tiny Irish village berates Catherine Goggins, a sixteen-year-old pregnant girl, and banishes her immediately. On the bus to Dublin she makes a friend, a young gay man who is escaping a similar prejudiced, violent, priest-dominated place. There's nothing subtle about Boyne's book. Ireland in the forties is a fearful place, dominated by brutal, violent priests who enforce their own prejudices. People who don't follow the Church's rules deserve their punishment.

(Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1993, divorce did not become legal until 1995, and on International Women's Day there will be a vote on changing the a woman's place is in the home clause in the constitution.)

The main character is Cyril Avery, Catherine's son. As the adopted son of Charles Avery and his wife Maude, a well-regarded writer, Cyril is "not a real Avery". When Cyril is seven and Charles is being prosecuted for tax evasion, Cyril meets Julian, the son of Charles' solicitor Max Woodhead, and falls in love.

Initially I was enjoying the book, which really romps along, but I lost interest in Cyril when he married Julian's sister Elizabeth then deserted her at the reception. The book became a collection of episodes, and I felt that Cyril was a pawn being moved by the author through a series of events, many of them tragic. Too many of the characters were so much larger than life that they came across as caricatures, and there were too many coincidences. I remained entertained by the story, but became disengaged from the characters and thought "What's Boyne going to make happen to Cyril next?"

An entertaining read, with plenty of historical information about Ireland. It's big plus is that it fits in so many categories. It's Irish for St Patrick's day, won the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award (which is new to me), and is over 500 pages.

>139 Tess_W: Definitely worth a read and not too long. I read the Natasha Randall translation in the Vintage Books edition, which flows and does a good job of the imagery but sometimes lapses into anachronistic colloquialisms. Apparently there's another new one, by Bela Shayevich. I'm thinking re-reading Brave New world to see how much it borrows from We.

>140 pamelad: Sorry this one wasn't more enjoyable. You've validated my decision not to continue with the series.

>143 christina_reads: I've read a lot of mediocre books because I just wanted something undemanding, but there are lots of historical mystery series so I'm sure to find some good ones. I've started the first book in the Sebastian St Cyr series, What Angels Fear, which is going well but is darker. You can't have everything!

11. New Authors

What Angels Fear by C. S. Harris is the first book in the Sebastian St Cyr series. Sebastian, Viscount Devlin, is the youngest son (or is he?) of the Earl of Hendon, and since the deaths of his two older brothers, is now the heir. He was an intelligence officer in the Napoleonic Wars, and has nightmares about the carnage. The Tory government is determined to continue the war, while the Whigs would negotiate an end to it. With the Duke of York about to become Regent, the Tories and the Whigs are competing for his favour. When a young actress is found murdered, Julian is accused because his conviction and execution would benefit the Tories. He escapes arrest and goes into hiding, determined to find the real murder and clear his name.

I enjoyed this. Lots of historical detail, some interesting characters, and a page-turner of a plot. I'm not a fan of gore, so I could have done without the bloodthirsty psychopathic killer and thought that necrophilia was a bridge too far, but I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

For reading in bed, you need a book that's interesting enough, but not so gripping that you have to stay awake to finish it. Semicolon: The Past, Present and Future of a Misunderstood Mark started out well, but has descended into a superficial discussion of grammar books through the centuries, which could be interesting but is not!

>146 pamelad: Totally agree about that book. Here's what I wrote..."especially toward the end, the book rambled and wandered with personal asides that weren't that interesting to me. The * notes on the page annoyed me--they were too long and often spilled over into two pages--if was that important, incorporate it into the text!"

>145 pamelad: The St. Cyr series sounds interesting but I really don’t need another series.

>147 kac522: Thank you! I won't persevere.

>148 hailelib: It's good to know that it's there, just in case. There are so many historical mystery series!

9. CalendarCAT and PrizeCAT

The Green Road by Anne Enright

The Madigan family is dominated by Rosaleen, a selfish and manipulative woman. Three of her four children escape, one to the US, one to Africa and the third to Dublin. The responsible eldest daughter remains near home and tries to look after her demanding and ungrateful mother. When Rosaleen announces that she is going to sell the family home her four children return for one last Christmas celebration. Dan is the "spoiled priest", Emmet an international aid worker, Hanna a struggling, alcoholic actress with a baby, and Constance the responsible daughter who is married with two children and looks after her mother.

It's a character study of a family: the disappointed Rosaleen and the four children who have not attained the success that Rosaleen expected of them.

Not much happens, and it's not a happy book, but I liked the writing and the character studies and would recommend The Green Road.

We're having a heatwave, three days of 39C (102F). It's late in the year for it, only the fourth time in 100 years that it has happened in March.

2. Wish List
12. BingoDOG Epistolary

The Appeal by Janice Hallett

Someone has been murdered and someone is in jail for the crime, but we don't know who and neither do the two articled clerks who are wading through piles of emails and text messages because their boss, the barrister who prosecuted the case, now thinks that the wrong person has been convicted.

A two-year-old girl, Poppy, has been diagnosed with cancer and her grandfather, Martin Hayward, has been told that an expensive experimental drug is the best hope for her survival. He is the wealthiest man in the community, top of the social scale, and the director and manager of the local theatre group. All the protagonists are connected to the theatre group, which is preparing to put on the play All My Sons. They become involved in a quest to raise 250,000 pounds for Poppy's treatment.

As the clerks read through the emails and texts, they begin to doubt that the fund is above board but can't be sure who is involved in the fraud. The murder occurs towards the end of the book, and there are plenty of suspects.

I was drawn in by The Appeal and had to keep reading. It's not really fair play, because the barrister dribbles out information to his clerks late in the book. For example, it's ridiculous that the clerks aren't told who has been convicted of the murder. But I put those irritations aside and enjoyed the book.

12. BingoDOG Writer over 65

The Cuckoo's Child by Marjorie Eccles

Marjorie Eccles was born in 1926. Her most recent book was published in 2021, which is a good effort indeed! She is still living, so perhaps there will be another. The Cuckoo's Child was published in 2011, which makes her about 85 at the time.

The Cuckoo's Child is an historical mystery set mainly in Yorkshire in 1909. Laura, who has been doing volunteer work at a women's settlement house, is at a loose end when she has to stop so is happy to take on the job of organising the library of a mill-owner, Ainsley Beaumont. The other members of the household are Beaumont's twin grandchildren, Una and Gideon, and their mother, Amelia. The twin's father died in a terrible fire twenty years ago and is rarely mentioned. There is a big secret about the fire. Laura is an orphan, and she's beginning to wonder whether she has a connection to Ainsley Beaumont.

There's a big cast of characters, so there are plenty of suspects when a body is found in a mill pond. I enjoyed this tidy mystery.

>153 pamelad: I'm taking a BB for that one! I like historical mysteries especially if they are written by an older author.

It seems unusual to see a "big cast of characters" and "tidy mystery" in the same sentence!

>154 VivienneR: It's tidy in the sense that the threads are tied up with no loose ends, and the characters bend to suit the plot. An old-fashioned mystery. None of that post-modern, unreliable narrator metafiction!

I hope you like it.

