Category: Memes

Celebrating 10 years of The Classics Club!

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It’s The Classic Club Blog’s 10th birthday – or it was earlier this week – and to celebrate they have put together a questionnaire for members to answer. I love being part of the club (you can find out more about it and see my current list of classic reads here), so I was happy to attempt to answer the questions. There are ten, but I’ve chosen to focus on seven of them.

1. When did you join the Classics Club?

My post announcing that I was joining the Classics Club appeared in March 2012. This confused me because obviously that would have meant the 10th birthday was in March of this year…then I remembered that the club was originally hosted on the personal blog of the founding member, Jillian. Obviously we are celebrating the birthday of the Classics Club Blog this month, rather than the beginning of the club itself!

It’s interesting looking back at the list of planned reads I posted when I joined the club. There were 50 books on the list (which I later expanded to 100), and quite a few (10 in fact) that I never actually read but replaced with other titles. I’ve now moved onto a second list of 50 books but still haven’t included any of those unread books on it. Maybe one day!

2. What is the best classic book you’ve read for the club so far? Why?

There are many great books I’ve read for the Classics Club – too many to name them all here – but my favourite is one that was actually a re-read for me: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I can’t describe how much I love this book in just a few words, so will direct you to my review if you want to know more. Despite the length (over 1000 pages), it’s such an exciting story that every time I read it I wish it would never end – and Edmond Dantès is one of my favourite characters in all of literature!

3. What is the first classic you ever read?

This is a difficult question for me to answer because I honestly can’t remember! As a child, I read a lot of children’s classics: The Secret Garden, The Hobbit, Black Beauty, the Narnia books, The Wind in the Willows, Watership Down, and many others. I also had a lovely illustrated edition of A Christmas Carol. I think Wuthering Heights was probably my first ‘adult’ classic, followed by things like To Kill a Mockingbird and Pride and Prejudice.

4. What is the most challenging one you’ve ever read, or tried to read?

That’s another difficult one to answer because books can be challenging in different ways. I’m going to highlight one that I did manage to finish, but struggled with at times – Samuel Richardson’s 1500+ page novel, Clarissa. It wasn’t necessarily the length of the book that bothered me (The Count of Monte Cristo is almost as long) and I didn’t really have a problem with the 18th century writing style either. The thing that made it challenging for me was the pace and the repetitiveness – the way hundreds of pages could go by without the plot moving forward at all. It took me a whole year to read it, first as part of a group read then on my own after I abandoned the group schedule, but when I reached the end I felt a real sense of accomplishment.

5. Favourite movie adaptation of a classic? Least favourite?

This is an easier question to answer! My favourite would have to be the 1940 adaptation of Rebecca with Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. I love the du Maurier novel it’s based on and it’s one of the few examples I can think of where the film is as good as the book. I would find it hard to single out a least favourite, but I tend not to like adaptations that diverge too much from the original novel (assuming that I’ve read the book first, that is). It annoys me when whole chunks of plot are left out or the ending has been completely changed or a character I loved in the book doesn’t appear at all in the film.

6. Has there been a classic title you expected to dislike and ended up loving? Respecting? Appreciating?

Yes, lots! I have often been – and continue to be – surprised by classics! For example, I’ve never considered myself to be much of a science fiction fan, but gave John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos a try back in 2013 and loved it. I’ve since enjoyed two of his other books and am currently reading another, The Chrysalids. I didn’t expect to like John Steinbeck or W Somerset Maugham either, but ended up loving East of Eden and The Painted Veil, respectively.

7. Classic/s you are DEFINITELY GOING TO MAKE HAPPEN next year?

My answer to that is everything on my current Classics Club list that I don’t manage to read this year! I had set myself a target of finishing the list by this November, but with twenty out of the fifty books still to read I don’t think that’s at all likely.

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Are you a member of The Classics Club? If so, have you completed this questionnaire? I would love to read your answers.

Six in Six: The 2022 Edition

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We’re more than halfway through the year and Six in Six, hosted by Jo of The Book Jotter, is back again! I love taking part in this meme as I think it’s the perfect way to look back at our reading over the first six months of the year.

The idea of Six in Six is that we choose six categories (Jo has provided a list of suggestions or you can come up with new topics of your own if you prefer) and then fit six of the books or authors we’ve read this year into each category. It’s more difficult than it sounds, especially as I try not to use the same book in more than one category, but it’s always fun to do – and always a bit different as my reading tastes and patterns seem to change slightly each year.

