stonepicnicking_okapi

Does your library do this?



I picked this up today. All I knew was it was a 'sea adventure' and one of garonne's squares is 'set at sea.' I did not take into account that the display was on the edge of the Young Adult section. It is a YA book.

Also, is the term 'blind date' not used anymore? Is it offensive to blind people?

What the book was in the cut...

( my date )

Finished:

After the Funeral by Agatha Christie. Okay. Not her best but not bad.

The Wager by David Grann. [audiobook] Narrated by Dion Graham. Excellent narrator. Non-fiction account of a sea voyage, storms, mutinity, shipwreck, cannibalism, and Byron's grandfather as a very young man.

Still Reading:

Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka. Japanese assassins on a train. Violent and with dark humor. It has some things in common with a locked room mystery in that it's a closed setting.

The Mill House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji. 'The Classic Japanese Locked Room Mystery' I only read this to and from soccer games, so I haven't made much progress.

Started: A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny. [audiobook] narrated by Robert Bathurst. Excellent narrator. This is #18 in the Inspector Gamache - Three Pines series in Canada. I can't say I love it, but I'm very familiar with the series and I like having an audiobook when I'm doing a jigsaw puzzle and this one was instantly available. It's sort of Very Earnest and gruesome in the way Law & Order SVU is gruesome.

Still on the TBR:

Coq du Vin by Charlotte Carter, book #2 of the Nanette Haynes mysteries. Protagonist is a black female street musician in New York City.

1) What is the best book you've read?

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2) What is the worst book you've read?

Death by Darjeeling by Laura Childs

3) What is a favourite book from childhood?

This question is difficult because I have little memory of what I read as a child. I have a vague recollection of liking The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Jester.

4) What is a favourite book from adulthood?

The Stately Home Murder by Catherine Aird, specifically the audiobook version narrated by Robin Bailey.

What is a book you've read a number of times?

Aunts Aren't Gentlemen by P. G. Wodehouse.

I've just binge-read 4 romance novels in 3 days and I feel a bit hungover.

All were by Cat Sebastian, an author recommended because I like K. J. Charles. All M/M Regency stories. Two e-books and 2 audiobooks (each 7 hours long!).

It Takes Two to Tumble. A The Sound of Music set-up where a vicar takes care of three kids and then the kids' widowed sea captain father returns. Made me think of Hobbit's Leonard. It is part of the Seducing the Segwicks (!) series.

Three were part of the Turner Series, a nice little intertwined AU

The Ruin of a Rake A ludicrous premise, but it (and the next) was an audiobook narrated by the very British and fabulously-named Gary Furlong (!) and I adore the way he says 'fuck' and 'cock-sucking' and he says them in the first 2 minutes, so yay! And it makes accounting and estate management sound sexy. And kittens.

The Laurence Browne Affaire My favourite. The reclusive, brilliant earl inventing the telegraph in his crumbling Cornish castle meets the con man with a heart of gold. And a lovable dog.

The Soldier's Scoundrel Injured soldier and amateur 'problem-solver.' Sound familiar?

My only small qualm is that I don't think pre-come is as lubricating as the author would have us believe or else this particular subset of men just produce copious amounts of extra slippery pre-come. I mean, I don't think it's enough for a whole handjob. And there are A LOT of class issues which got old after 4 books.

I have also read 3 books for the Bingo. And 1 other book. I've listened to tons of audiobooks.




Diverse Reads: The Widows of Malabar Hill. Book 1 in the Perveen Mistry series. It is set in Bombay in the 1920's. She is India's first female lawyer. I liked it a lot and learned a lot. Perveen is sort of an Indian Maisie Dobbs, but with law instead of psychology. And a white British lesbian bestie. And a supportive family and a tragic backstory. At some point, I want to read the next.

More than 300 pages: The Silent Patient [audiobook, 9 hours] by Alex Michaelides. This is a thriller. I checked it out because Louise Brealey (who plays BBC Sherlock's Molly) was the female voice. There's a male voice, too, who looks nothing like Ben Whishaw but whom I imagined was Ben Whishaw. The twist was a 'gotcha' moment for me but readers familiar with the genre might guess it early. A lot of bad shit happens to the main character, and you sort of imagine if she'd had one decent person in her life, things might have been different.

Romance: Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. This is the only bingo book that I haven't really enjoyed. It is the GYWO comm book club book at the moment. The First Son and the Prince of England. Very hip and young. A fade-to-black about the sex that striked me as weird and vague (given I'm used to explicit fanfic). I mean, at one point, I asked myself 'But is he topping?' And I felt ashamed but you know, in the Sherlock fandom, you would definitely KNOW who was topping even if it shouldn't matter. Too much Rich People's problems. It was difficult not to cast Prince William of my youth and that actor from High School Muscial as the leads. It reads like a movie, one I would never watch, if that makes sense.

( Books, books, books )

The books so far:

Humour: Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
Movie/TV tie-in: War Horse by Michael Morpurgo (audiobook)
Mystery/Crime: This Poison Will Remain by Fred Vargas
Title has a Name in It: Lord Darcy Investigates by Randall Garrett (e-book)
An Author You've Never Read Before: The Raven Tower by Anne Leckie (audiobook)

( Impressions )

I'm enjoying the coffee-table book Orient Express: The Story of a Legend [Text by Guillaume Pieon]. It details everything you'd want to know about the train, the journey, the history, different roles it played in history as well as its iconic status in terms of mystery novel settings.



One thing I enjoyed, which surprised me, were the close-up shots of the Art Deco panels on the sleeping cars.



Plus the typical train shots.

( Two more photos: platform & dining car )

Here are three photos of the Paddington London Pop-up Book, which I checked out from the library.

( London Pop-up Book )

'Tis the season for Christmas mysteries!

I have read:

Mystery in White by J. Jefferson Farejon (1937). A nice little horribly charming and utterly implausible scenario of a group of strangers being snowbound in a train car then they decide to get out and find themselves in a strange house (where tea has been laid but no one is home!) on Christmas. And the murders (most of them) have everything to do with the house and not the company of interlopers. I quite enjoyed it. It is one of two books from the British Library Crime Classics series which I found at the library.

I am reading:

Crimson Snow, which is a collection of winter mysteries, also part of the British Library Crime Classics. There's Ironsides, there's Campion, there's a Holmes pastiche that could have been written by any number of my clever friends. I'm half-way through and enjoying it.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Right now, I'm listening to:

Fog of Doubt by Christianna Brand (1952). I'm on a locked room jag and I read listened to Brand's Suddenly at his Residence and enjoyed it, so I thought I try this one, which is, according to the introduction, the author's favourite of her own works. The fog is almost a character itself. A Belgian comes to dinner and is killed and everybody in a household is a mile radius. It is Inspector Cockrill, who doesn't alienate or endear himself. There's a surprise pregnancy, which is not my favourite plot device in the world, but we'll see how it goes. It has locked room elements (the fog being the lock, so to speak) so it'll be interesting to see how it resolves and the writer (in the intro) says all isn't revealed until the final line, which I think is intriguing. Read by David Thorn who is one of a few very solid narrators (think Simon Vance and Simon Prebble) who don't 'perform' like some narrators (which has its own merits such as in the case of my beloved Cumberbatch) but simply gets out the way and lets you sink into the story.

Things I'm going to be re-reading:

Hercule Poirot's Christmas. Not my fave (which is "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding") but, hey, it's Poirot and Christmas.

The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P.D. James.

I'm on the waitlist for The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries at the library, but who knows if I'll get it in time!