john257hopper's 100 books of 2021 (again aiming to include at least 12 previously unread from the 1001 books list)

Converses100 Books in 2021 Challenge!

Afegeix-te a LibraryThing per participar.

john257hopper's 100 books of 2021 (again aiming to include at least 12 previously unread from the 1001 books list)

1john257hopper
des. 30, 2020, 4:40 pm

Welcome all to another year of reading :)

2john257hopper
Editat: des. 31, 2020, 6:03 pm

So my final total for 2020 was 111 books read, one more than in 2019. I see that a number of people here have read fewer books in 2020 due to the other distractions and challenges we have all faced to a greater or lesser degree this year. For me, my reaction was to read fewer very heavy books, cutting out post-apocalyptic SF and non-fiction books about plagues and such like, and to read a few more lighter books such as children's literature and comfort reads.

3jfetting
gen. 1, 2021, 2:02 pm

Happy New Year and happy reading in 2021!

4john257hopper
Editat: gen. 1, 2021, 4:41 pm

Thank you, Jenn :) Happy new year to you too!

6hemlokgang
gen. 2, 2021, 1:47 pm

Good health and good reads in 2021!

7pamelad
gen. 2, 2021, 3:04 pm

Happy reading in 2021. Is there more Vasily Grossman in your future? I am considering A Writer at War.

8john257hopper
Editat: gen. 2, 2021, 3:27 pm

>7 pamelad: Thanks Pamela. I have that one, and also Stalingrad on my TBR list.

9john257hopper
gen. 2, 2021, 3:27 pm

>6 hemlokgang: thanks :)

10john257hopper
gen. 4, 2021, 4:40 pm

1. The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman

My first completed read of 2021 was a re-read, after watching the second series of the excellent BBC adaptation of His Dark Materials. This is a somewhat darker and grittier novel than Northern Lights, and I enjoyed it slightly less, but only slightly - they are both great examples of fiction aimed at younger readers, but which can be enjoyed by readers of all ages. The spectres are a truly horrible concept in their effects on their victims, and some of the language used to describe this was reminiscent of the effects of clinical depression - while my own depression has been mild to moderate, the descriptions of a "nausea of the soul" and "melancholy weariness" reminded me of the numbness and inability to feel I have sometimes experienced.

11john257hopper
gen. 5, 2021, 3:37 pm

2. Sherlock Holmes and the Twelve Days of Christmas - Roger Riccard

This is a series of twelve short Sherlock Holmes spin off stories, each of them being a play on words with a stanza of the seasonal song (I read the appropriate one on each of the twelve days). These are well written, with an authentic Holmesian feeling, though with the occasional grating Americanism. Some of them were based on misunderstandings rather than crimes, but nearly all of them had a nice feeling of completeness and working as self-contained stories. My favourites were probably The Four Calling Birds, The Five Gold Rings (where Holmes, called out of retirement, owns a Bassett hound called Lestrade) and The Ninth Ladyship at a Dance.

12john257hopper
gen. 5, 2021, 4:08 pm

3. The Collectors: His Dark Materials Story - Philip Pullman

This short story does not take place within the exact context of any of Pullman's full length novels in the Dark Materials or Book of Dust series, but is a macabre tale relating to a cursed painting and statuette which are unknown to the characters who fall victim to them, but to the reader are clearly a painting of Mrs Coulter and a statuette of her monkey daemon. Short but effective.

13john257hopper
gen. 7, 2021, 2:08 pm

4. Death's Door: An Edgar Allan Poe Time Travel Novella

The elements of time travel and Poe tempted me to download this short novel by an author I'd never heard of, and I was pleasantly surprised. While not a deep read, it is quite well written and light-hearted, a pleasant read with some interesting ideas. The main character Alexandra Reynolds is the owner of a bar in Baltimore, who is surprised when a drunken Edgar Allan Poe staggers in one night - but not as surprised as one might think, as she seems to be a time traveller herself, though her origins are not explained. It emerges that Poe has time travelled from a point just a few days before his early death in 1849, and the plot centres around Reynolds trying to find a way to return Poe to his own time, even though she knows he will shortly die, with the help of a local cop who has the hots for her. Reynolds's own time travelling exploits are not explained, though she was involved with helping to hide runaway slaves on the famous Underground Railway. Quite intriguing, and I would read more from this author.