Here is my 2022 Six in Six, with links to my reviews where available:

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Six authors I’ve read for the first time this year:

1. Janice Hallett (The Twyford Code)
2. Sophie Irwin (A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting)
3. Mathew West (The House of Footsteps)
4. Catriona McPherson (In Place of Fear)
5. Lianne Dillsworth (Theatre of Marvels)
6. Rosie Andrews (The Leviathan)

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The six oldest books I’ve read this year:

1. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (1722)
2. The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, fils (1848)
3. Diary of a Pilgrimage by Jerome K. Jerome (1891)
4. The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie (1923)
5. The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie (1924)
6. Scarweather by Anthony Rolls (1934)

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Six books set in countries other than my own:

1. Fortune by Amanda Smyth (Trinidad)
2. Death in the Andamans by M.M. Kaye (Andaman Islands)
3. The Sunken Road by Ciarán McMenamin (Ireland)
4. Death on Gokumon Island by Seishi Yokomizo (Japan)
5. The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley by Sean Lusk (Turkey)
6. A Bad Business by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russia)

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Six books about real people:

1. The Queen’s Lady by Joanna Hickson (Joan Vaux)
2. The Colour Storm by Damian Dibben (Giorgio Barbarelli or ‘Giorgione’)
3. The Stone Rose by Carol McGrath (Isabella of France)
4. The Rebel Daughter by Miranda Malins (Bridget Cromwell)
5. Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (The Booth family)
6. The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn (Lyudmila Pavlichenko)

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Six books with living things in the title:

1. The White Hare by Jane Johnson
2. The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff
3. Go Tell the Bees That I am Gone by Diana Gabaldon
4. Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper
5. The Reindeer Hunters by Lars Mytting
6. The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

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Six books read but not yet reviewed:

1. That Bonesetter Woman by Frances Quinn
2. Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes
3. All the Broken Places by John Boyne
4. The Night Ship by Jess Kidd
5. Death and the Conjuror by Tom Mead
6. The Magician by Colm Tóibín

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Have you read any of these books or authors this year? Will you be taking part in Six in Six?

Top Ten Tuesday: Upcoming releases

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by Jana of That Artsy Reader Girl, is “Most Anticipated Books Releasing In the Second Half of 2022”.

Here are ten books due to be published in the second half of this year that I’m looking forward to reading. Publication dates were correct for the UK as of today, but could change.

1. The Blood Flower by Alex Reeve (7 July) – The fourth book in the Leo Stanhope series, one of my current favourite historical mystery series.

2. The Bewitching by Jill Dawson (7 July) – A novel about the 16th-century case of the witches of Warboys. I have a copy of this one from NetGalley and have just started reading it.

3. The House of Fortune by Jessie Burton (7 July) – Has it really been eight years since The Miniaturist was released? I hope the sequel will be just as good!

4. The Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz (18 August) – The next book in the Horowitz and Hawthorne mystery series. I’ve enjoyed all of the previous three (my review of the third one should be up in the next few weeks).

5. The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (30 August) – I didn’t love Hamnet as much as most people did, but I thought it was beautifully written and would like to try Maggie O’Farrell’s new book, set in Renaissance Italy.

6. Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris (1 September) – Robert Harris is one of my favourite authors, so a new book by him is always something to look forward to!

7. Ithaca by Claire North (6 September) – This Greek myth retelling about Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, is another book I have from NetGalley and will read nearer the publication date.

8. The Hidden Palace by Dinah Jefferies (15 September) – I’ve read all of Dinah Jefferies’ books and this one will be the second in her new World War II trilogy, which began last year with Daughters of War.

9. Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson (27 September) – Kate Atkinson is another author I always look forward to reading. I don’t know much about her new book but I’m sure it will be great.

10. Blue Water by Leonora Nattrass (20 October) – I enjoyed the debut novel by Leonora Nattrass, Black Drop, so I’m interested in reading this sequel.

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Will you be reading any of these? Which new releases are you looking forward to in the second half of 2022?

Six Degrees of Separation: From Wintering to The Strangers in the House

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we’re starting with Wintering by Katherine May – yet another book that I haven’t read! This is what it’s about:

In Wintering, Katherine May recounts her own year-long journey through winter, sparked by a sudden illness in her family that plunged her into a time of uncertainty and seclusion. When life felt at is most frozen, she managed to find strength and inspiration from the incredible wintering experiences of others as well as from the remarkable transformations that nature makes to survive the cold.