It's unlikely that I'll complete my Historical Romance BingoDOG because it's becoming difficult to find historical romances that I want to read, so I'm going to use romances to fill in a few squares in this thread.

2. A book with an ugly cover Unforgivable by Joanna Chambers
3. A book with nothing on the cover but the title and author The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett
6. Published in year ending in 24 The Lady Plays with Fire by Susanna Craig 2024
9. A book from one of the libraries listed under the "Similar libraries" featured on your LT profile page Pirate Next Door by Jennifer Ashley
10. About friendship Satyr's Son by Lucinda Brant
12. Paper-based item in plot When the Marquess Was Mine by Caroline Linden
15. Person's name in title Miss Gordon's Mistake by Anita Mills
17. A book with fewer than 100 copies on LT That Sweet Enemy by Dinah Dean
20. Featuring water The Pirate Hunter by Jennifer Ashley

>13 pamelad: Done! Now I only have 6 squares to go.

>153 pamelad: This sound like a book I would enjoy. I will add to to my very, very, very long Wishlist and maybe it will get moved to my very long TBR list later on in the year.

>152 pamelad: I have The Appeal on my TBR shelves. Thanks for your caveat about fair play -- I'll keep that in mind as I read!

I've taken quite a few BB's from your reads!

>157 Zozette: I hope you like it, if you get to it!

>158 christina_reads: Perhaps if you know you’re going to be messed around, it won’t be annoying.

>159 Tess_W: I hope you enjoy them, Tess.

Today I’ve been to Arthur Boyd’s gallery, Bundanon, and am now in Kiama, NSW. Canberra tomorrow. Yesterday Fitzroy Falls. Will say more when I’m home again.

Happy trails!

Looking forward to hearing all the details of your travels.

I've been on a road trip with a friend to the NSW Southern Highlands and Canberra. We stopped first in in Bundanoon, a pretty little town in the Southern Highlands of NSW and visited the Fitzroy Falls and another small town, Robertson, which has lots of working artists and galleries. We stayed in a guesthouse which was pretty rather than practical. In the guest lounge there was a wall of bookshelves on which all the books had their spines facing towards the wall and the pages facing out. Enough said!


Fitzroy Falls

From Bundanoon we did a too-exciting drive across the mountains to Bundanon along a steep winding road with lots of hairpin bends, so I was grateful to be driving a Corolla rather than a mammoth SUV. Bundanon is an art gallery on land bequeathed by a famous Australian artist, Arthur Boyd. It's a beautiful spot on the Shoalhaven River. From there we went to Kiama, on the coast, and on to Canberra where we went to the Botanical Gardens, the Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery. The portrait gallery is very much improved. It used to have lots of paintings of ancient dignitaries, but now there's much more variety.

On the way home from Canberra we stopped in Gundagai. It's famous for the dog on the tuckerbox and the song The Road to Gundagai. I've driven past the town many times without stopping, but it's worth a stop. Lots of historic buildings. It was Saturday morning and Gundagai was bustling with farmers who come into town and catch up for a chat. We plan to stop there again on the next trip up the Hume Highway so we can check out the Niagara Cafe, which looks fabulous.

Sounds like a great trip. My husband was watching a home improvement show recently and they put the books spine in on the shelves - I thought it looked dumb.

>163 pamelad: Sounds lovely!
>164 dudes22: I've seen that before and wondered why. Copyright! https://www.jasmine-roth.com/blogs/design-build/hgtv-secret-revealed-why-books-a...

>163 pamelad: lovely photo!

>163 pamelad: wow, what an excellent sounding trip.

>165 Tess_W: well I never! Spines out in our house, for the avoidance of doubt.

>165 Tess_W: love the comments.

>163 pamelad: That does sound like a great trip - beautiful scenery. I love road trips and I am hoping we will be able to fit one in soon.

Books with their spines inward make absolutely no sense!

>163 pamelad: That's a great picture of the falls! Which Fitzroy are they named for?

>165 Tess_W: - I figured it was something like that.

>164 dudes22:, >165 Tess_W: The copyright issue makes sense, but displaying books backward when there's no need makes none!

>166 fuzzi: Stole the photo from the Internet! There's a path around the falls with lots of lookouts so you can see them from many perspectives. For anyone who who's planning to come to Australia, we nod and smile and say hello to total strangers we pass on walks. Tourists often don't respond, and it's quite off-putting.

>167 Helenliz: We (my friend Tim and I) planned it as a birthday trip two years' ago (our birthdays are two days apart in early March and these days we go away instead of giving presents), but there were floods.

>169 DeltaQueen50: I hope you get to go on a trip soon. Is spring a good time to travel in Canada?

>170 hailelib: Charles Augustus FitzRoy, 10th governor of NSW, 2 August 1846 – 28 January 1855. Often there would be an Aboriginal name as well, but I haven't found it.

What a fantastic sounding trip!

I love a road trip too, and it sounds like you hit the jackpot with this one!

>172 pamelad: here in the American South (North Carolina specifically, but I've noticed it elsewhere) most people smile, wave, are pleasant as you've described. I have observed in the urban areas a disconnect from society, a coolness towards others. And I recall a more hands-off attitude where I grew up, in Connecticut (New England).

Sounds like you're having a great adventure! And if you kept yourself from putting all those books right way round, you're a better person than me ;-D

>172 pamelad: Canada is so large that conditions vary greatly across the country but here on the West Coast we tend to have milder winters and longer springs. Depending on the weather, I think late April or early May would be a wonderful time to be on the road.

>176 mstrust: It would have taken many hours and a ladder!

>177 DeltaQueen50: Happy travels!

9. PrizeCAT

Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki Akutagawa Prize

A gentle, melancholy novella. Taro is divorced, isolated from his family and bored by his job. His apartment building is about to be demolished, to be replaced by one bigger and more modern, and he is one of the few remaining tenants. He runs across another tenant, Nishi, as she is climbing up to a balcony to get a better view of a nearby house. The blue house, built in the sixties, is featured in a book, Spring Garden, and Nishi has been fascinated by it for years. She and Taro become friends and he is drawn into her interest in the blue house.

It's hard to say what this novella is about. It's more a mood, a narrative of time passing. The blue house seems to stand as symbol of individuality and longevity. It, adn the friendship with Nishi, begin to rouse Taro from his apathy.

9. CalendarCAT and PrizeCAT Davy Byrne's Irish Writing Award

Foster by Claire Keegan

This is a re-read for our book club. We all liked Small Things Like These, and Foster is even shorter. I enjoyed it again, and followed up with the film, The Quiet Girl, which is based on the book. (For people in Australia, it's on SBS on Demand but is leaving in a fortnight.)

>163 pamelad: That sounds like a wonderful day trip! Thank you for the picture. It reminds me of the Blue Mountains.

About six or seven years ago it was all the rage on bookish social media (Instagram etc.) to turn your books around on the shelves. I think it is over now. I never understood how anyone could find their books if they look all the same - I love my colorful and lively bookshelves! But I think it is a trend to have all beige and colorless interiors (there have been many articles about this in Germany, even wondering if this might harm the development of children because they don't see any colors anymore when they are indoors).

