After the Sunday Papers #4: Reading Challenge Update

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I have now completed four reading challenges so, instead of posting individual wrap-ups for each challenge, I’ve decided to incorporate them all into this week’s After the Sunday Papers post.

Before I begin, I want to let you all know that I probably won’t have internet access this week as I’m going away tomorrow to spend five days in one of my favourite parts of England, the beautiful Lake District.

I won’t be able to comment or reply to comments, but I’ve scheduled one or two posts for while I’m away.  This is the first time I’ve tried the WordPress scheduling feature so I hope it works!

Now, on with the challenge updates.  For the full lists of books I’ve read for each of the challenges mentioned below, with links to my reviews, see my Completed Challenges page.

The first is the Typically British Challenge.  The idea was to read books written by British authors.  I signed up for the “Cream Crackered” level, which meant I needed to read 8 books.  The 8 British authors I chose were Anne Bronte, Horace Walpole, Richard Adams, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anthony Trollope, Daphne du Maurier, Thomas Hardy and Georgette Heyer.

The second challenge I’ve completed is the Chunkster Challenge.  I knew this one wouldn’t be a problem for me as I read so many long books.  To complete the challenge I needed to read 6 or more chunksters of 450+ pages or 3 books with 750+ pages.  I ended up reading 4 with 450+ pages and 2 with 750+ pages, so I think I’ve now satisfied the requirements of the challenge!

For the 2010 Classics Challenge, I had to read 6 classic novels.  Before the challenge started, I made a list of the classics I wanted to read but I’ve actually only read one from the list and five others that I hadn’t been intending to read.  This is why I don’t like making lists for challenges – I know that I won’t be able to stick to them.

The fourth challenge I’ve completed is the 18th & 19th Century Women Writers Challenge.  I only needed to read two books for this, and the two that I read were The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte and The Doctor’s Wife by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

I am still working on the rest of the challenges I signed up for and am making good progress with most of them.

Have a great week, and I’ll be back on Friday.

Thoughts on A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

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A few months ago I mentioned that I would like to revisit a few of Shakespeare’s plays, but for one reason or another I haven’t had time to do that until now. I thought this would be an appropriate time of year (unless you live in the southern hemisphere, of course) to look at A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As I’m not a Shakespearean scholar and haven’t actually tried to write about one of his plays since I was at school, this is not going to be an in-depth analysis. As the title of this post suggests, I am just going to give some of my thoughts on rereading the play.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is widely performed on stage, making it one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. The play is thought to have been written around 1594-1596 and is classed as a comedy.

There are three separate storylines woven into the plot. The first involves the upcoming wedding of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. A group of craftsmen (known as ‘mechanicals’) are rehearsing the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, a play they are planning to perform at the wedding. In the second thread we meet Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the fairies. Titania has a new page boy and Oberon is jealous. He and his servant, the mischievous fairy Puck, come up with a plot to distract Titania while Oberon takes the boy away from her. The third storyline follows Hermia (who is in love with Lysander), Helena (who is in love with Demetrius), and Demetrius and Lysander (who are both in love with Hermia). Confusing? Yes – and it gets even more complicated when the four of them get mixed up in Puck and Oberon’s scheming!

In Act I Scene 1, Lysander tells us “the course of true love never did run smooth” – and the central theme of the play is love and its difficulties. Here is one of my favourite quotes on the subject of love:

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind:
Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgement taste;
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste:
And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.

The play begins and ends in Athens but the majority of the play is set in the nearby woods, a place free from Athenian law. With some of Shakespeare’s plays I find it difficult to get a real sense of the time and place, but with this one I have no problem picturing the characters running through the moonlit woods on a warm midsummer’s night while the fairies dance around them weaving their magic. The dreamlike mood is enhanced by the way much of the action takes place while various characters are sleeping. Here Oberon describes the bank where Titania sleeps:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight;

As in several of Shakespeare’s plays there’s also a theme of doubling and symmetry with Theseus and Hippolyta mirroring Oberon and Titania, and the two men Lysander and Demetrius being balanced by the two women Hermia and Helena. The conflict is caused by the fact that although Hermia and Lysander are in love, Demetrius also loves Hermia, leaving Helena on her own. Only when the balance is restored by Demetrius falling in love with Helena can the story come to its conclusion.