This beautiful, perspective-shifting memoir teaches us to draw from the healing powers of the natural world and to embrace the winters of our own lives.

Although I haven’t read Wintering, it seems that Katherine May is using the idea of ‘winter’ as a metaphor for depression. In Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt (1), depression is represented by a black dog. The ‘black dog’ is how Winston Churchill referred to his own periods of depression and in this very unusual novel, Rebecca Hunt brings the dog to life, giving him the name Mr Chartwell and describing his visits to Churchill’s home.

My next link is simply to another book with an author whose surname is Hunt: The Seas by Samantha Hunt (2), a novel about a young woman who lives in an isolated town by the sea and believes she is a mermaid. This is a beautifully written novel which combines mermaid mythology with the Iraq War, post traumatic stress disorder and the creation of a new dictionary, but it was a bit too strange for me and not a book I particularly enjoyed.

The sea also plays a part in the plot of The Sea Change by Joanna Rossiter (3). This is a novel set in two different countries and two different time periods: India in 1971 where a newly married couple are separated by a tsunami, and England during World War II, where the village of Imber is evacuated for use by the Army (and remains uninhabited to this day).

Some of the events of The Sea Change take place in 1971, so my next link is to a book that was published in 1971: Nemesis by Agatha Christie (4). This is a late Miss Marple novel in which Marple agrees to investigate a crime for an old friend – without having any idea of what the crime is or what she will need to do. During a coach tour of Britain’s historic houses and gardens, the details of her mission begin to unfold.

Strangers in Company by Jane Aiken Hodge (5) is also a mystery that takes place on a bus tour – this time it’s a tour of Greece’s famous archaeological sites. I’ve read quite a lot of Hodge’s novels now and this is the only contemporary one (the others I’ve read have been Gothic or Regency novels). It reminded me of Mary Stewart’s or M.M. Kaye’s romantic suspense novels, although I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as those.

My final link takes us to another book with ‘Strangers’ in the title: The Strangers in the House by Georges Simenon (6). This is one of Simenon’s romans dur, or ‘hard novels’; I have read a few of them over the last year or two and enjoyed them (I’m actually reading another one at the moment which I’ll be reviewing soon). The Strangers in the House is about a lawyer who fell into a depression and became an alcoholic after his wife left him. When his daughter becomes implicated in a murder investigation, he finds that he has a chance to redeem himself and repair his damaged relationships.

The theme of depression and finding a way to heal links back to Wintering, so I’ve managed to bring the chain full circle this month!

In August we’ll be starting with the winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize, The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki.

Top Ten Tuesday: A Journey Through Time

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by Jana of That Artsy Reader Girl, is “Books With a Unit of Time In the Title (seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, eternity, etc.) (Submitted by RS @ The Idealistic Daydream)”.

I decided to make things more interesting by starting with a very short period of time and becoming gradually longer! All of the titles on my list are books that I’ve read and reviewed on my blog.

1. The Second Sleep by Robert Harris – I’m starting with a title which includes the word ‘second’. Robert Harris is a favourite author of mine and I usually love his books, but I found this one a bit disappointing. It seems at first to be a conventional historical novel set in rural England in the year 1468, but it turns out to be something very different! A fascinating idea, but not what I had expected.

2. Ten-Second Staircase by Christopher Fowler – I don’t seem to have reviewed any books with ‘minute’ in the title, so I’m going with something longer than a second but not as long as an hour. This is the fourth novel in Fowler’s Bryant and May series which follows the investigations of two octogenarian detectives working for London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit.

3. The Distant Hours by Kate Morton – I’ve read most of Kate Morton’s books, although this isn’t one of my favourites. Moving between the 1990s and 1940s, the novel has lots of gothic elements from crumbling castles to family secrets and I did find it entertaining, but much longer than it really needed to be.

4. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – I don’t read a lot of science fiction, but I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by John Wyndham. In The Day of the Triffids, after an unusual display of meteors throws the world into chaos, an aggressive species of tall and vicious plants begin to dominate. A fascinating, but unsettling read.

5. A Week in Paris by Rachel Hore – In this dual timeline novel, the ‘modern’ storyline is set in 1961 and follows music student Fay Knox who is spending a week in Paris trying to discover the truth about her childhood. The other narrative tells the story of Fay’s mother during the occupation of Paris during World War II. I enjoyed this book, but much preferred the wartime storyline to the 1960s one.

