Month: July 2017

Six in Six – the 2017 edition!

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It’s July, which means it’s time for the return of the Six in Six meme, hosted by Jo of The Book Jotter! I think this is the perfect way to reflect on our reading over the first six months of the year. The idea of Six in Six is to choose six categories (Jo has provided a list to choose from or you can come up with new topics of your own if you prefer) and under each heading list six of the books or authors you’ve read so far this year.

6

I’ve used four of these categories before, but the first and last ones are new to me this year. I had fun putting this post together, but it’s not as easy as it looks; some titles could have been placed in more than one category and, as I’ve read more than thirty-six books this year, I wasn’t able to include everything.

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Six books with a colour in the title:

The Red Sphinx by Alexandre Dumas
Midnight Blue by Simone van der Vlugt
The Red House Mystery by AA Milne
Golden Hill by Francis Spufford
The Silver Swan by Elena Delbanco
Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons by Gerald Durrell

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Six books set in different countries:

The Tea Planter’s Wife by Dinah Jefferies (Sri Lanka)
Archangel by Robert Harris (Russia)
The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova (Bulgaria)
The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain (Switzerland)
A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding by Jackie Copleton (Japan)
The Valentine House by Emma Henderson (France)

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Six books with a touch of mystery

They Came To Baghdad by Agatha Christie
The Unseeing by Anna Mazzola
Duplicate Death by Georgette Heyer
Prague Nights by Benjamin Black
Miraculous Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards
The Coroner’s Daughter by Andrew Hughes

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Six classic novels

East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Lost Horizon by James Hilton
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Six books about a real historical figure

Mata Hari by Michelle Moran (Mata Hari)
The Winter Isles by Antonia Senior (Somerled)
The Empress of Hearts by E Barrington (Marie Antoinette)
The Vatican Princess by CW Gortner (Lucrezia Borgia)
The Shadow Queen by Anne O’Brien (Joan of Kent)
First of the Tudors by Joanna Hickson (Jasper Tudor)

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Six books with covers I loved!

The Wild Air by Rebecca Mascull

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

The Witchfinder’s Sister by Beth Underdown

The Muse by Jessie Burton

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Are you taking part in Six in Six? How is your reading going this year?

Mata Hari by Michelle Moran

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So far my feelings about Michelle Moran’s novels have been very mixed. Cleopatra’s Daughter was interesting, but felt too light and insubstantial, The Second Empress was much better, but I had one or two problems again with Rebel Queen. I had hoped Mata Hari (also published as Mata Hari’s Last Dance) would be another good one, but unfortunately it turned out to be my least favourite of the four that I’ve read.

Before I read this book, all I knew about Mata Hari was that she was an exotic dancer who was accused of spying during the First World War. I felt sure that she must have been a fascinating woman and I was looking forward to learning more about her. And I did learn a lot from this novel. Mata Hari narrates her story (fictional, but based on fact) in her own words and tells us all about her dancing career, her experiences of life in European cities such as Paris and Berlin, and her many romantic relationships, including several with military personnel which led to her being accused of passing secrets to Germany.

However, I wanted to get to know the woman behind the newspaper headlines and the seductive costumes – Margaretha Zelle, or M’greet as she is called in the novel – and although she does confide in us now and then about her childhood in the Netherlands (she did not come from an Indian background, as she tried to claim), her time in Java during her unhappy marriage to Rudolf MacLeod and her heartbreak at the loss of her children, I never felt very close to Mata Hari and didn’t gain a very good understanding of the person she really was.

The one aspect of Mata Hari’s life that Moran does successfully capture is her loneliness; I didn’t like her and had very little sympathy for her as she seemed so immature and selfish, but I could see that she was not a happy person and that her character had been shaped by her earlier experiences. The descriptions of Mata Hari’s various dances are also well done, particularly one that she performs with a live snake while dressed as Cleopatra. The novel is strangely lacking in period detail, though, and apart from the obvious references to the war and to other famous people of the time – her rival dancer, Isadora Duncan, for example – I didn’t feel that there was much sense of time or place at all.

