stonepicnicking_okapi

My thought is 3 books make a post.

This bingo card was created by kingstoken. More about the challenge here: https://kingstoken.dreamwidth.org/109837.html




Recommended: The Seamstress [also titled The Time In Between] by María Dueñas is one that smallhobbit recommended as one of her favourites. It is the story of a young Spanish girl with a talent for dressmaking. Her loves, betrayals, breakdowns, and triumphs set against the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of World War II. She flees to Morocco and there is a lot about life there. She ends up being a spy. Very engaging, compelling. It's long. 600+ pages but I definitely got sucked in. [I am also trying to do as many squares as I can of garonne's 2025 Book Bingo here: https://garonne.dreamwidth.org/58219.html so I think this qualifies as G-G-1: Not set in UK/US/France/Germany.]

YA/Children's: Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. This was on the list of books for 4th graders and Minisculus and I read it. It was about a young boy living in a poor rural American setting who wants to be a fast runner. He also loves to draw but hides his enthusiasm due to stigma. He makes friends with the new girl over the summer, and they invent a make-believe land in a secret hideout near their homes. Very tragic ending.

Sci-fi/Fantasy: Death Note vol. 1. by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata. This is a Japanese manga (which Minisculus much prefers to the reading list!). I wasn't sure if it fit this category but simple wikipedia calls it a 'supernatural thriller fantasy manga. It is the story of a Japanese high schooler who comes into possession of a mystical notebook and he finds he has the power to kill anybody whose name he enters in it. I enjoyed it even though reading right to left and back to front was a bit awkward. I wouldn't mind knowing what happens next but I don't think I'll seek another one out. [G-N-1: Book from a genre I typically avoid]

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order. It was begun in January 2021.

I enjoyed The Pale Horse [1961]. Summary:

A dying woman, Mrs Davis, gives her last confession to Father Gorman, a Roman Catholic priest, but along with her confession she gives him a list of names and a terrible secret. Before he can take action, however, he is struck dead in the fog. As the police begin to investigate, a young hero begins to piece together evidence that sets him upon a converging path.

Mark Easterbook is the amateur detective in the case. He is actually a Mogul scholar (a scholar of the Mogul period) but gets drawn into a diabolical conspiracy. It really is a clever scheme, I think, and smacks of And then there were none but the villain is not as cool as the one in that book. Nevertheless, excellent murder weapon and use of red herrings and blinds in the form of the occult.

I listened to an audiobook version narrated by Hugh Fraser which was solid. I hurried a bit through it because I wanted my first completed book of 2025 to be an Agatha Christie, but I am saving the next two for February and March because we've hit two of my all-time favorites: A Caribbean Mystery and At Bertram's Hotel--and I have a jigsaw puzzle to go with them! Rapture! Joy!

I read the English translation of Seishi Yokomizo's The Little Sparrow Murders which was put out by Pushkin Press this year. I loved it. It is very typical of the earlier ones in the detective Kosuke Kindaichi series. Kindaichi ends up in the village which has a lot of secrets and those secrets bubble up in gruesome ways. Staged bodies. In this one, he is doing what Christie often did, and using a children's rhyme (in this case it's the folklore/tradition song little girls sing when they are bouncing a rubber ball) as the centerpiece of the mystery. It was a bit slow to get started (they always are. he always provides a map and a cast of characters and the latter is absolutely needed) but by the third chapter I was hooked. I am keeping it until March for 7 days, 7 covers.



I also finished Three Doors to Death by Rex Stout which is a collection of three Nero Wolfe detective stories. I like Nero Wolfe in small doses. Stout does occasionally do the noirish sarcasm very well, though, and here are two quotes I pulled out:

During meals Fritz always answers the door, on account of Wolfe's feeling that the main objection to atom bombs is that they may interrupt people eating.

She nodded, decided to wire it for sound, and said, "Yes, certainly."

I mainly got this one because of the last entry which includes a body found in a greenhouse, and it relates to orchids, the fumigation system in the greenhouse plays a role in the death (my sister is an orchid enthusiast). I used this one for this year's 7 days, 7 Covers.



At the moment, I am reading short stories by Stanley Ellin and A Question of Blood by Ian Rankin, which is #14 in the Inspector Rebus series. I've just started it, but given that past performance is the best indicator of future performance, I'm guessing Rebus will make some Very Questionable Life Choices--and solve the case!

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

Destination Unknown is a forgettable novel from 1954. Here is the synopsis:

Hilary Craven, a deserted wife and bereaved mother, is planning suicide in a Moroccan hotel, when she is asked by British secret agent Jessop to undertake a dangerous mission as an alternative to taking an overdose of sleeping pills. The task, which she accepts, is to impersonate a dying woman to help find the woman's husband, Thomas Betterton, a nuclear scientist who has disappeared and may have defected to the Soviet Union. Soon she finds herself in a group of travellers being transported to the unknown destination of the title.