6. The Nine Day Queen by Ella March Chase – Lady Jane Grey lasted slightly longer than a week on the throne of England. Her nine day reign in July 1553 is the subject of this historical novel which also gives plenty of attention to the stories of Jane’s two younger sisters, Katherine and Mary.

7. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne – I didn’t have any books with ‘month’ in the title, so am skipping ahead to ‘eighty days’ instead. This classic adventure novel follows the journey of Phileas Fogg who attempts to travel around the world in eighty days in order to win a bet. It’s an entertaining story, but it seemed such a waste to pass through so many countries without having time to explore them!

8. The Year Without Summer by Guinevere Glasfurd – This fascinating novel is set in 1816, the year after the eruption of Mount Tambora, an Indonesian volcano. Glasfurd tells the stories of six people, some real and some fictional, whose lives were affected by the extreme weather that followed the eruption.

9. Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas – This is the second book in Dumas’ d’Artagnan series and, as the title suggests, takes place twenty years after the events of The Three Musketeers. I loved this one every bit as much as the first book and I think it’s a shame it’s so much less well known.

10. Like This, For Ever by Sharon Bolton – For the final title on my list, I couldn’t decide between this one and Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End. Which is the longer period of time? They’re both the same, surely. Anyway, I settled on this one, which is the third novel in Bolton’s wonderful Lacey Flint crime series and one of my favourites!

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Have you read any of these? Which other books with units of time in the title can you think of?

Six Degrees of Separation: From Sorrow and Bliss to Long Summer Day

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we’re starting with Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason. I haven’t read it, but here’s what it’s about:

Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets. So why is everything broken? Why is Martha – on the edge of 40 – friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave?

Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe – as she has long believed – there is something wrong with her. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at 17, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain.

Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, foul-mouthed sister Ingrid), Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix – or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself.

It can be hard to find that all-important first link when the starting book is one you haven’t read, so I often take a word from the title for inspiration. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1), ‘Sorrow’ is the name Tess Durbeyfield gives her baby son. I won’t tell you why, except that the circumstances of his birth are not very happy. Poor Tess has very little happiness in her life at all; this is a heartbreakingly bleak novel, but one that I loved. Many of Hardy’s books have been adapted for film and television and the edition of Tess I read is a tie-in with the BBC adaptation from 2008 – which has a screenplay written by the author David Nicholls, whose most recent book is coincidentally called Sweet Sorrow.

But that’s not my next link! The same adaptation starred Gemma Arterton as Tess, who also played Sister Clodagh in the BBC’s version of Rumer Godden’s novel Black Narcissus (2) in 2020 – and that’s the next book in my chain. Black Narcissus tells the story of a group of Anglican nuns who set out to establish a new convent in an abandoned palace in Mopu, high in the Himalayas. It’s the only Rumer Godden book I’ve read so far, but I loved the atmosphere she created and the way she wrote about the tensions between the nuns as their repressed feelings and desires rose to the surface in the isolation of Mopu. I’m sure I’ll be reading more of her novels.

Another book that features a nunnery is The Lady Agnes Mystery by Andrea Japp (3). I read this a few years ago for the Women in Translation month that takes place every August – it’s a French historical crime novel translated into English by Lorenza Garcia. The story is set in the Perche region of France in 1304 and follows the adventures of Lady Agnes de Souarcy, a young widow who is arrested for heresy by the Inquisition and becomes embroiled in a series of poisonings taking place at nearby Clairets Abbey. This was an entertaining read but the introduction of another storyline involving a secret prophecy gave it too much of a Da Vinci Code feel for my taste. This edition of the book only contains Volume 1 of the mystery; there is a sequel, Volume 2, which I haven’t read and probably won’t.

The Travels of Daniel Ascher by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat (4), is another French novel I read in translation for an earlier Women in Translation month. The translator this time is Adriana Hunter. In this book, a young archaeology student sets out to discover the truth about her mysterious great-uncle Daniel, the author of a series of adventure novels known as The Black Insignia. This was a short novel, which I think was probably aimed at younger readers. I found it quite an interesting, unusual read, but the way the dialogue was written spoiled it for me – no quotation marks and no breaks between sentences to indicate who was speaking. Why do authors do it?

