Plans for November

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November is always one of the busiest months in the book blogging calendar and having seen other bloggers planning ahead, I thought I would do the same. There are lots of different events happening in November and I like to support as many as I can, although I don’t always manage it.

First, there’s Nonfiction November which has five co-hosts this year: Heather of Based on a True Story, Frances of Volatile Rune, Liz of Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home, Rebekah of She Seeks Nonfiction and Deb of Readerbuzz. There are weekly prompts to take part in and I’m already thinking about my answers to some of them. I also have a review I would like to post and reading-wise I’m going to focus on finishing my current non-fiction read The Eagle and the Hart by Helen Castor and I may also read 100 Books to Live By by Joseph Piercy which I have from NetGalley.

Novellas in November is hosted by Rebecca at Bookish Beck and Cathy at 746 Books. For the purposes of the event, novellas are classed as anything under 200 pages (even nonfiction). I’m planning to read at least two novellas: Air by John Boyne, the final book in his Elements quartet, and The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas, a Norwegian author I discovered recently.

It’s also Margaret Atwood Reading Month in November, hosted by Marcie at Buried in Print. Last year I started to read The Blind Assassin but got distracted by other things. I would still like to read it but am not sure I’ll have time for such a long book this November. I do have a few of her other books on the TBR, including Surfacing which is also a novella so would count for more than one event.

Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Tony of Tony’s Reading List are hosting German Literature Month, where the only rule is to read books that were originally written in German. I’m not sure what I’ll be reading for this either; I have an unread volume of short stories by one of my favourite German authors, Hans Fallada, but could decide to try a new author instead.

Finally, November is also SciFi Month hosted by Annemieke of A Dance With Books, Lisa of Dear Geek Place, Mayri of Bookforager and Imyril of There’s Always Room For One More. I probably won’t be joining in with this as I don’t read much SciFi, but I’m including it here in case anyone else is interested.

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Are you planning to take part in any of these? And is there anything else happening in November that I’ve missed?

A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Solving a Murder by F. H. Petford

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Twenty-two-year-old Alma Timperley is stunned when she learns that her Aunt Gladys has died, leaving her hotel in Cornwall to Alma in her will. The news comes as a particular surprise as Alma didn’t even know that Gladys existed in the first place! Still, she accompanies her lawyer, James Nascent, to Falmouth on the Cornish coast to inspect her inheritance and likes what she sees. The Timperley Spiritualist Hotel overlooks the town below and has a very special clientele. The people who come to stay are hoping to make contact with loved ones beyond the grave and their reservation fee includes three sessions with one of the hotel’s two mediums, George Weaver and Valentine Wragge.

Alma has always believed she has psychic abilities herself, so she’s intrigued and decides to immediately take ownership of the hotel. She soon finds that she has more than ghosts to worry about, however, because it’s 1914 and war has recently broken out with Germany. Why has a book written in German been hidden inside a cooking pot in the hotel kitchen? And who turned on a light in the tower, guiding an enemy Zeppelin in from the shore? Is someone in the hotel spying for the Germans?

This is the first book in a planned series of novels starring Alma Timperley and based on this one I’ll definitely be looking out for more. It wasn’t really what I’d expected, though; the title and cover gave me the impression this would be a humorous cosy mystery set in a haunted house, but it’s actually something very different. There’s no ghost hunting (unless you count mediums trying to contact spirits) and there’s not really a mystery either. The identity of the German spy – referred to as Excalibur – is revealed to the reader very early in the book and although Alma and the police don’t know who it is, I would have preferred to be kept in suspense as well, wondering who it was.

Despite the book not really being as advertised – which is a shame, as it seems to have resulted in the book receiving worse reviews than it deserves – I still enjoyed it. I particularly loved the Cornish setting: Petford does a great job of bringing Falmouth to life, with its bay and harbour and local landmarks such as Pendennis Castle, which played a part in the town’s defences during the war, and the King’s Pipe, a chimney used to burn tobacco illegally smuggled into the country. We also learn a lot about PK Porthcurno, once the world’s largest telegraph station where many cables from overseas came ashore and now a museum open to the public.

I think this book has a lot to offer, as long as you approach it as historical fiction about German spies in the First World War and not a ghost story or a detective novel. It covered some aspects of the war I hadn’t read much about before and it held my interest from beginning to end. I liked Alma and her friends and hope to meet them again soon.

Thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 4 for RIP XX

#1925Club – Some previous reads

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1925 Club, hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, starts on Monday and we will all be reading and writing about books published in that year. 1925 was a great year for publishing – I have previously read and reviewed six books on my blog and thought I would list them before the week begins. If you haven’t decided what to read yet, maybe you can find some inspiration here, although some of these are now out of print.

Don’t forget, this is also the 10th anniversary of Simon and Karen’s clubs and we’ve been invited to celebrate by highlighting some of our favourite reads from earlier clubs. I’ll be doing that next week, but first here are my previous reviews of 1925 books:

The Professor’s House by Willa Cather – This quiet, reflective novel about a Professor in his fifties looking back on his life as he prepares to move house was the first Willa Cather book I read.