I have a difficult time finding books with their spine where I see it. Makes no sense, when not for copyright purposes to do that. Besides, who wants to collect that dust on each individual page? I tried grouping all the like colored spines together, didn't like that either! I like an electric bookshelf!

>180 MissBrangwen: We were also reminded of the Blue Mountains. Spectacular views but without the crowds.

>181 Tess_W: Grouping by colour might work if you had very few books, but otherwise you'd never find the book you wanted. That might be the point. If you shelve your books by size or colour, or with spines to the back, it could be because you won't need to find a book again.

What's an electric bookshelf? One on an ereader? A dynamic arrangement?

We have off-white walls but they are colorful, none the less, because of all the books on the many shelves. Also, our son was told when his son was born early to have lots of strong colors in his environment to help his development.

>183 hailelib: To quote Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room. I have them all through the house, spines out, as they should be. As you say, they're nice and colourful.

8. Books by Decade Sixties

The Weather at Tregulla by Stella Gibbons

Una's mother has just died and her father is grief-stricken and drinking too much. He's never been particularly fond of the intense and demanding Una, who desperately wants to get out of the tiny Cornish town of Tregulla and go to London to become an actress. There's not enough money, and Una is losing hope, so she's excited to meet the Bohemian siblings Emmaline and Terrence. Una falls in love with Terrence, an artist, but he can't be bothered.

Meanwhile, Una's childhood friend Barnabus, the elder son of the village's wealthiest and longest-established best family, has fallen in love with Emmaline. Hugo, Barnabus's younger brother, who is recovering from a serious a serious car crash, is suffering not just from his injuries but from unrequited love for Una.

Gibbons clearly loves the Cornish countryside, and these unsuitable love affairs play out over a beautiful Cornish summer. She has sympathy for her flawed, well-rounded middle-class characters, but none for Terrence's and Emmaline's villainous working-class friends, who don't know how to behave.

I enjoyed the book, which was first published in 1962. Like many British books of that time and earlier it's steeped in class-consciousness, which I judge harshly but am interested in all the same. This is the era of the working-class novel - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top - and from he evidence of The Weather at Tregulla, Stella Gibbons is uneasy.

10. Historical Fiction Challenge

Deception aka If I Were You by Joan Aiken

I started Deception thinking it was an historical romance, but while it's historical, it's not a romance. Alvey and Louisa are students at a girls' school. They're identical in appearance, but quite different in character and have never been friends. Louisa has been sent to school to get her out of the way because she desperately wants to be a missionary and has been nagging her parents to death. On top of that, she's an unpleasant person and, as Avery is to discover, no one in her family likes her. Avery is alone in the world. Her aunt in America sent her to England, where her parents came from, to get an education so she could make her own living, but has since died, and Alvey has been teaching at the school. When Louisa's parents call for her to return home, she persuades Alvey to take her place so that she, Louisa, can travel to India to become a missionary. This is all very hard to swallow, but best to do it and move on because there's a lot of book to go.

Avey settles in with Louisa's family and loves it there, despite the remarkable number of tragedies and disasters that befall the family. She's such a help that everyone except for Louisa's parents, who have little interest in their children, realises that she's not Louisa.

This was a light and entertaining read, but a bit too long and slow for my taste. It has touches of Gothic, a bit of mystery, and hints of romance.

8. Books by Decade Seventies

Castle Barebane by Joan Aiken

I considered putting this in my romance thread, but there's not a lot of romance. It's a gothic melodrama, which I liked for Aiken's writing style, her sardonic observations of the New York upper crust and the appealing heroine.

It begins in New York, where Valla, a journalist, is engaged to Bennett. She's beginning to realise that she doesn't fit into his milieu and will never be welcomed by his family, so when her half-brother, Nils, asks her to go to England to take care of his children for a short time, she agrees. When she gets to England Valla finds her brother and his wife missing and their house for let. She finds the children in desperate straits and applies to their great aunts for help. They send Valla and the two children to stay in a dilapidated Scottish Castle looked after by a grumpy old woman.

There are a lot of plot threads, and some of them are ludicrous. Valla's brother Nils is an evil man, and his closest friend is even worse. There's a Jack the Ripper clone on the loose, the Beast of Bermondsey. Jannie, the younger child behaves very oddly. The old lady in the castle has a mysterious, tragic history. There's a helpful doctor who never wants to marry, and a gout-ridden magazine editor who is taken with Valla. Towards the end of the book it seems that Aiken has lost patience with her people and her plot. The threads converge and there's a mass killing: shootings, stabbings, drownings, toppling from a cliff, a whole boat-crew being sucked into quicksand.

Castle Barebane was a mess, but I enjoyed it.

9. CalendarCAT

Madam by Mrs Oliphant

Grace Trevanian's husband married her in Europe when she was in desperate circumstances and treated her despicably for most of their marriage. Despite his ill-treatment Grace nursed the querulous invalid devotedly, but days from his demise the vicious old man re-wrote his will to punish her further. I won't say how, because that would destroy the suspense.

Rosalind is Grace's stepdaughter, and calls her mother because Grace is the only mother Rosalind has ever known. She is loyal to Grace despite wicked rumours, most of them perpetrated by the family nurse who brought up Rosalind and her four half-brothers and sisters. The nurse has tried to poison the younger children's minds against their mother, and has carried malicious stories to Grace's husband.

Somewhere I read that this was Margaret Oliphant's favourite of her books. It has less humour than the Carlingford series because Grace is such a tragic figure, and so ill-treated, but there is some in the sketches of the minor characters, particularly Aunt Sophy. I was very much engaged because I had to find out what would happen to Grace and Rosalind.

>188 pamelad: I've read the Carlingford books and Hester, but hadn't heard of this one. It sounds interesting; how/where did you find it?

>189 kac522: I went looking for authors born in April for the CalendarCAT and decided on Mrs Oliphant, then read more about her books and came across the snippet that Madam was her favourite (Wikipedia perhaps?) so decided to read it. I started Hester a while ago, but she annoyed me so I put the book down and didn't pick it up again. I should give her another try.

I downloaded the book from KoboPlus, but it's probably available on Gutenberg as well.

Margaret Oliphant's life was tragic. She outlived all her children. Perhaps there is some of her in Grace Trevanian.

>190 pamelad: Actually, I didn't like Hester all that much--I didn't like any of the characters, but I did finish it. There was a small group read of Hester a couple of years ago. Probably some spoilers here, but it will give you an idea: https://www.librarything.com/topic/343001

I may pull Madam down from Project Gutenberg. I think I have The Curate in Charge downloaded somewhere, too. Last year I got The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow and Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund (two novellas), which is a Persephone release. Haven't read it yet; maybe for Victober.

When I was reading the Carlingford novels, I found a dissertation on the series by Birgit Kamper, which added a lot to my enjoyment of the series. She even had a little map of Carlingford, which was helpful.

>191 kac522: I can recommend The Curate in Charge.

Squire Arden has been on my wish list since NinieB mentioned it, so I've just downloaded it and will give it a try. There are a few versions on KoboPlus, so this time I'll be careful to choose one with British spelling. The changed spelling in Madam made me uneasy, because I wondered whether other things had been changed too.