The book is also disappointingly short, with under 300 pages in the edition I read. If you just want a basic overview of Mata Hari’s life and career, it’s perfectly adequate, but for something deeper you will need to look elsewhere. The section of the novel covering her spying activities is very brief and feels almost like an afterthought, which is a shame as this is the part of the story which should have been the most interesting. Even on finishing the book, I’m not completely clear on what we are supposed to assume; was Mata Hari really a spy or was she just someone who had made some poor decisions and been carried along by events outside her control? To be honest, long before we reached this point I had lost interest anyway and had already decided that I would need to look for another book on Mata Hari one day. Has anyone read The Spy by Paulo Coelho?

My Commonplace Book: June 2017

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A selection of words and pictures to represent June’s reading

My Commonplace Book

commonplace book
Definition:
noun
a notebook in which quotations, poems, remarks, etc, that catch the owner’s attention are entered

Collins English Dictionary

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“Wintrow,” he chided softly. “Refuse the anxiety. When you borrow trouble against what might be, you neglect the moment you have now to enjoy. The man who worries about what will next be happening to him loses this moment in dread of the next, and poisons the next with pre-judgement.”

Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb (1998)

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Anne Boleyn

“But that’s dreadful!” Anne cried. “If she is not mad, then she should be restored to her throne. Surely her own father would not treat her so terribly.”

“When kingdoms are at stake, Mistress Anne, human feelings count for nothing,” Sir John observed.

Anne Boleyn: A King’s Obsession by Alison Weir (2017)

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How could the child bear not just the hunger, but the boredom? The rest of humankind used meals to divide the day, Lib realised – as reward, as entertainment, the chiming of an inner clock. For Anna, during this watch, each day had to pass like one endless moment.

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue (2016)

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Unconsciously, she had always clung to dignity as her sole possession. She had asked for no pity, made no lamentation, and had endured each moment as it came, waiting patiently for release, because she believed that in all circumstances there must be some right way in which to think and act, which can lift them into a kind of beauty.

Lucy Carmichael by Margaret Kennedy (1951)

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Prague Castle

It was the heart of winter, and a crescent moon hung crookedly over the bulk of Hradčany Castle, looming above the narrow laneway where the body lay. Such stars there were! – like a hoard of jewels strewn across a dome of taut black silk. Since a boy I had been fascinated by the mystery of the heavens and sought to know their secret harmonies.

Prague Nights by Benjamin Black (2017)

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“Modern society is the greatest criminal of all. Distribution of wealth notoriously unjust. So-called “justice” a mockery. Organised society makes criminals by the hundred, and then revenges itself upon them – if they’re poor. Big thieves get off and get honours. All wrong. Prevention of crime is the great thing – not punishment.”

Miraculous Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards (2017)

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History wasn’t made without taking risks, that much he knew. So maybe sometimes you had to take risks to write it, too.

Archangel by Robert Harris (1998)

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It was easy to wander into the heart of the ancient streets, laced together by alleys aromatic with the smell of ginger and charcoal. She watched women traders shouting out their wares in shrill voices, their socks, shawls and cotton reels displayed on trolleys covered with straw and tarpaulin, while the men sat crosslegged on low stools, rolling dice on the pavement. Canaries sang in bamboo cages hanging from canopies outside narrow shops and the sun lit up particles of dust, making the air shimmer.

The Silk Merchant’s Daughter by Dinah Jefferies (2016)

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Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia

Elizabeth could not imagine being dismissed with a shrug and a careless sentence. That was not the lot of princesses. If they were not beautiful men pretended that they were. If they were fortunate enough to possess beauty, charm and wit then poets wrote sonnets to them and artists had no need to flatter them in portraits.

House of Shadows by Nicola Cornick (2015)

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“You are right, Mother: long before I was born, you tied my fate to the Palmisanos. I can’t break away from that. Even if I hated them with all my might I couldn’t get away. If I chose not to take sides, I would still be shackled to them. But am I condemned to death by this curse? Aren’t I a free man? Don’t I control my actions? Can’t I rebel and fight against destiny?”

The Last Son’s Secret by Rafel Nadal Farreras (2017)

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But tomorrow there will be another theory, and another; one will be discredited and the other praised; they’ll fall from fashion and be resurrected a decade later with added footnotes and a new edition. Everything is changing, Mrs. Seaborne, and much of it for the better: but what use is it to try and stand on quicksand? We will stumble and fall, and in falling become prey to folly and darkness – these rumours of monsters are nothing more than evidence that we have let go of the rope that tethers us to everything that’s good and certain.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry (2016)

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Favourite books read in June: The Wonder, Ship of Magic and The Essex Serpent