14john257hopper
gen. 10, 2021, 3:51 pm

5. Edgar Allan Poe and the London Monster - Karen Lee Street

This is a very well written literary mystery in which Edgar Allan Poe teams up with the fictional detective he created, Auguste Dupin, in order to investigate a mystery in London in 1840. Poe is receiving mysterious letters claiming to implicate his long deceased grandparents, Henry and Elizabeth Arnold, British actors on the London stage in the 1790s, in a series of bizarre crimes, a real historical series of attacks on ladies where their skirts were slit and their buttocks slashed by a knife-wielding man (nicknamed by the media the "London Monster"). Poe and Dupin must investigate who has penned these letters and their motives, in the process coming to know and often mistrust a selection of individuals in incidents that clearly gave Poe inspiration for some of his most famous stories such as The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Masque of the Red Death. Indeed he pays a call on Charles Dickens (who is out) and meets his pet raven, Grip, who appears in the latter's Barnaby Rudge and inspired Poe 's most famous poem. The final resolution contains a number of twists and turns. Extremely well written, the narrative just on occasion became a little confusing with a number of dream sequences, but is a powerful read. It is the first of a trilogy and I will read the others.

15john257hopper
gen. 14, 2021, 3:52 pm

6. The Gods of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs

This is the second book in the author's Barsoom (Mars) series, a sequel to Princess of Mars. John Carter returns to Mars after a 10 year gap and has to battle through the various factions on the planet to rescue his princess Dejah Thoris, though he (hopefully temporarily) loses her again in the last chapter. As ever, Burroughs is very imaginative in creating alien cultures, despite the obvious limitations of scientific and astronomic knowledge at the time the book came out in 1913. There is very little plot, it is all action sequences, battles, one on one fights, captures and rescues, which does become a bit repetitive at times.

16john257hopper
gen. 17, 2021, 7:04 am

7. The Pierced Heart - Lynn Shepherd

This is the third of the author's literary pastiches I have read, this one being based on Bram Stoker's Dracula. A German scientist Baron Von Reisenberg is conducted mysterious experiments in his castle in Austria and young women are disappearing there and in London. The final explanation turns out to be more scientific than vampiric, with some interesting twists and turns in the last couple of chapters. I thought this was a great read, well written and with a good sense of gothic atmosphere, and is my favourite of the three of her novels I have read. I noticed with slight annoyance half way through that this is, however, the fourth in the Charles Maddox series, not the third, so I will need to go back and re-read this and hope that doesn't make too much of a difference to the flow of the series.

17Matke
gen. 17, 2021, 8:43 am

You read some interesting books! Sherlock Holmes and the Twelve Days of Christmas and The Pierced Heart sound fascinating and up my alley.

I’m making my way, very slowly, through the Barsoom novels. Like you, I’d prefer a bit more plot.

18john257hopper
gen. 17, 2021, 9:30 am

>17 Matke: good to see you on here, we have a number of interests in common I. I'm following your thread here and have sent you a friend request if that's okay.

19Matke
gen. 17, 2021, 10:37 am

>18 john257hopper: Oh, of course, John. I drop over and accept right now.

20john257hopper
gen. 26, 2021, 4:03 pm

8. The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins

Published in 1868, this is often described as the first detective novel in the English language (Poe's earlier Dupin tales were short stories, and more exercises in ratiocination than full fleshed out stories; and Dickens's novel Bleak House contained Inspector Bucket of the Detective in one strand only of the story). It feels quite like a modern detective mystery, with carefully laid clues and red herrings surrounding the eponymous Indian diamond which is sacred in the Hindu religion. Much of the book is told from the point of view of different characters, most of whom are in a sense detectives - there is no single acknowledged sleuth here, though Sergeant Cuff is the nearest thing in the first part of the book, while the servant Gabriel Betteredge also fulfills that role for much of the first half of the story. There is a Sherlock Holmes vibe twenty years before Conan Doyle's first published story, as per Sergeant Cuff: "At one end of the inquiry there was a murder, and at the other end there was a spot of ink on a table cloth that nobody could account for. In all my experience along the dirtiest ways of this dirty little world, I have never with such a thing as a trifle yet", and "It's only in books that the officers of the detective force are superior to the weakness of making a mistake". A great read.