I think it's a nice fantasy. A person planning to commit suicide finds themselves enveloped in a strange plot that ends up giving them a reason to live. But there's so many identity changes that you could be forgiven for forgetting who is who.

Next Up: A Poirot and a return to the nursery rhyme theme with Hickory, Dickory, Dock.

Multiple POVs: Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka. [Translated by Sam Malissa] This was recommended by a Japanese ARMY in the Seom chatroom. My sister says there is a movie version with Brad Pitt. It took me about 9 weeks to read this. In many ways, I liked it. The concept is great: five assassin board a non-stop train. There's a snake, a suitcase of money, lots of quirky characters. And it's a closed setting which appeals to the locked-room mystery lover. My only qualm is that there is a lot of child violence and child-on-child violence (one of the assassins is 14 and he's a psychopath and it isn't pretty being in his POV). So that was the drawback. But if you like Pulp Fiction and Guy Ritchie films, this is the book for you.

Seasonal Read: Valentine Murder by Leslie Meier. I wanted a seasonal read that wasn't Xmas and Leslie Meier writes a cozy mystery series with titles for every American holiday. But, boy, was this a shitty book. I know there are better cozies out there. There are probably better seasonal cozies out there. I won't be ready any more about Lucy Stone of Tinker's Cove, Maine (USA). It's just weird. She has 4 kids. Her husband is a run-of-the-mill homophobe. The treatment of the gay couple is shitty (not super-shitty, just regular shitty, and one of them is a murder victim and the husband goes to the funeral and falls asleep, for real) and I was hoping her husband would be murdered by the murderer at the end (but he wasn't, he just got thrown off the roof of the library). bethctg is a librarian and this mystery is around the library and the board and the head librarian and the antique tankard in the library. That part was kind of okay. I like to imagine bethctg solving the murder instead of this lady. I also thought this lady's relationship with technology was weird. The book's only 12 years old but she was perfectly ok with her kids pretending to be big-boobed blonde and catfishing some stranger on the internet for funsies. Like that was no big deal. And she didn't understand how poor people could be addicted to the lottery. It was just yuck. It is possible to write humor about old people not understanding (or learning about) technology and new ideas, The Thursday Murder Club series does a good job of this with Joyce dabbling in bit coin and talking about instagram. But you have to be very subtle/clever/intelligent to make it work. And this really didn't seem true to life.

Banned Book: Another category I always struggle with, so I went with a children's book about a transgendered child. I am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings. I have read a few reviews. One about white washing, and I do think that's valid. She's a person of color in real life. The other is about setting up the gender binary, either you're a girl or you're a boy. Some people criticized the comment of 'girl's brain in a boy's body' And she's a girl because she likes dance and mermaids. But for what I wanted it for, which was a first conversation with Minor and Minsiculus with this topic, it was fine. And she wrote it herself (with help) so it's her voice and that's important.

( The full list 6 out of 25 )

My badge for completing the 2023 book bingo. Thank you, kingstoken.




And here is January's additions to the 2024 card.



Book in a Series: A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny. Audiobook. 13 hours. Narrated by Robert Bathurst. Excellent narration. This is the latest in the Canadian Inspector Gamache of the village of Three Pines. Gamache investigates murders related to a bizarre painting found in a hidden room. There are a lot of flashbacks to Gamaches's early career. I think it's a bit gruesome and overwrought (like Law & Order SVU) but very nice to have on in the background while you do a jigsaw puzzle.

Non-fiction: The Wager by David Grann. Audiobook. 8.5 hours. Narrated by Dion Graham. Excellent narration. I enjoyed it very much. The book concentrates on the story of HMS Wager, a square-rigged sixth-rate Royal Navy ship, and the mutiny that took place after the ship's wreckage in 1741. Byron's grandfather as a young man was part of it.

With a Blue Cover: The Pattern in the Carpet: a Personal History with Jigsaws by Margaret Drabble. I disliked this book very much. I did not like the author and I wasn't moved to care about her reminiscences of her Aunt Phyl. It was much more 'personal history' than 'jigsaws.' The parts about the history of jigsaws were fine, but those are few and far between. It's mostly about her, and she's rather tiresome, wandering, cross and crotchety old lady. She name-drops a lot (including name-dropping herself) and I've not heard of a single person she mentions! Nevertheless, it has a blue cover, and here are a few interesting quotes:

Led by Kevin, I have strayed out of my frame and along a branching spiral track of free associations. But no associations come for free. They cost the neurons dear. [Note: they also cost your readers' their patience with your ramblings.]

The French used to call puzzles les jeux de patience, and the Germans called them Geduldspielen.

Jigsaws may be connected with depression. They serve the depressed, and they certainly flourished during the Depression.