The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie – One of Christie’s early thrillers rather than a detective story and the first of several books to feature Superintendent Battle.

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham – I loved this beautifully written book set in 1920s China during an outbreak of cholera.

Glorious Apollo by E. Barrington – This is a more obscure one! A fictional biography of Lord Byron with a focus on three of the women in his life.

These Mortals by Margaret Irwin – A fantasy novel inspired by Shakespeare and following the story of magician’s daughter, Melusine, and her companions the Cat, the Raven and the Snake.

The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach by Esther Meynell – This novel imagines that after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, his wife Magdalena decides to write a chronicle of their marriage and their lives together.

I’ve also read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I haven’t reviewed as I read it before I started blogging.

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Have you read any of these – or any other books published in 1925? Will you be taking part in 1925 Club next week?

White Teeth, Red Blood: Selected Vampiric Verses

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I don’t usually choose to read poetry anthologies but this vampire-themed collection sounded appealing, particularly with Halloween just a few weeks away.

White Teeth, Red Blood contains the work of famous poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christina Rossetti, Rudyard Kipling, Emily Dickinson and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as well as some lesser known names and some contemporary writers. Some of the poems feature traditional undead, blood-sucking vampires, while in others there is no actual vampire character; as we are told in the introduction, the vampire ‘acts as a metaphor for many things, from pregnancy and art to racism and colonialism’.

I can’t possibly talk about all the poems in the book, so I will just highlight my favourite, which was actually the first poem in the book, Lenore by the German author Gottfried August Bürger. Originally published in 1774, it’s not technically a vampire story, but does feature a character who has returned from the dead. Lenore is a young woman who loses her faith in God when her lover, William, fails to return from the Seven Years’ War. Late that night, a man who looks like William appears and asks her to join him on a midnight horseback ride to their wedding bed. The translation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is wonderful – I always find it impressive that poetry translated from another language manages to retain its rhythm and rhyming words.

Although I enjoyed this collection overall, it does feel very uneven. The first section, Chilling Tales, which takes up around three-quarters of the book, is made up of long narrative poems (or extracts from them); a lot more pages are devoted to Byron’s The Giaour than to anything else. The poems in the second and third sections, Dire Warnings and The Vampire Within, are much shorter, sometimes less than a page long. I can appreciate that there’s some logic in the way the poems are divided into these three groups (explained in the introduction by the author Claire Kohda), but I think I would have preferred them mixed together for more variety. Also, the poems are ordered chronologically within each section and as the majority are from the 18th and 19th centuries, the small number of very modern ones feel a bit out of place.

With some of the poems, I struggled to see why they were included and what the connection with vampirism was, so it would have been nice to have been given some context, but this really is just a straightforward anthology with no additional material or notes apart from Kohda’s introduction. I didn’t find it completely satisfying, then, but I think it would make a nice gift for a poetry lover or someone with an interest in vampire mythology.

Thanks to Pushkin Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 3 for RIP XX

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

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This is another book that I probably wouldn’t have read if it hadn’t been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize this year (I have an ongoing project where I’m attempting to read all of the shortlists for that particular prize). I’m glad I decided to read it, because after a slow start I ended up enjoying it more than I thought I would at first.

Glorious Exploits is set in 412 BC during the Peloponnesian War. An attempt by Athens to invade Sicily has ended in failure and thousands of defeated Athenian soldiers have been imprisoned in a disused quarry in Syracuse where they are slowly starving to death. Gelon and Lampo, two out of work Syracusan potters, occasionally take food to the quarry and in return the prisoners recite lines from plays by the Athenian tragedian Euripides. Gelon loves Greek theatre and when he discovers that some of the prisoners are familiar
with Medea and, even better, Euripides’ newest work, The Trojan Women, he comes up with a plan to stage both plays in the quarry, with the Athenians as actors.

Lampo is our narrator and tells his story using lots of modern Irish vernacular (Lennon is an Irish author) and lots of swearing. He also has a dry sense of humour and I know many people have found the book hilarious, although it didn’t quite work as a comedy for me. Whether or not you’ll like the writing style is entirely down to personal taste, I suppose. I tend to get irritated by historical novels written in very modern, anachronistic language, although as I said when I read Natasha Pulley’s The Hymn to Dionysus earlier this year, it bothers me less when the book is set in the ancient world. I got used to Lampo’s voice after a while and accepted it.

The relationship between Lampo and Gelon forms an important part of the novel. They are very different people but their friendship has endured since childhood. Lampo is illiterate and directionless but always seems cheerful and ready with a joke – until we start to see signs that there’s more to him than meets the eye and we see another side when he falls in love with a slave girl, Lyra. Gelon has a more serious nature and has taught himself to read, developing a love of Greek plays. He’s afraid that the defeat of Athens could mean that the work of great Athenian playwrights like Euripides become lost to history, which is why he comes up with his idea to keep the plays alive. Gelon knows that it’s possible for warring nations to appreciate each other’s art and culture, even if not everyone would agree.