21john257hopper
gen. 28, 2021, 3:14 pm

9. The Moonstone - Play

This is a play version of Wilkie Collins's famous novel, adapted by the man himself for performance in a two month run in autumn 1877, nearly a decade after the book was published. The play was apparently not received well, but I think it works quite well as a telescoped version of the story, retaining the key elements of the mystery as to who stole the diamond from Rachel Verinder, while omitting some characters and subplots, especially the Indians pursuing the diamond across the world as it is sacred to the Hindu religion. Quite a satisfying read.

22john257hopper
gen. 30, 2021, 8:38 am

10. Yes to Life In Spite of Everything - Viktor Frankl

This is the text of a series of three lectures given in 1946 by Viktor Frankl, the Auschwitz survivor famous for his book Man's Search for Meaning about his philosophy of finding a sense of purpose and meaning even in the direst of circumstances a human being can live through. These lectures further elaborate on his philosophy, raw and fresh barely a year after his liberation from the camps. He had managed to survive through his belief in an ultimate sense of purpose in life, a belief that every human being, must find and live out their own sense of purpose, be it big or small, to live their lives fully.

He saw this as the positive extrapolation of Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration that "Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how. " Frankl saw in this "an explanation for the will to survive he noted in some fellow prisoners. Those who found a larger meaning and purpose in their lives, who had a dream of what they could contribute, were......more likely to survive than were those who gave up." Ultimately while the Nazis were able to take away a camp inmate's possessions, name and very identity, the one thing they could not take was a person's freedom of choice to decide how they would react in a given set of circumstances, by retaining some inner hope for the future, however slim it might objectively seem to be realisable.

He concludes: "when the inmates in the Buchenwald concentration camp sang in their song, ‘We still want to say yes to life’, they did not only sing about it, but also achieved it many times – they and many of us in the other camps as well. And they achieved it under unspeakable conditions, external and internal conditions that we have already spoken enough about today. So shouldn’t we all be able to achieve it today in, after all, incomparably milder circumstances? To say yes to life is not only meaningful under all circumstances – because life itself is – but it is also possible under all circumstances." A strong lesson in positive thinking that we all could usefully benefit from in today's very challenging and harrowing, but clearly less extreme, circumstances, and especially poignant in the week of Holocaust Memorial Day.

23pamelad
gen. 30, 2021, 3:22 pm

>22 john257hopper: Now is a good time to remember that message. I've just ordered the physical book (not the ebook) so I can pass it on.

24john257hopper
Editat: gen. 31, 2021, 3:16 pm

11. The Children of Green Knowe Collection - Lucy M. Boston

This book collates two of the books in this classic children's series published between the 1950s and 1970s. The original Children of Green Knowe is a lovely atmospheric story of a seven year old boy Tolly's stay at the ancient house of his great grandmother Mrs Oldknow, where the present merges with the past and Tolly meets the spirits of children who lived in the house in the 17th century. River of Green Knowe is actually the third in the series not the second and I didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much. It had no characters in common with the first book and concerned the adventures of three children staying in Green Knowe, Ida, Ping and Oskar on the river, and it doesn't feel like the same place as in the first book. I thought this almost entirely lacked the atmosphere of its predecessor, apart from one mysterious timeslip sequence near the end. 5/5 for Children, 3/5 for River, so 4/5 overall.

25Matke
gen. 31, 2021, 10:31 pm

I loved The Moonstone and might reread it this year.

And I have Man’s Search for Meaning on the shelf; just trying to figure out when would be the best time to read it.