If you’d like to read the play online you can do so here. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a few words from Puck…

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.

*The picture at the top of this post shows “The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania” by Sir Joseph Noel Paton, c. 1849 (in the public domain)

Review: The Time of Terror by Seth Hunter

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In The Time of Terror, Seth Hunter introduces us to a new naval hero in the style of C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower.  Nathan Peake is a commander in the British Navy who spends his days chasing smugglers along the English coastline.  This is not really Nathan’s idea of fun and he longs to have some real adventures.  He gets his chance in the year 1793 when, with England and France at war, he is asked to run the blockade in the English Channel and deliver some important documents to the American minister in Paris.  Unknown to Nathan, however, his ship is carrying a cargo of counterfeit banknotes – putting his life in serious danger!

Although it’s not necessary to be an expert on French history to understand this story, you will get more out of it if you have some prior knowledge of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.  So if names such as Georges Danton and Robespierre mean nothing to you, it might be a good idea to do some research before beginning the book.

Readers who enjoy historical fiction novels that focus on real historical figures will be pleased to know that throughout the pages of The Time of Terror you’ll meet the author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, the American agent (and Mary’s lover) Gilbert Imlay, the revolutionary writer Thomas Paine and many more – so many, in fact, that I began to feel Hunter was just trying to drop as many famous names as possible into the story, regardless of whether they were necessary.  The sheer amount of historical detail in this novel was slightly overwhelming, though usually interesting.  There were dinner parties with Camille Desmoulins and Lucile Duplessis, visits to the waxworks (including a brief appearance by the young Madame Tussaud) and vivid descriptions of the guillotine.  However, other parts of the story that interested me were barely touched on.  The romantic storyline, for example, is very weak, and I would also have liked to have seen more of Nathan’s American feminist mother who had the potential to be a fascinating character.

If you’re concerned that there’ll be a lot of unfamiliar nautical terms and difficult-to-understand naval battles you’ll be right to some extent, but the story can still be followed even if you find yourself confused or bored by the seafaring aspects.  The sea battle scenes, although very well written, actually contribute very little to the plot and the book would have worked better as a more conventional historical fiction novel in my opinion.  However, there was probably too much land-based action to satisfy fans of nautical fiction so I think the book suffered from not really knowing what it wanted to be or what kind of reader it was aimed at.

This book is the first in a trilogy.  In the second Nathan Peake book, The Tide of War, the action moves to the Caribbean and in the third, The Price of Glory, Nathan will meet Napoleon Bonaparte.  Although I did find this book entertaining and interesting, I’m undecided as to whether I want to invest the time in following Nathan’s story to its conclusion.

Genre: Historical Fiction/Year: 2010/Publisher: McBooks Press/Pages: 391/Source: Won copy from LibraryThing

After the Sunday Papers #3

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* Last week many of you took part in Bloggiesta, which was hosted by Maw Books. Although I found the previous Bloggiesta in January very productive, I decided not to participate this time because I knew last weekend was going to be too busy for me to commit enough time to make it worthwhile. During the week though I’ve had a sort of personal mini-Bloggiesta of my own and made a few improvements to my blog. Here are some of the things I’ve done:

Created Read in 2009 and Read in 2010 pages.
Improved navigation of the A-Z Reviews Page.
Created a Short Story index page.
Updated my About page. This also satisfies the requirements of this week’s Blog Improvement Project task. The task asked us to think about blog branding and building a consistent identity across our blog title, subtitle and about pages.

There are still a few other things I need to do – including moving my completed challenges to another page to keep them separate from the ones I’m currently working on – but those can wait for a while until I have time.

* Did you know 14th-21st June was Independent Booksellers Week here in the UK? I didn’t hear about it until it was too late, as it ends tomorrow, but it made me think – there are no independent booksellers that I know of anywhere near where I live. There are some charity bookshops, second hand bookshops, and chain stores such as Waterstones and WH Smith, but I can’t think of a single independent bookshop. Isn’t that sad? I suppose it doesn’t help that so many people, including myself, are buying most of our books online these days. Are there any independent booksellers near you – and if there are, do you try to support them?