Towards the end, things take a surprisingly dark turn and I found the final part of the book quite moving. It seemed I was more emotionally invested in the story than I thought! I’m not sure if I would rush to read more books by Ferdia Lennon, but I’m glad I stuck with this one despite initially thinking it wouldn’t be for me.

The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas

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Translated by Torbjørn Støverud and Michael Barnes

Tarjei Vesaas is a completely new author for me, but when I saw two new editions of his books available from Pushkin Press in English translations, I was intrigued by both of them. I decided to start with The Birds, which sounded fascinating. On the front cover, the author Karl Ove Knausgaard describes it as ‘the best Norwegian novel ever’.

The Birds is a short but powerful book. It’s the story of Mattis, a Norwegian man in his late thirties who sees the world differently. Today he would be described as having a mental disability, but Mattis lives in a time when people are not always so sensitive. He’s aware that his neighbours talk about him behind his back and that the village children call him Simple Simon. He has never been able to hold down a steady job and lives with his older sister, Hege, who supports them both through her knitting.

Mattis has low self-esteem and is afraid of what will happen to him if his sister ever leaves, but he is still able to find pleasure in the small things in life, such as the appearance of a woodcock which begins to fly over their house at night. Although nobody else seems to care, to Mattis this is an important, momentous event and the bird and its fate eventually become symbolic of himself. Another, equally significant event is the arrival of Jørgen, a lumberjack with whom Hege falls in love. Convinced that she’ll go away with Jørgen and abandon him, Mattis struggles to cope with this unwelcome change in his life.

This book was published in 1957 and I was impressed by how sensitively and convincingly Vesaas writes about Mattis and his disabilities. He knows he’s not like other people, which makes him feel inadequate and isolated, so any little victory means a lot to him. I found it very moving to see the joy he feels when two young women are kind to him and his sense of pride when he finally starts his own business as ferryman (despite there never being any passengers). I also had a lot of sympathy for Hege. Although we only really see her through Mattis’ eyes, it’s clear that the situation is equally difficult for her. She loves her brother and is protective of him, but at the same time she feels tired, trapped and frustrated. Life seems to be passing her by, so when she finally gets a chance of happiness, she doesn’t want to lose it.

The Birds is a sad, poignant novel but also has some moments of hope and inspiration and is beautifully written, in a simple, gentle way. I loved it and am now looking forward to reading The Ice Palace which sounds just as good.

Thanks to Pushkin Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Top Ten Tuesday: Series I still haven’t finished!

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is “Satisfying Book Series”.

I am very good at starting a series but not so good at remembering to continue with it, let alone finish it! I’ve taken a slightly different approach to the topic and am listing ten series that I’m in the middle of – or, in some cases, still at the beginning of. I’ll be satisfied if and when I finish them!

1. The Wolves Chronicles by Joan Aiken – I somehow missed out on this series as a child but have now read the first two books, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Black Hearts in Battersea. I’ve found that the series has a lot to offer an adult reader too, so I’ll continue!

2. Bryant and May by Christopher Fowler – Starting with Full Dark House, I’ve been reading this series about an octogenarian detective duo since 2011 and am still not even halfway through! I did read the fifth book, White Corridor, recently and will be reviewing it soon.

3. The Johnson Johnson series by Dorothy Dunnett – Dunnett is better known for her historical novels, but this is a contemporary mystery series with each book set in a different part of the world. I’ve read three of them: Tropical Issue, Rum Affair and Ibiza Surprise.

4. The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard – There are five books in this series following the Cazalet family from the 1930s to the 1950s and so far I’ve read the first two, The Light Years and Marking Time. I enjoyed them and hope I’ll be able to pick up the threads of the story again when I eventually get round to the next book.

5. The Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian – When I started to read Master and Commander I didn’t really expect to like this nautical historical fiction series (I often struggle with books set on ships), but here I am eight books in and still enjoying it!

6. Daughters of England by Philippa Carr – This is a pseudonym of Jean Plaidy/Victoria Holt. I read an omnibus edition containing the first three books of the series – The Miracle at St Bruno’s, Lion Triumphant and The Witch from the Sea – and did intend to continue with the fourth one, but never have.

7. The Gervase Fen series by Edmund Crispin – I loved the first Edmund Crispin book I read, The Moving Toyshop, but was less impressed with the second, The Case of the Gilded Fly. There are lots more in the series still to try, though, and the good thing is they don’t need to be read in order.

8. The Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters – I loved Crocodile on the Sandbank, a mystery set in 19th century Egypt, when I read it back in 2012, but thirteen years later I’ve still only read two more books from the series. I do have the next one ready to start!

9. Temeraire by Naomi Novik – I wasn’t sure if I would like this series set in an alternate history version of the Napoleonic Wars (with dragons), but I loved the first book, Temeraire, and went on to read the second one, Throne of Jade. Seven more to go!

10. Barsetshire Chronicles by Angela Thirkell – I liked, but didn’t love, High Rising and Wild Strawberries, set in Thirkell’s fictional Barsetshire (originally created by Anthony Trollope). I’m planning to continue with the series but am happy to work through the books at a slow pace.

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Have you read any of these? Are you currently reading a series that you would like to finish?