11. New Authors

My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley

Helen, known as Hen, divorced her children's father, an awful man who insisted on painful access visits with his two daughters, Bridget and Michelle. She had married because that's what everyone did in the seventies and she wanted to be normal. Bridget narrates the sad history of her relationship with her mother, whom Bridget castigates as performing normality and refusing to engage with life. But as the book goes on, Bridget's own problems begin to appear.

My Phantoms describes the characters of these two women with wit and subtlety, but I was pleased that it was short because I found it so very depressing.

>182 pamelad: Ha Ha...I sure butchered that post! How about an eclectic shelf!

>194 Tess_W: Eclectic makes sense!

>13 pamelad: I've moved a few books around and now I have only four Bingo squares to go. I just found one on KoboPlus for the Warriors square, which also fits my last Historical Challenge option (speculative): Sworn Soldier - What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher is the sequel to What Moves the Dead. I have Little Man, What Now for the little/big square, so that will leave two: Food or Cooking and Specific Knowledge.

6. Crime

The Art of Love aka Villa on the Riviera by Elizabeth Edmondson

It's hard to classify this book because there's no central murder, which makes it not quite a crime novel, and a bit of romance that is too much in the background to call the book a romance. It's quite leisurely, so there's not a lot of suspense, but it did remind me a little of Mary Stewart's romantic suspense novels. It's definitely historical fiction, because it's set in the thirties.

The heroine, Polly Smith, is engaged to Roger, a pompous doctor who doesn't listen to her and likes to tell her what to do. She's an artist but Roger expects that she will give it up when she marries. They're planning on an overseas honeymoon, so Polly needs to get a passport, but at Somerset House she finds that there is no birth certificate in her name, and the woman who Polly thought was her mother reluctantly tells Polly that she is adopted. Polly ends up having a holiday in the Riviera, staying with Oliver, a gay man who moves in the same artistic circles she does, who has become a good friend.

The romantic interest is Max, who works for Special Branch and also met Polly through her work as an artist. He is investigating the villain to whom his sister is engaged. The plot involves art forgery, a missing husband, and a plot to destabilise the political system of the western world.

This is not literature. I enjoyed it, so much so that I've started another, The Frozen Lake.

6. Crime

The Frozen Lake by Elizabeth Edmonston

It's 1936 and the lake near the homes of the Richardson and the Grindley families has frozen solid for the first time in sixteen years. Family members return after many years' absence, as does a young man who was there as a boy and experienced something awful that has lodged in his sub-conscious ever since. Family secrets are uncovered.

There's a bit of romance, a few mysteries, British Fascists, an evil grandmother and her evil, dead son, a Jewish refugee, a woman in disguise, a great-aunt in purple, a banished divorcee. You can see the resolutions of the plot threads from a mile away, which isn't a problem to me because I'm looking for a happy ending and don't want a lot of suspense on the way.

A pleasant, cosy read. I enjoyed it.

Wow! What a great list of books about families. I've enjoyed catching up with your thread this evening and reading about your book adventures.

And also, glad you liked the St Cyr first book! They are an engaging series. I plan to read the next one later this spring - probably June to give myself a bit of a break. There is darkness in this series, that's for sure.

>198 threadnsong: Interesting. I hadn't deliberately sought out books about families, but there they are! It must be because families are so important and such a common theme.

I'm having a break from St Cyr for just that reason. My recent Elizabeth Edmondson reads are much lighter, and hit the spot! I've just found a pile of her books in KindleUnlimited, listed under the name of Elizabeth Aston and have borrowed one of them, The True Darcy Spirit on Overdrive for a test read.

1. Books I Own
11. New Authors

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, and Bernstein is on Granta's list of Best British novelists.

This short book appears to be about survivors' guilt. The narrator is the youngest child of a large family and has been brought up to serve the needs of her siblings, so when her oldest brother is abandoned by his wife and children (not surprisingly when you read his expectations of them) he calls on the narrator to come to his remote northern village to look after him. He has bought and restored the house where generations of his family once lived before being banished, and seems to be respected by the local community. The narrator, however, arouses suspicion, and the locals blame her for the deaths of animals and the blighting of crops.

The book is experimental in that it has long, run-on sentences (not a problem to me) and no plot (huge problem!) I think she might be poisoning her brother, but that sounds like a plot, so she probably isn't.

>196 pamelad: >197 pamelad: The Elizabeth Edmondson books sound like they'd be up my alley! I have read her Austen spinoffs under the name Elizabeth Aston and remember liking them -- I think I still have my copy of Mr. Darcy's Daughters. And I see I have one of her more traditional mysteries, A Man of Some Repute, on my TBR shelves!

>201 christina_reads: I read the series that starts with A Man of Some Repute. Nice, light, undemanding reads.

I am off to the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape in the west of Victoria.

>203 pamelad: Sounds lovely!

Budj Bim is in Gunditjmara Country. On 30 March 2007 the Federal Court of Australia delivered a consent determination over almost 140,000 hectares across the southwest of Victoria, recognising the Gunditjmara People’s native title rights and interests across our traditional homelands and waters. The Gunditjmara were able to demonstrate a continuous connection to their land over more than 6000 years, and the network of channels used for capturing eels is the world's oldest evidence of farming. In 2019 the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape became a World Heritage Site.

Budj Bim is the volcano, once known as Mount Eccles but now given back its original name. Our guide, Luke, told us something of the Gunditjmara stories about Budj Bim and the history of the land. Spectacular scenery. At the foot there's a visitors' centre with audio-visual displays, where we learned something of the history of Aboriginal resistance to the colonists' takeover of Aboriginal land. We travelled by bus to an Aboriginal Protected area where we saw eel channels and the remains of a village. There's a memorial to the massacres of Aboriginal people, and Luke pointed out that there has never been an official, Government memorial.

We had an eel-based lunch at Tae Rak (aka Lake Condah), heard about the life cycle of the eel (very odd!) and went to another Aboriginal Protected Area with another guide, Reuben, to see more channels.

All interesting, and quite confronting. The Gunditjmara people are raising money to buy back more of their land. In the past that wasn't possible because the pastoralists were so racist, but the current generation is more cooperative.

1. Books I Own

Best in Class: Essential Wisdom from Real Student Writing by Tim Clancy

Over his teaching career, Clancy, collected samples of entertaining writing from his students' English essays and book reports. This very short, amusing book was a Kindle bargain.

6. Crime

A Reputation Dies by Alice Chetwynd Ley

Ley, A British author, wrote competent steamless romances modelled on Georgette Heyer's, but in this book, the first in the Rutherford Trilogy, she's dipped her toe into crime. There's blackmail and a murder, investigated by Justin Rutherford, his niece Andrea, and a Bow Street runner who used to be Captain Rutherford's sergeant.

A workmanlike attempt, it's free in KindleUnlimited.