* You may have heard that the author Jose Saramago died on Friday at the age of 87. He became the first Portuguese-language winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. I haven’t read any of Saramago’s work but over the last few days have been hearing a lot about how good his books are. Have you read any of his books and would you recommend them?

* Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl has been voted the all-time favourite Puffin children’s book according to a poll on the Puffin Books website. The other six choices were The Family from One End Street by Eve Garnett, Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, Stig of the Dump by Clive King, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian, and the Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog by Jeremy Strong. Have you read any of these? Which is your favourite? My vote went to Charlotte’s Web.

I’m going back to my books now. Enjoy your reading this week!

Review: The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer

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This is only the second Georgette Heyer book I’ve read and it was very different to my first, The Talisman Ring, in setting, language and plot. The Masqueraders is set just after the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and follows the adventures of Prudence and her brother Robin. Along with their father (referred to by his children as ‘the old gentleman’) Robin had been involved in the failed Jacobite rebellion and is now in danger of being hanged. To prevent him being captured, the brother and sister have created new roles for themselves – Robin has disguised himself as the beautiful ‘Miss Merriot’ and Prudence has become the handsome young ‘Peter’. All very Shakespearean! Not surprisingly, this leads to a number of misunderstandings and narrow escapes.

Things get even more interesting when Prudence, still posing as Peter Merriot, begins to fall in love with Sir Anthony Fanshawe – and then ‘the old gentleman’ arrives on the scene, claiming to be the lost heir to the Barham fortune.

I found the story confusing and difficult to follow at first. I spent several chapters trying to work out exactly why Prudence and Robin had found it necessary to masquerade as people of the opposite sex and what they were hoping to achieve. It also took me a while to get used to the Georgian-style dialogue, with all the egads, alacks and other slang terms of the period.

Robin made a face at his sister.  “The creature must needs play the mother to me, madam.”
“Madam, behold my little mentor!” Prudence retorted.  “Give you my word I have my scoldings from him, and not the old gentleman.  ‘Tis a waspish tongue, egad.”

After a few chapters, however, various parts of the story started to fall into place and then I had no problem understanding what was happening. I ended up enjoying this book more than The Talisman Ring, which surprised me as a lot of people have said that The Talisman Ring is their favourite Heyer, so I wasn’t expecting this one to be as good. There were many things that made this book such a success for me. I thought the Georgian setting, with its powdered wigs, card games, sword fights and duels, was perfectly portrayed. The plot was full of twists and turns that kept my interest right to the end. And I loved the characters. The calm and cool-headed Prudence was the perfect balance for the more impetuous Robin – and both were fun and likeable. Watching Prudence’s relationship with Sir Anthony develop was one of my highlights of the book. Robin’s romance with Letty Grayson, who knew him only as a masked man known as the Black Domino, was equally well written.

Most of all, I loved the ‘old gentleman’. He was conceited, arrogant and a scheming rogue – but he was also hilarious and capable of coming up with such ingenious schemes that maybe his arrogance was justified.

“Have you limitations, my lord?” asked Sir Anthony.
My lord looked at him seriously. “I do not know,” he said, with a revealing simplicity. “I have never yet discovered them.”

Having enjoyed both of the Georgette Heyer books I’ve read so far, I think I’m starting to become a fan and will definitely look out for more of her books!

Highly Recommended

Genre: Historical Fiction/Pages: 320/Publisher: Arrow/Year: 2005 (originally published 1928)/Source: Library book

Review: The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas

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Who would have thought that a book about growing tulips could be so exciting? And yet Alexandre Dumas managed to write a compelling page turner based on that very subject. Dumas became one of my favourite authors a few years ago when I read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers but I had not read any of his lesser-known works until now. I regret not reading The Black Tulip sooner because I enjoyed it almost as much as the two books I’ve just mentioned.

The book is set in seventeenth century Holland and begins with the violent murders of John and Cornelius De Witt, suspected of conspiring against the young Stadtholder, William of Orange. Our hero is the fictional godson of Cornelius De Witt, who is also called Cornelius. Cornelius Van Baerle is a keen tulip-fancier whose biggest goal in life is to produce the world’s first black tulip. However, Van Baerle is not the only tulip-grower in the race for the Grand Black Tulip – and his rival Isaac Boxtel will stop at nothing to get there first!