26john257hopper
feb. 4, 2021, 2:46 pm

12. Dawn Wind - Rosemary Sutcliff

This is yet another beautifully written historical novel by Rosemary Sutcliff. Set in the 7th century AD, Owain is a young Briton who escapes wounded from a catastrophic British defeat in battle at the hands of the advancing Saxons near Aquae Sulis (Bath). He wanders across the seemingly almost empty landscape of southern England, including the eerie deserted remains of the former Roman town Vinconium and meets a young equally homeless and rootless girl Regina. Years pass and Owain becomes a slave to a Saxon master Beornwulf, who nevertheless treats him well and he earns his freedom and becomes involved in national events, including St Augustine's visit to Kent (the coming of Christianity being the "dawn wind" of the novel's title - "ever since the last stand, by Aquae Sulis, Owain had felt himself at the end of something. Now.....he knew all at once, that he was at a beginning"). As in The Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset, Sutcliff is very evocative in describing the sense of vacuum and rootlessness during this time after the Roman legions leave: "Britain was a lost land and a lost cause, the swords were rusted and the lights were out, and nothing seemed left to do but to get away and leave it to the dark". This story is loosely tied to the Eagle of the Ninth series through Owain's possession of the dolphin ring that is passed down through the Aquila family line in that trilogy, though this is by no means integral to the plot and it can be enjoyed as a self-standing and typically extremely high quality piece of historical fiction.

27john257hopper
feb. 7, 2021, 7:49 am

13. The Serpent Sword - Matthew Harffy

This is the first in a series of novels set in early 7th century Anglo-Saxon England. Beobrand is a young warrior from Kent who now finds himself in the north of the country in the kingdom of Bernicia (the northern half of what would later be Northumbria). This is a time of struggle between the Saxons and the "Waelisc", or Celts, and between emerging Christianity and the old Celtic and Saxon gods. The atmosphere in this feels a lot like Bernard Cornwell's Uhtred series, though that is set some three centuries later. While I have got slightly tired of the latter series over the years due to the endless setpiece battle scenes, The Serpent Sword feels like a more plot-driven book and Beobrand is a more sympathetic central character (after an initial morally dubious sequence and a horrible murder and rape incident in which he is peripherally involved and fails to prevent). I will pursue this series.

28john257hopper
Editat: feb. 12, 2021, 1:44 pm

14. Crow Stone - Jenni Mills

This is the second archaeological-based mystery thriller I have read by this author, though I didn't enjoy it as much as Buried Circle. This one is based around the discovery of a temple to Mithras in some old mines underneath Bath. While I love Bath, we don't get to see much of the city here, and indeed we don't get that much of the mystery either. While there were some creepy and atmospheric scenes set in the utter darkness of the mines, much of the novel concerned the childhood travails of the central character, Kit Parry, and her complex relationships with her families and friends as she grew up, with chapters alternating between her childhood and her current (2007) work as a mining engineer, facing sexism from many of her colleagues in an overwhelmingly male industry. For me, there was rather too much of Kit's personal life, and not enough of the mystery/thriller elements in a slightly rambling and probably overlong novel. I understand what the author was trying to achieve, but this imbalance was a bit of a disappointment to me.

29john257hopper
feb. 15, 2021, 2:02 pm

15. The Scent of Danger - Fiona Buckley

This is the eighteenth book in the Ursula Stannard series of Elizabethan mysteries. Ursula decides to investigate the apparent disappearance of two of Walsingham's agents whom she recruited in Devon. She discovers that they have both died in rather unlikely "accidents". The investigation brings with it the usual series of dangers to Ursula, whose life is threatened on two occasions. However, like the most recent two novels in the series, I found the final revelation and motivation of the culprit just stretched my credulity too far. Ursula helps to resolve a couple of romantic situations in the process and also acquires two more members of her household, to replace one who leaves. Given that the author is in her mid 80s, one wonders how many more books there are likely to be in this series, but the ending does not suggest any kind of finality and I will keep reading them so long as she keeps writing them.

30kac522
feb. 18, 2021, 10:24 am

>22 john257hopper: I will see if I can find a copy of Yes to Life: in Spite of Everything. And a reminder to re-read Man's Search for Meaning, which I haven't done in a while.