9. PrizeCAT Comedy Women In Print, Published Novel, 2022

Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen

It's 1994 in Northern Ireland and no one really believes in the Peace Process. Maeve and her two friends are waiting for the A-level results that will determine whether they can escape their embattled town for university elsewhere. In the meantime they take jobs in a shirt factory run by Handy Andy, an Englishman who drives a Jag. Any young female factory worker who accepts a lift home from Andy could get more than she bargains for.

The factory is unusual in that the workforce is integrated. The book really brought home to me how little contact there was between Catholics and Protestants, at least in this town. Maeve has no time for sectarian violence, but she really does loathe Protestants.

Factory Girls won an award for comic writing, but the comedy is so very black. The people in this town are without hope: their only option is to get away.

Worth reading. I've read other books about the Troubles written from the Catholic perspective - Milkman, Trespasses - all by women and blackly humorous, but never one from a Protestant.

Yes I have. Troubles by J G Farrell. Another book I've read about the Troubles is We Always Treat Women Too well by Raymond Queneau.

>207 pamelad: Queneau?? Him of Zazie dans le métro?? Okay, that's another one for the list...

>208 MissWatson: Yes. That's the Queneau! It's a satire and is quite ridiculous, with IRA men quoting James Joyce. There's an absolute bloodbath and it's all very, very wrong. I put my 21st century sensibilities and my political leanings aside, and found it very funny. It's a response to No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a truly revolting crime novel by James Hadley Chase.

I'd like to read Zazie in the Metro, but so far haven't found an English translation. The Sunday of Life is also on my wish list.

Actually, the English translations are available. It's just that $15.99 is a lot to pay for an ebook, and I've been too frugal to do it.

>205 pamelad: All sounds wonderful except for the eel-based lunch!

>209 pamelad: Ouch! That's indeed a heavy price to pay.

>211 MissWatson: I thought for a moment that it was the eel lunch that was a high price to pay!

>210 Tess_W: We had eel arancini, eel pate and a sushi-looking thing of eel wrapped in eel skin with crispy eel skin on top (crispy eel skin is really nasty!). My friend Tim said that the best things in the eel-based lunch were the goat cheese, the olives and the macadamia nuts.

10. Historical Fiction Challenge

Voyage of Innocence by Elizabeth Edmonson

Lately I've read a few books by Edmondson. They're light, engaging reads written with an innocuous, grammatical style. You know what I mean by innocuous - you're not forever tripping up against grating word choices, grammatical errors and obvious anachronisms, or having to re-read sentences in order to make sense of them. There's enough drama and mystery to keep you interested, and you know that the main character will end up OK. Unfortunately, Voyage of Innocence wasn't up to scratch. It started at the end, with the main character, Vee, apparently having fallen overboard from a ship that has just left Port Said. Obviously that can't be true, so we go back a few days and get inside Vee's head to follow her thoughts about a horde of people we've never heard about and her guilt at betraying them. Then we go back to the beginning again and fill in the gaps.

I found the book far too confusing, because it took me until half-way through to sort out who all the characters were. The main characters are three young women: Vee, who embraces communism; Claudia, who is an enthusiastic fascist; and Lally, who is American and the voice of reason. There's a lot of political drama going on, and Edmonson is far too superficial a writer to make sense of it. I don't read many books about WWII for just this reason: most of them are trite and exploitative. Usually I stick to books written at the time, or soon after, by people who lived through what they were writing about.

For now I've put this in the Historical Fiction Challenge category under 2. Set in a different country. I'm going to expand the topic to include a list of all the historical fiction I read, rather than adding books to already completed options.

One to go: 5. Speculative element. I have What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher, which will also fill the warrior square in the BingoDOG.

Reading for May.

1. Finish the Historical Fiction Challenge with What Feasts at Night, speculative (also BingoDOG).
2. Finish the BingoDOG:
Food or Cooking - Strange Weather in Tokyo (also for the PrizeCAT). There are quite a few descriptions of food. They eat a lot of eel!
Warrior - What Feasts at Night
Big or Little - Little Man, What Now? by Hans Fallada
Specific Knowledge - still thinking about this one. Something about chemistry or biology? I'll check the wish list.

Just had an idea for the Specific Knowledge square. Something Australian. Perhaps I've already read a book that will fit.

>163 pamelad: Just catching up on threads so I have to go back a bit. Your road trip must have been fantastic. I'm always impressed by the varying landscapes of Australia.

Your thread takes me a long time to read because it has me searching for books, making lists, etc. My bookshelves (physical and electronic) are bursting at the seams.

>215 VivienneR: I find the same with your thread, Vivienne.

>205 pamelad: What an exciting trip and thank you for this history of this part of Australia. I know about the conflicts between the settlers and Aboriginal peoples, but to have this much specific history about southwest Australia is fascinating. And channels to hunt eels! How amazing.

Glad to be catching up with where your reading has led you.

>217 threadnsong: Regarding colonisation, the more you find out the worse it gets. The Yoorrook Indigenous truth-telling inquiry is occurring in Victoria right now.

Loved catching up on your thread and picking up a few book bullets. Your road trip sounded wonderful.

>219 LisaMorr: We saw some spectacular scenery and realised that there are so many parts of Australia we've never been. Because the distances are so large it's easier to fly to a destination and rent a car, so we've missed the places in between.

Pleased to contribute some book bullets!

This week we've been for a day trip to Bendigo, a Gold Rush city 150 km from Melbourne. The Bendigo Art Gallery had an exhibition from the Musée Carnavalet - Paris: Impressions of Life 1880 - 1925. Lots to see: paintings, posters, newsreels, photographs, clothes, menus. I'd like to see Paris again, and would definitely visit the Musée Carnavalet.

9. PrizeCAT
11. BingoDOG

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami won the Tanizaki Prize and was shortlisted for the Independent foreign Fiction Prize and the Man Asian Literature Prize.

Tsukiko works in an office and spends many evenings in a neighbourhood bar, where she comes across her old Japanese teacher. Despite the difference in their ages - Tsukiko is about forty and the man she calls Sensei has a son in his fifties, so must be in his seventies - they understand one another and enjoy each other's company. Initially they don't arrange to meet, but run into one another fortuitously.

The book consists of discrete incidents that could almost stand alone. A constant theme is food, which is described in appreciative detail and marks the changing seasons. The changing weather also contributes to the sense of time passing, which is ominous because Sensei is so much older than Tsukiko that their time together can only be short.

This short, strange book melds melancholy with humour. I enjoyed it.

I'm counting it for the Food square in the BingoDOG becasue there's quite a food focus.

>221 pamelad: BB for me!

>188 pamelad: I'm adding this to my TBRs, and I'll probably download the Project Gutenberg version when I'm ready to read it. I've read and enjoyed the Carlingford novels, but I haven't read any of her other works.

6. Crime

Lady of Mallow by Dorothy Eden was first published in 1960, the same year as Victoria Holt's Mistress of Mellyn, perhaps to cash in on Mellyn's popularity. Eden isn't as engaging a writer as Holt, but I enjoyed Mallow and will read more of Eden's books, mainly because they're available free on KoboPlus. This was an utterly undemanding read.