The first few chapters put the novel in historical context and will be slightly challenging to anyone like myself, who doesn’t have much knowledge of Dutch history, but if you read carefully and refer to the notes it’s easy enough to follow. As soon as Dumas finishes setting the scene, the story explodes into action and never stops until the final page, taking us on a journey through the full range of human emotions – love, hatred, greed, loyalty, jealousy and obsession.

Rosa, the only female character in the book, is a jailer’s daughter who falls in love with Cornelius and finds herself having to compete with the tulip for his affections. Despite making a few remarks of the “I am but a woman” variety she is otherwise a strong and quick-thinking character who does what she knows is right, even if it means going against the wishes of Cornelius or her father. The starring role in the story, though, goes to the elusive black tulip itself.

As you might have guessed, I really loved this book. If you enjoyed The Count of Monte Cristo there’s a good chance that you’ll like this one too, as it’s very similar in writing style, pace and even several plot elements. It could almost be described as a shorter, less epic, less complex version of The Count.

Highly recommended

Publisher: OUP (Oxford World’s Classics)/Year: 2008 (originally published 1850)/Pages: 258/Source: Library book

Review: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson

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“She, Miss Pettigrew, spinster, maiden lady, dull nonentity, jobless, incompetent, was bound for a night club, clad in splendour: painted like the best of them, shameless as the worst of them, uplifted with ecstasy…”

Although I didn’t participate in the Persephone Reading Week hosted by Claire and Verity last month, I enjoyed reading everyone else’s reviews and they made me want to read some Persephone books myself. Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day seems to be the usual recommendation for someone who is new to Persephone – I was a bit unsure about reading it because it didn’t sound like the kind of book I would usually choose to read, but when I found it in the library I grabbed it and immediately started reading it to see why so many people love the book so much.

Before I even started to read the story though, I was pleased to discover that Winifred Watson was from Newcastle like me. There are not many authors from the North East of England who have been internationally successful, so it’s quite exciting to unexpectedly discover one!

Now, what about the novel itself? I’ve seen it described as a romantic comedy, a fairy tale and a Cinderella fantasy – and it’s all of those things and more. It tells the story of Guinevere Pettigrew, a timid middle-aged governess.  When her employment agency accidentally send her to the wrong address, she finds herself at the home of the beautiful young actress and singer, Miss LaFosse.  Waiting for the right moment to tell Miss LaFosse that she thinks there’s been a mistake, and realising that her new friend needs her help, Miss Pettigrew is swept into a glamorous world of night clubs and cocktail parties – and to her surprise, discovers that she’s enjoying every minute of it!

I found Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day very easy to read, and with the entire story taking place in a day, it moved along at a fast pace.  The perfect choice if you’re in the mood for something light hearted, fun and frivolous.  Although it didn’t immediately become a favourite book, it was a lively, entertaining read full of amusing scenes and witty dialogue that made me smile.  Here Miss Pettigrew attends a party wearing make-up and fashionable clothes for the first time in her life:

“I think,” said Miss Pettigrew simply, “I will stand just over there, so that if I look up I can see myself in the mirror across the room…I am not accustomed to myself yet, and if I can glance up every now and then merely to reassure myself of what I don’t look like, it will give me tremendous strength and encouragement”.

Although the book was written in the 1930s and does have a certain old fashioned charm, it still has a lot of relevance. I’m sure we’d all love to have a day like Miss Pettigrew’s where all our dreams comes true and we finally do all the things we’ve never been brave enough to do before.

I did like this book – and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, as I wasn’t really expecting to – but I didn’t love it and will wait until I’ve read more Persephone books before I make up my mind about them. I have Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski waiting to be read and I think that one will probably be more to my taste.

As a side note, I really loved the illustrations in this book! It’s always nice to see illustrations and these beautiful drawings by Mary Thomson really added something extra to the story and helped bring the scenes to life.

Recommended

Publisher: Persephone Books/Year: 2008 (originally published 1938)/Pages: 256/Source: Library book