#1925Club – My Top 10 Reads from 10 Years of Clubs!

30 Comments

As part of 1925 Club (hosted this week by Karen and Simon), we’re invited to join in the celebrations marking the 10th anniversary of the clubs. Yes, beginning in 2015 with 1924 Club, the club reading weeks have now been held twice annually for ten years! I’ve taken part in all of them and have discovered lots of great books, as well as being inspired to try some new authors for the first time. Having looked back at all the titles I read for the various club years, I have picked out ten favourites to highlight below. The books are listed in order of publication year.

1. Beau Geste by P.C. Wren (1924 Club)
Part adventure novel, part mystery, this was the book I read for Simon and Karen’s first club ten years ago and it was a great choice.

2. The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge (1940 Club) – I really enjoyed this first book in a trilogy following the lives of Lucilla Eliot and her children and grandchildren. I must read the second book soon!

3. They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie (1951 Club)
This is one of Christie’s standalone thrillers (no Poirot or Miss Marple here). It’s great fun and has a very engaging heroine in Victoria Jones.

4. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken (1962 Club)
I missed out on reading Joan Aiken’s Wolves Chronicles as a child, so I took the opportunity to read this one for 1962 Club!

5. Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper (1965 Club)
The first in Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series and another children’s book that I came to as an adult and loved.

6. Chocky by John Wyndham (1968 Club)
As someone who doesn’t read much science fiction, I didn’t expect to love this novel about a boy with a very unusual imaginary friend, but I found it fascinating!

7. God is an Englishman by RF Delderfield (1970 Club)
This is the first book in Delderfield’s Swann Saga about a family who establish a haulage business in Victorian Britain. I will definitely be reading the next book at some point.

8. Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark by Celia Fremlin (1970 Club)
A wonderful collection of thirteen dark, unsettling stories in which Fremlin creates tension from domestic settings and everyday situations.

9. Castle Barebane by Joan Aiken (1976 Club)
Another Aiken book, this time a very entertaining adult Gothic novel set in 19th century Scotland.

10. Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym (1977 Club) – A surprisingly dark and poigant Pym novel, about four lonely people who share an office. It has stayed with me because of the sadness I felt for the characters.

Some honourable mentions:

Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis (1936 Club)
The So Blue Marble by Dorothy B. Hughes (1940 Club)
Earth and High Heaven by Gwethalyn Graham (1944 Club)
The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff (1954 Club)
A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters (1977 Club)

~

Have you read any of these? If you join in with the clubs, what are the best books you’ve read for them?

Simon the Coldheart by Georgette Heyer – #1925Club

18 Comments

This week, Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon of Stuck in a Book are hosting another of their very popular clubs, where we all read and write about books published in the same year. This time it’s 1925! When deciding what to read for the clubs, I usually start by looking to see whether any of my favourite authors had a book published in that year. Georgette Heyer had such a long career there’s nearly always something suitable for whichever year it is and she didn’t disappoint this time.

Simon the Coldheart, published (obviously) in 1925, is one of several straight historical novels Heyer wrote, rather than one of the Georgian or Regency romances for which she’s most famous. It does feel very different and I don’t think it will necessarily appeal to fans of her other books, but I still liked it.

We first meet Simon in the early 1400s when, at the age of fourteen, he presents himself at the castle of Fulk of Montlice, demanding to join his service. Simon is the illegitimate son of Fulk’s bitter enemy, Lord Geoffrey of Malvallet, but Fulk is impressed by his confidence and determination and offers him a position as page. As the years go by, Simon repays Fulk’s faith in him, serving him well for several years before being knighted by the King and gifted lands of his own.

Now known as Sir Simon of Beauvallet (a play on the name of his father, Malvallet, and on the name of his lands, Fair Pastures), Simon has his life in order, exactly as he wants it. His friend Alan, Fulk’s son, and his half-brother Geoffrey, however, believe there’s still something missing from Simon’s life: a wife. Simon insists that he has no interest in women and no plans to get married. But when he meets Lady Margaret of Belrémy, it seems he may have met his match.

I’ve been meaning to read Simon the Coldheart since I read Heyer’s Beauvallet a few years ago – technically a sequel to this book, although it’s set several generations later and features completely different characters. I didn’t find this one as much fun as Beauvallet, which is an Elizabethan pirate novel, but I still found it quite enjoyable. Simon is a strong character, if not particularly easy to like at first – he becomes known as Coldheart for a reason – but later in the book we start to see a more human side to him, first in the close friendships he forms with Alan and Geoffrey, then in his kindness to children and finally his romance with Margaret, which forms a relatively small part of the novel. I also loved his relationship with Fulk, who comes to love him like a son (sometimes, it seems, more than his real son).

As she always does, Heyer attempts to write using language appropriate to the era, which in this case means lots of ‘thees’ and ‘thous’. Today’s historical fiction authors tend not to do this, so it does make the book feel dated – which again won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I didn’t have a problem with it. I didn’t find the romance element of the book particularly satisfying, though; Margaret is introduced quite late in the novel and Heyer’s usual witty dialogue between hero and heroine isn’t much in evidence here. I found Margaret a more interesting character when she’s away having adventures on her own than I did in her scenes with Simon.

Apparently Simon the Coldheart was one of six books Heyer tried to suppress in the 1930s (the others were another historical novel, The Great Roxhythe, and four contemporary novels) as she considered them inferior early works. In 1977, a few years after her death, her son gave permission for this one to be republished. In general I believe an author’s wishes should be respected, but I also think she was maybe being too hard on Simon the Coldheart – it obviously isn’t one of her best, but it’s not a bad book at all. It got my 1925 Club reading off to a good start and I hope to post another review later in the week, as well as looking at some of my favourite reads from previous club years.

Plans for November

19 Comments

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.

~

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

13 Comments

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

19 Comments

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.

~

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

7 Comments

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

28 Comments

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.