Sarah Mildmay is engaged to the heir of Mallow. He's the cousin of the original heir, Blane, who ran away to sea at sixteen and had been presumed dead. A man appears, accompanied by a wife and a son who closely resembles a portrait of Blane as a child, and claims the estate. Sarah goes undercover as a governess to collect evidence that the claimant is a fraud.

The plot didn't hang together all that well, but I was entertained.

Lady of Mallow is a gothic novel, which barely fits into the Crime category, so I need a sub-category for gothic and romantic-suspense novels.

>223 cbl_tn: I hope you enjoy Madam. I'll probably try more of her non-Carlingford novels.

>221 pamelad: I borrowed it from KoboPlus, which has a much wider range of books than KindleUnlimited. It would be great if ereaders were all compatible and we could get books from any service we wanted, like streaming television!

>220 pamelad: Oh! I love that museum. It was where I first saw a real, live painting by Van Gogh and finally understood what a magnificent artist he was. How great that they are bringing some of these works to your part of the world.

>226 threadnsong: And it's good that the exhibition is in a regional city. I've been to lots of international exhibitions in capital cities, but not so many in the country.

6. Crime
Romantic Suspense and Gothic

Ravenscroft by Dorothy Eden

On the death of their father, a doctor, Bella and Lally come to London to live with their father's cousin and to seek employment. But their relative has moved away and they are taken in by an elderly lady, Aunt Aggie. It doesn't take long for them to realise that the old lady is not what she seems, and that they are trapped. Luckily the grief-stricken Guy Raven, who is searching for a meaning in life after the death of his young wife and newly-born son, is passing in the street with his old friend Doctor Bushey and hears Bella's cries for help.

Aunt Aggie and her evil son Noah are determined to take their revenge on Guy, Bella and Lally.

Dorothy Eden was born in New Zealand and moved to London as an adult. Ravenscroft was first published in 1964. I do enjoy a vintage Gothic, so am pleased to find a selection of Eden's books in KoboPlus and have already started a third, Darkwater.

9. CalendarCAT

The Judgement of Eve by May Sinclair

Aggie takes her time to choose a husband and her final choice comes down to two men. She marries Arnold because with him she believes she will have an intellectual life, but eight pregnancies in as many years destroy her health and leave her with no time for anything other than domestic labour. The once supportive Arnold shows himself to be selfish and petulant.

Aggie's younger sister marries John, the man Aggie refused. He would have been a better choice.

May Sinclair was a suffragist whose youth was spent caring for four dying brothers. Her views of marriage and the choices open to women, as evidenced by this novella, were bleak. It's well worth reading, but it's depressing.

>229 pamelad: I think this is the same author who wrote The Life and Death of Harriet Frean. I read that novella recently and really liked it. Also has feminist themes with a bleak look at options for women in the Victorian era and early 1900s. Have you read that one? I'll look for The Judgment of Eve.

>230 japaul22: Yes, same author. The Life and Death of Harriet Frean has stayed with me - the perils of obedience. I also enjoyed The Three Sisters and have The Belfry on my wish list.

And The Tree of Heaven was gripping because Sinclair wrote it during WWI, so it gives the perspective of the people at home.

>220 pamelad: I have been to the Musee de Carnavalet (2007). I loved seeing in person some of the paintings that I use(d) to teach World History. The Louvre is wonderful, but I really liked the feel of the smaller and more historic Carnavalet.

>228 pamelad: Ravenscroft sounds good. With the name Guy Raven, the hero should be tall, dark, and handsome.

>232 Tess_W: I'd never heard of the Musee de Carnavalet before this exhibition, and would really like to see it. I also like smaller galleries. The Louvre and MOMA, for example, are overwhelming. If you lived nearby you'd be able to visit often and see a section at a time rather than trying to take them all in at once.

>233 NinieB: Guy Raven is problematical and there's a nasty incident early on. I know he's grief-stricken, but that's no excuse for being so nasty to Bella. I think he is tall, dark and handsome and if he's not he should be.

6. Crime
Romantic Suspense and Gothic

Darkwater by Dorothy Eden

Fanny Davenport's parents died when she was a small child and she has lived at Darkwater, in Dartmoor, ever since with her guardian, whom she calls Uncle Edgar, and his family. As a poor relation, and much more beautiful than the daughter of the house, she is resented and exploited, treated almost like an upper servant. Fanny's cousin George was injured during the Crimean War and has gone off his rocker, but his family can't see how dangerous he is.

When her uncle's younger brother dies in China, he leaves his two children to the guardianship of Uncle Edgar, and Fanny us sent to pick them up from the port. They're accompanied by a Chinese servant and, unexpectedly, by a young man called Adam Marsh who Fanny believes to be the man from the shipping company. Adam Marsh reappears at Darkwater, where he might be keeping an eye on the children and Fanny, or perhaps not. Is he a villain?

There's a murder, an escaped prisoner, the eerie surroundings of the moors, a haunted room, a trapped bird that portends death, and Fanny's impending 21st birthday, when she's being pressured to make a will. What does she own? All the ingredients of a good Gothic.

>234 pamelad: I think that's true. When I lived in London I went through every room of the British Museum, National Gallery & National Portrait gallery, but I did it over 4 years. I had a map & I'd tick off the rooms I saw each time. These days, when on a day trip, I tend to pick a smaller museum - less crowded, for one thing.

I like seeing what you're reading an a line or two about the author, putting them into context.

>236 Helenliz: That's a good way of making sure you see everything. If you were still living in London, you might be tempted to do it again, because things change.

It's often women writers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who make me think, "Where did that book come from?"

10. Historical Fiction Challenge

What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher

Alex Easton, the sworn soldier from What Moves the Dead is back in her homeland, Gallacia, with her friend and colleague Angus, and Miss Potter the mycologist. Alex and Angus have arrived at Alex's hunting lodge only to find that the caretaker is dead, apparently killed by a morai who sits on a victim's chest and steals their breath. They need to get the lodge in order for Miss Potter's funghi-hunting visit, but the presence of the morai makes it hard to find a housekeeper, so they have to employ the fractious Widow Botezatu, who has the benefit of being highly entertaining. Everyone is entertaining: it's a very funny book.

Alex's position as a sworn soldier reminds me of the sworn virgins of Albania, Last of the Burrnesha, who take a vow of celibacy and live as men. I'm amused by the way Kingfisher addresses the pronoun problem: there's a range of them and priests, for example, get their own. Alex uses var.

The funghi in What Moves the Dead were a bit more special than the morai in this book, but it's a good sequel and I enjoyed it.

6. Crime
Romantic Suspense and Gothic

Winterwood by Dorothy Eden

The heroine, Lavinia Hurst, has a desperate past - her brother is in jail for manslaughter - and has been compelled to take a position as a companion to her horrible cousin. They're in Venice, where she befriends a young girl, Flora, in a wheelchair, and despite her better judgement, agrees to become her carer and return to England with the girl's family.

There's a dying aunt with a fortune to leave, a shady cousin who wants to marry Lavinia, Flora's mad mother and badly-behaved little brother, and Flora's worried father. Lavinia falls in love with the worried father despite there being no future with him, and would do anything to keep her past secret.

Another good Gothic.