By Gaslight by Steven Price (5) is another book where the author has chosen not to use punctuation correctly. Again, this irritated me because this was otherwise a fascinating novel! Set in the 19th century, it follows an American detective who travels to London in pursuit of a mysterious criminal known only as Edward Shade. It’s a very autumnal novel and in my review I said the following: “…not only are gaslights mentioned frequently, the whole novel feels misty and murky and everything seems to happen either at night or in the fog and rain.”

Well, here we are at the beginning of June, the start of summer, and hopefully we won’t be seeing too much mist, fog and rain for a while yet! So, for my last book (and I know this is a bit of a tenuous link), I have chosen something more appropriate to the season: Long Summer Day by RF Delderfield (6). This is the first in Delderfield’s A Horseman Riding By trilogy, a wonderful family saga set in a farming community in rural Devon during the first half of the 20th century. I loved all three books and am hoping to read more by Delderfield soon.

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And that’s my chain for June! My links have included ‘sorrow’, Gemma Arterton, nuns, women in translation, punctuation (or lack of it) and seasons.

In July we’ll be starting with Wintering by Katherine May.

Top Ten Tuesday: Famous Authors in Fiction

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by Jana of That Artsy Reader Girl) is “Bookish Characters (these could be readers, writers, authors, librarians, professors, etc.)”

There were lots of ways to approach this topic, but I’ve decided to list ten historical fiction novels about the lives of real authors. I have read all of them apart from the last one, which I’m reading now. Let me know if you can think of any more!

1. Daphne du Maurier – Daphne by Justine Picardie
I’m starting with one of my favourite authors, who is being celebrated this week in a Reading Week hosted by Heavenali. Picardie’s novel follows Daphne through the period when she was working on her biography of Branwell Brontë, while in the modern day we meet a PhD student who is writing a thesis on Daphne and the Brontës.

2. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins – Drood by Dan Simmons
This Gothic mystery is supposedly narrated by Wilkie Collins as he and Dickens (the two authors were good friends in real life) search Victorian London for a mysterious figure known only as Drood. There were some things I loved about the book – the setting, atmosphere and biographical information – but I was disappointed by the negative portrayal of Collins, who I confess to liking more than Dickens!

3. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë – A Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan
I’ve read a few other books about the Brontë sisters (and their brother Branwell), but didn’t enjoy any of them as much as Jude Morgan’s beautifully written novel. He captures the personalities of the three sisters so well.

4. William Shakespeare – The Tutor by Andrea Chapin
I’ve read other fictional portrayals of Shakespeare too – including one by Jude Morgan, in fact – but I decided to feature this one, in which Andrea Chapin explores a possible theory to explain what Shakespeare was doing during his ‘lost years’ of 1585-1592.

5. DH Lawrence – Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore
Zennor is a village on the coast of Cornwall and this novel is set during the period when DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived there towards the end of World War I. I loved the way Dunmore wrote about life in a small village during wartime, but found the parts of the book about the Lawrences less interesting.

6. EM Forster – Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut
This novel follows Forster’s visits to India and Egypt and the relationships he forms there that will influence his novels. Although I found a lot to admire about this book, I think I would probably have enjoyed it more if I’d read more of Forster’s own work first.

7. Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm – The Wild Girl by Kate Forsyth
This book takes a fascinating look at the inspiration behind the Brothers Grimms’ well-known fairy tales. Forsyth writes the novel from the perspective of Dortchen Wild, a young woman who grows up next door to the Grimm family in the small German state of Hessen-Cassel.

8. Bram Stoker – Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor
The Irish author Bram Stoker’s story unfolds alongside the lives of English stage actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in this epistolary novel written in the form of diary entries, letters and transcripts of recordings. O’Connor weaves lots of allusions to Dracula into the plot and shows how Stoker could possibly have drawn on his own experiences to help write his most famous novel.

9. Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower – A Burnable Book by Bruce Holsinger
We’ve all heard of Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, but his friend, the poet John Gower, is much less well-known. The two of them team up to solve some intriguing mysteries in A Burnable Book and its sequel The Invention of Fire.

10. Thomas Mann – The Magician by Colm Tóibín
I don’t have much to say about this one as I’m only a few chapters into it, but I’m already learning a lot about the life of Thomas Mann. This is one of the shortlisted titles for this year’s Walter Scott Prize and is maybe not a book I would have chosen to read otherwise.

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Have you read any of these? Which other novels featuring famous authors can you recommend?