31kac522
feb. 18, 2021, 10:34 am

John, you may be interested in the British Authors Challenge here:

Main Page: https://www.librarything.com/topic/327699#n7400811
February's Challenge thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/329101#n7426380

Also, right now a few of us are in the middle of a Group Read discussion of Trollope's Orley Farm, which you might enjoy:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/329326#n7426582

32john257hopper
feb. 18, 2021, 12:17 pm

>31 kac522: - thanks for the heads up. On a quick look at the thread, it looks like an interesting novel. I've only read The Warden so far but would like an excuse to read more.

33john257hopper
feb. 18, 2021, 12:17 pm

>31 kac522: - thanks for the heads up. On a quick look at the thread, it looks like an interesting novel. I've only read The Warden so far but would like an excuse to read more of his works.

34kac522
Editat: feb. 18, 2021, 4:13 pm

>33 john257hopper: Right now Liz (lyzard) is taking us through Trollope's lesser known novels in chronological order. She is leading about 2 novels per year. She led group reads of the Barsetshire and Palliser novels in prior years. Liz is very knowledgeable about the Victorian era, and about Trollope in particular.

Orley Farm starts out a little slowly, but it picks up midway. It's a lot about lawyers and Trollope's views of the courts, justice and the legal system.

She also leads us through lesser-known female novelists, mostly British and re-published in the 20th century by Virago Press. Last year we read Lady Audley's Secret. I think up next will be something by Mrs. Oliphant.

Here is our discussion thread of Lady Audley's Secret--186 posts, so we had a lively discussion about the book and about "sensation" novels in general: https://www.librarything.com/topic/318457

35john257hopper
feb. 18, 2021, 5:46 pm

>34 kac522: Thanks. I read Lady Audley's Secret last year. I like Mary Braddon, I also read her The Christmas Hirelings and have read some of her short ghost stories.

36john257hopper
feb. 20, 2021, 10:48 am

16. Dresden: The Fire and the Darkness - Sinclair McKay

This is an extremely well written and balanced account of one of the most controversial actions of the Allies in the Second World War: the firebombing of the German city of Dresden by British and US bomber planes on 13-14 February 1945. Its detractors, especially in later decades far distant from the preoccupations and reality of the time, have described it as a war crime and its architect Sir Arthur ("Bomber") Harris as a war criminal, as an attack on a cultural metropolis of limited military strategic significance, where many refugees had gathered. Harris and others saw it as eliminating a major centre where many peacetime industries had been converted to military use, a vital step in ensuring that the Nazi regime, already dying though it didn't admit it, was finished off properly and forced to recognise the reality of its own demise, in order to save the lives of thousands of Allied pilots and civilians. Others have seen it in more simple terms of revenge as just reprisal for similar Nazi destruction of numerous other cities earlier in the war, notably Coventry, but also Rotterdam and many others. Churchill's views changed over time; while ultimately politically responsible for ordering the firebombing, he seemed to regret it afterwards, and wanted to revert back to a strict focus on purely military targets - though the distinction between military and civilian targets was less clear-cut than many might imagine.

The first third of this book covers the history of Dresden as an artistic and cultural centre and the way in which the Nazis changed, or in some cases failed to change, the character of the city and its people from 1933. Thereafter it follows the experiences of a range of ordinary people, both Dresden residents sheltering from the bombardment and trying to locate family and friends afterwards in a city centre incomprehensibly smashed beyond recognition and where 25,000 people had been killed in one night, and the bomber pilots who had seen large numbers of their fellow pilots shot down and many towns and cities in Britain ravaged and their citizens killed by air raids.

These groups' perceptions on these events may seem utterly irreconcilable. And yet the twinning of Dresden with Coventry in 1959 was surely a very significant event, a joining of two cities both of which had their hearts torn out through war, but which had been rebuilt. More specifically, the destroyed Frauenkirche cathedral in central Dresden, left in ruins through the duration of the communist East German state partly as an attempted reminder to the population of the actions of "imperialist" Americans and British, was rebuilt after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and one of the British craftsmen working on the golden orb and cross at its apex was the son of one of the bomber pilots who took part in the raid.