12. BingoDOG Specific knowledge

This is a hard square to fill because no books about any area of my specific knowledge have leapt out at me, so I'm stretching the definition to read a book by Mignon G Eberhart. I've read 32, not counting those I read before LT, so have decided that this is enough to claim knowledge of the oeuvre of Mignon G.

Another Man's Murder by Mignon G. Eberhart

Cayce Clary left home at 19, driven away by the judge, his dead father's step-brother. He's returned at the judge's request, only to become a suspect in the man's murder. The judge has plenty of enemies, but his nephew is out to implicate Cayce.

Nice and short. Unusual in that the main character is a man, rather than an intellectually-challenged female orphan.

>238 pamelad: I need to get to this one. The atmosphere of What Moves the Dead was so intense.

>241 mstrust: I hope you enjoy it. I found it less gruesome and more humorous than What Moves the Dead. But it's quite gruesome enough.

6. Crime

The Cases of Susan Dare by Mignon G. Eberhart

Susan Dare is a mystery writer who dabbles in crime-solving. This short story collection contains six of Susan's cases. I'm not really a fan of short crime stories because the characters appear, kill someone and disappear before you get to know them, but like most of Eberhart's books this was atmospheric.

6. Crime
Romantic Suspense and Gothic

The American Heiress by Dorothy Eden

Hetty is the illegitimate half-sister of Clemency Jervis, and looks just like her. She's Clemency's maid, and when Clemency becomes engaged to a debt-ridden earl who is in desperate need of her dowry, Hetty accompanies Clemency and her mother to England for the wedding. War has broken out between Britain and Germany, so sea voyages are no longer safe, but Clemency and her mother ignore warnings and set off on the Lusitania. The ship is torpedoed off the coast of Ireland and few passengers survive. Hetty is one of them.

Another enjoyable Gothic, but it's probably time for a break.

Actually, this one is more romance than crime, but I'll leave it where it is. There are no murders.

>238 pamelad: I've added a category for More Historical Fiction because I've completed the Historical Fiction Challenge with What Feasts at Night. I read a lot of historical fiction, and could do with a category for the books that don't quite fit into other categories, as well as those that I've been adding as multiples to the Historical Fiction Challenge e.g different country and classic.

I've moved the Romantic Suspense and Gothic books there because so far they're all historical and they don't quite fit under Crime.

I bought the Kindle edition of Little Man, What Now by Hans Fallada but it turned out not to be the Michael Hoffman translation but something confusing, ungrammatical and unreadable by Robert Boettcher. Always check!

"One ought to be able to live like this," thinks Pinneberg. "Surely this sesame has seven rooms. Must make a chunky buck. He'll pay rent...Two hundred marks? Three hundred marks? Oh, shucks, I have no idea. - Ten minutes past four!"

>239 pamelad: Gothic used to be my favorite genre, and for some reason I haven't been reading it much in the last 4-5 years. I'm going to put this book and my list.

>247 Tess_W: Gothic and romantic suspense have been favourites of mine in the past too, so I'm happy to have found Dorothy Eden, and also Joan Aiken (thank you Aviatakh). I've read most of Mary Stewart's and Barbara Michaels' books and would like to see more of Victoria Holt's books re-published. These vintage books are comforting - minimal or no steam, well-drawn characters and interesting plots. I also appreciate the correct vocabulary and grammar and the lack of waffle.

Another good romantic suspense writer is M. M. Kaye.

6. Crime
Romantic Suspense

Whistle for the Crows by Dorothy Eden

Cathleen's husband and young daughter were killed in a car crash, so six months later she takes a job in Ireland to make a new start. She's employed as a secretary to Matilda O'Riordan, who is writing a history of her family, which currently consists of her nephews Rory and Liam, and their bed-ridden mother. The eldest brother, Shamus, died three years previously in an apparent accident. His mother witnessed it, had a stroke and has been unable to communicate ever since. The property has passed to Rory who is determined to restore the estate's profitability, so there is little spare cash.

A mystery surrounds Shamus's death, and there are rumours that he had a secret wife. Cathleen, who can hear a baby crying at night, puts herself in danger.

I enjoyed this one too. It's vintage, not historical, and was first published in 1962.

8. Books by Decade 1910 - 1919

William: An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton 1919

William was an insignificant man, ruled by his mother, with no will of his own. He was employed as a clerk in a firm where he made no impression, but his life changed when his mother died. Under the influence of a colleague he took up causes and became immersed in the anti-war and labour movements. At this stage of the book Hamilton is so condescending to William and his fellow activists whom she denigrates as thoughtless, closed-minded and petty, that I assumed she held conservative political views herself and was contemptuous of anyone who thought differently, but the opposite is true and she changed her anti-militaristic views when was broke out and she realised what was happening in Europe. William is also forced to reconsider.

I found this short book to be a bit heavy-handed, but extremely interesting, and would recommend it.

>248 pamelad: I've read Kaye's The Far Pavillions and it was just ok....It was a a historical romance, but it seemed to me that the romance got in the way of the potential good book.

>251 Tess_W: She wrote a series of books set in foreign countries e.g. Death in Zanzibar, Death in Cyprus, which I enjoyed. But I don't mind a bit of romance in a mystery. I took The Far Pavilions on a trip to Vietnam in 1994, and it was a big favourite with my travelling companion and other people we met on the trip. It's an entertaining holiday read, even more so when books are hard to come by.

Just remembering how exciting it is when you're travelling around to come across a second-hand book shop where you'd least expect it. I bought Bosnian Chronicle somewhere in Thailand, but also had to read a lot of Alistair Maclean.

13. More Historical Fiction

Speak to Me of Love by Dorothy Eden

Dumpy, plain Beatrice Bonnington falls in love with the decorative but useless William Overton and his house. Beatrice's father owns the profitable Bonnington's Emporium, which Beatrice will inherit, so she is wealthy enough to tempt the impecunious William. She is optimistic that William will eventually fall in love with her.

This sad and dreary book covers three generations of Beatrice's family and the fortunes of Bonnington's Emporium, beginning during Victoria's reign and ending with the Great Depression.

Despite its title, I wouldn't categorise this as a romance. Perhaps a family saga?

1. Books I Own
12. BingoDOG

The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings

In 1917, before the US had entered WWI, E. E.Cummings travelled to France to become an ambulance driver. On the ship he met William Slater Brown, also bound for the ambulance service, and the they became close friends. Once in the ambulance service, with prejudiced, insular American superiors who loathed the French, and mistrusted the two young American men for choosing to associate with them, Brown and Cummings were assigned to cleaning duties. Both men were pacifists, and Brown wrote scathing, anti-militarist letters home, denigrating the French Government. He was arrested for treason, and so was Cummings, whose loyalty to his friend prevented him from saying the words (I hate all Germans) that would set him free. The two Americans ended up incarcerated in a jail for people accused of crimes but not convicted. Sixty men lived together in one huge room, half-starved, in primitive unhygienic conditions, at the mercy of irrational guards, insane fellow-prisoners and a vicious prison governor.