Jigsaws are useful antidotes to anger.

I usually use my public library, but as it was Buy a Book day (7 September), I went down to Barnes & Noble and browsed and got this. This is the second in a series of mysteries with protagonist Nanette Haynes, a black female street performer, by Charlotte Carter. I enjoyed Rhode Island Red, the first in the series, in which Nanette gets mixed up in a case about a famous saxophone in New York City. In this second book, she goes to Paris. I much prefer hard copy books to ebooks and I prefer free books at the library to buying them; however, I wanted to celebrate the day by making a purchase. I was also tempted by a Edgar Allan Poe Tarot Deck, but, alas I shall have to wait until Buy a Tarot Deck day. :/

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

Aggie says Crooked House is one of her top five favourites. It isn't a favourite of mine but I did have a lot of 'oh, I see what you're doing there' moments where you can't help but admire her talent for misdirection and multiple interpretations of the same incident/statement/object.

Here's the plot:

Wealthy entrepreneur Aristide Leonides has died aged 85. Due to the war, the whole Leonides family has been living with him in a sumptuous but ill-proportioned house called "Three Gables", the crooked house of the title. The autopsy reveals that Leonides was poisoned with his own eserine-based eye medicine via an insulin injection. Sophia tells Charles that she can't marry him until the matter is cleared up.

I tried to watch the TV production with Glenn Close but I only lasted about 5 minutes and turned it off. For some reason, it rang my 'Lots of White People Being White' bell.

As I said, in terms of mystery engineering it is a gem, but I didn't care about any of the characters so it didn't matter.

But...speaking of characters I care about...I posted Crooked House by itself because next up is A Murder is Announced!!! And we have a canonical Boston marriage and Miss Marple being an A+ ally. Hinch and Murgutroyd! And the suspicious goings on at Little Paddocks. There are some very droll lines in it that I want to pull out and I checked out the Joan Hickson version to watch.

So I just finished reading Ian Rankin's Strip Jack and Seishi Yokomizo's Death on Gorkumon Island to bring my 2022 total to 60 books. I have never counted how many books I've read in a year so I don't have any feeling about that number. It will be interesting to see what the number is this time next year.

My sister gave me what I call 'a brick of Rebus' for Christmas. Meaning, 5 books of the Inspector Rebus series by Ian Rankin, all of the titles which I sent her which I couldn't find in my library system in any form. My library has early Rebus and late Rebus but the middle of the series it lacks. There are about 20, I think in the whole series. She ordered them from an online used book service and rubber banded them into a solid rectangular mass. They are very, very easy reads. I read the first one of the brick in about two days.

In non-reading news, I'm setting up my planner for 2023 with my goals. I am still doing Get Your Words Out but I am going down to 150,000 words (from the usual 250,000). It's called 'Modest' level which I like better than the lowest level 75k which is called 'Basic.' I do not want to be Basic!

My main goal is about my weight. I also want to improve on my practice of my spiritual disciplines, which include among other things, daily meditation. I have already been meditating daily for 20 years (yes, I know, but yes! It's amazing. I started in 2003) but there is room for improvement in terms of quality. I also have a goal about reducing screen time, and I have just discovered the feature on my phone which tracks such things, so I think I'm in a good place now to reduce it. It's mainly my phone, too. I don't watch television and I am very utilitarian about my computer use. Saving money as always, trying to reduce impulse buys and if there's less junk food buying that will help.

The first page of 2023 of my planner I put a sticker with a quote from Louise May Alcott: I'm not afraid of storms for I'm learning to sail my ship. That's what I am keeping in mind!

I just finished Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth. A big thanks to friendofthejabberwock for recommending it. I enjoyed it very much and got hooked several times. It seems like it might be a regshoe kind of book because it involves a girls' school at the turn of the century. It's 600+ pages so it's taken me about about six weeks, picking up and putting down, to get through it. I tried the audiobook version but I got about 2 minutes into it and noped out. American female voices are really, really not my thing. Here's a summary:

The novel is set during two time periods: 1902 and present day.

In 1902 readers are introduced to Clara and Flo, students living in Rhode Island and attending Brookhants School for Girls. They are completely infatuated with each other. They also share a love for Mary MacLane and a memoir she wrote, to the point where they create a secret club called The Plain Bad Heroine Society. The two meet an untimely death in a nearby orchard, the site of their club meetings and trysts, stung to death by eastern yellowjackets. Their deaths are not the last in the school, which closes five years later. Three more people died in the intervening years. As a result, the school is believed to be both haunted and cursed.

In the modern day, the abandoned school is now the site of a film production, based on a book detailing Brookhants' history. Celebrities Harper Harper and Audrey Wells have been cast as Flo and Clara, respectively. They travel out to the school with the book's author, Merritt Emmons, and the rest of the film's cast and crew, but soon discover that the school's curse may actually exist.