Some of the prisoners were jailed for petty crimes, some were pimps, others were violent, but the majority had done nothing criminal at all and had been picked up on suspicion because they were citizens of neutral countries. Letters to their embassies were confiscated, so no one knew where they were. Cummings' father back in the US was desperately trying to trace his son, who at one stage was reported dead, and the book begins with his letters.

The Enormous Room is a fictionalised memoir, written at the instigation of Cummings' father and first published in 1922. These days, in its depiction of people victimised by cruel irrational forces, it's seen as a precursor to Catch-22 and Mash, and that's what makes it interesting. Most of The Enormous Room is dedicated to descriptions of Cummings' fellow prisoners, in particular those he admired and who made a lasting impression on him, so rather than there being a strong narrative the book is episodic. The language is unusual: sometimes it's striking and conveys the narrator's impressions brilliantly, but sometimes it obscures the narrator's meaning. Probably in the context of the time, Cummings wasn't racist, but some of his language and descriptions couldn't be used today.

A worthwhile read. Recommended.

2. Wish List
6. Crime

The Chinaman by Friedrich Glauser

Sergeant Studer is riding his motorbike back to Bern and has almost run out of petrol, so he stops at an out of the way inn. There he meets a man with a long drooping moustache that reminds Studer of a Chinese man. The "Chinaman" tells Studer that he expects to be murdered, which Studer writes off as paranoia, but four months later Studer is called in to investigate the man's death. The local doctor is trying to pass the death of as a suicide, but that's clearly impossible.

It took me a while to sort out who all the characters were, and their relationships to one another. The head of an agricultural college is involved, and the manager of the poorhouse, as well as the dead man's brother-in-law. All three are present at the inn the first time Studer meets the victim.

The Chinaman was first published in 1938. It's not as striking as In Matto's Realm but I enjoyed it because of Sergeant Studer, an honest and compassionate man who is surrounded by hypocrisy and corruption.

8. Books by decade Sixties

Bel Lamington by D. E. Stevenson

Bel is an orphan, brought up by her aunt after her parents died tragically in an accident. On the death of her aunt Bel has just enough money to pay for secretarial training, and now she's living in a flat in London, working as a secretary in an exporting business. She's very sorry for herself, having to work for a living, and I had no sympathy at all! There's another minor character who gave up a promising career as a portrait painter and now paints as little more than a hobby, because she chose love and family in a remote farm in Scotland. But she's blissfully happy. Stevenson is the anti-feminist and she does not like women working! Fortunately her characters are wealthy enough, or are supported by men wealthy enough, not to have to!

Bel Lamington is a drip. Fortunately it's a short book.

>254 pamelad: I did not know this biographical detail about E.E. Cummings! How fascinating, and how very tragic. Does it touch on how this part of his life influenced his poetry?

Your reviews of Dorothy Eden books are thoughtful; like you, my reading/subjects/authors tend to go in phases. I also read (and liked) Victoria Holt around the age of 12 and remember liking her.

>256 pamelad: Isn't it strange how a woman writer like Stevenson, who worked for a living as a writer, was against women having a career? Why was it OK for her to work, but not OK for others? I wonder how she justified that position.

>257 threadnsong: In The Enormous Room Cummings made light of his own experience and focused on the other inmates. He said many times that he was happier in the enormous room than he had been in the ambulance service, and had met in jail some of the best people he ever did in his life. It was only near the end, when his friend B was sentenced and moved to a “real” jail for the duration of the war, that he admitted to distress. Plus, this is WWI, which was a tragedy for a whole generation, so it would have been out of place to focus on the trauma of one individual. Cummings wrote the book after the war had ended. By then he was well aware of the influential people whose efforts managed to free him, a contrast to his powerless friends inside the room.

I'd heard of the book, and knew it was a classic, but hadn't known what it was about. It was the first work by Cummings to be published, predating his first poetry collection.

>258 kac522: I've read 11 of D. E. Stevens' books now, and have never come across a heroine who went to university. Nor can I recall any minor female characters who did. I dare say, regarding working, that Stevens saw herself a a special case! Or perhaps writing genteel novels was acceptable, whereas mingling with the hoi polloi in paid employment was infra dig.

>259 pamelad: I've read 25 of D. E. Stevenson's books. I started with the Mrs Tim books and then went back and started reading all of them in publication order. I'm up to 1951 (just finished Music in the Hills last month). What I've been noticing, especially starting with the pre-WWII years, is that she is getting progressively more conservative and a bit more outspoken about current events within the text, like complaining about the new National Health, etc.

I can't remember any young woman going to university, but I can't say I've looked for it. I think there was someone who took typing and steno classes, though. In Music in the Hills there is a woman artist, which is about as independent a woman as I can remember in her books, but it's unclear how well she is educated. Of course, she gives it up to move to Scotland to marry the hero😧.

>260 kac522: Same woman artist. I stopped that series after the first book, Victoria Cottage. Here's my review.

Appallingly patronising towards the lower classes. One of the characters actually thought of a village woman as a peasant. Dated, even for 1949.

I'm currently reading The Innocents by Margery Sharp, which is a breath of fresh air! Nicely astringent, and the lower classes are paid as much attention as the upper-middle. A female vet AND a female doctor. And humour!

>261 pamelad: Appalling, indeed. I just finished High Wages by Dorothy Whipple (1930) the story of a lowly draper's shopgirl who works hard and saves enough to open her own ready-made dress shop in Lancashire. Stevenson would be shocked! 😀

>252 pamelad: I'll definitely look up one of Kaye's other books. Also, the Bosnian Chronicle looks interesting--always trying to find books in not so usual locales.

>263 Tess_W: The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric is also worth reading, and is better-known than Bosnian Chronicle but there are a lot of massacres, so I had to read it in sections to allow recovery time. It covers over 300 years of Bosnian history.

>262 kac522: That sounds a lot better. I'm not keen on the snobbish, "people like us" crowd. I'll be interested in your reports on D. E. Stevenson's post-1951 works. I wonder whether she will adjust to the modern world, or retreat further into the past.

2. Wish List

The Innocents by Margery Sharp

Cecilia is a beautiful young woman who runs a dress shop and has refused all her local suitors because she wants to get away from her East Anglian village. When a wealthy American visits, she snaps him up and returns with him to the United States. Five years later she and her husband return, bringing with them their three-year-old daughter, Antoinette. Because the child is distressed by travelling, they leave her with the narrator temporarily while they make a trip to Europe, but while they are there the war breaks out and they have to return immediately to the US, leaving their daughter behind with the book's unnamed narrator, a sixtyish spinster.

The little girl is shy, easily frightened, and unable to talk. The local doctor diagnoses her as retarded (we would say now that she had an intellectual disability, but the book was written more than fifty years ago), not autistic. She's never going to be able to read and write, or carry on a conversation, but she flourishes with the narrator, although she never gets over her fear of strangers and new places.

After the war the widowed Cecilia returns, determined to take her daughter back to the US and get the medical profession to fix her up with speech therapy and psychological treatment.

I'm a big fan of Margery Sharp, but had put off reading The Innocents because it might have been sentimental. I should have known better. Sharp is her usual witty, astringent, open-minded self, and I enjoyed the book.