Ultimately, the raid can only be seen against the context of its time, after five years of total war and an existential struggle for existence that left all its participants desperate and exhausted. This was an engrossing read, and the author lets the reader make his or her own mind up about these cataclysmic events.

37john257hopper
feb. 21, 2021, 7:10 am

17. The Invisible Man - H G Wells

This is a re-read of one of the quartet of classic science fiction novels which propelled H G Wells to fame in the mid to late 1890s. For me, this is the least good of them, and is nowhere near as gripping or thought-provoking as The Time Machine, War of the Worlds or The Island of Dr Moreau. An unscrupulous scientist Griffin seeks to become invisible before realising the disadvantages and strives to hide from society and avoid exposure. Much of the novel is comedic and it is only when Griffin explains the science behind it and how it happened to a doctor, Kemp, and then decides to take revenge and unleash a reign of terror on the local town, that the action hots up and the final struggle is quite violent and dramatic. Despite some interesting reflections on the amorality of the potential application of some scientific ideas, this is not, for me, one of Wells's strongest novels.

38john257hopper
feb. 23, 2021, 4:33 pm

18. V2 - Robert Harris

Robert Harris is one of my favourite contemporary authors, but I found this latest novel of his a bit disappointing by his usual high standards. The story focuses of course around the infamous V2 rockets shot by the Nazis over London and south east England in the last few months of the second world war. The principal (fictional) characters are a British WAAF Kay Caton-Walsh, who is assigned to a group based in newly liberated Belgium in November 1944 where they are calculating the trajectories of newly launched V2s to ascertain their launch sites so they can be bombed, and Dr Rudi Graf, a disillusioned German engineer working on the V2s; the novel is based around the unseen rivalry between these two's efforts, though they don't meet each other until after the war when Graf and his superior the historical Werner von Braun are en route to a new life in America via London. Despite this interesting backdrop and strong narrative drive, the novel for me somehow failed to take off (pun unintentional) until the last few chapters and was rather short, with perhaps slightly too much technical details of rocket construction for my taste.

39john257hopper
feb. 27, 2021, 4:31 pm

19. The Murderer in Ruins - Cay Rademacher

This is the first in a murder mystery trilogy set in the ruins of post-WWII Hamburg, a city devastated by Allied air raids. In the freezing winter of Jan/Feb 1947, with food and fuel in very short supply in the ice-bound city, Chief Inspector Frank Stave (pronounced Stah-vay) has to investigate the discovery of a series of naked bodies in bombed and rubble-strewn working class areas in the east or west of the city, bodies that seem to have nothing in common, lack clues as to their identities and, even more strikingly and hauntingly, are completely unclaimed and unrecognised when posters seeking for clues are posted all over Germany. The eventual solution to the mystery has its roots in the events of the war, which still looms large over the city and its inhabitants. This novel is very well written and Inspector Stave quite a well drawn and already quite hard bitten and cynical character, but who still hopes for a better life for his country. Hamburg itself is really the principle character of the novel, with its bleak and rubble-filled streets and wrecked buildings creating a very haunting atmosphere against the background of the one of the bitterest winters for many years. The storyline is based on a real series of murders carried out by a, still to this day, unknown "rubble murderer". A very good, if stark read, and I have already purchased the following two books in the series.

40john257hopper
feb. 28, 2021, 4:51 pm

20. Ship of Fate: The Story of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff - Roger Moorhouse

This is a fascinating short book about a little known maritime disaster, but what in fact was the single worst in history in terms of its death toll. The MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a luxury cruise liner launched by the Nazis in 1937, very much as a propaganda symbol of the luxuries the Nazi regime could give to its rank and file workers. After a couple of years of conveying German people on subsidised cruises round the Baltic and to Nazi-friendly countries such as Italy and Portugal, it became a hospital ship in the first year of the war, then a floating barracks for most of the rest of the conflict. In late January 1945 as the Red Army was advancing ever nearer to the heart of Germany itself, the Wilhelm Gustloff helped to evacuate thousands of service personnel, civilians and refugees away from the coast of what is now north west Poland/north east Germany. The ship, designed for 2,000 passengers, had over 10,000 by the time it set sail. Containing at least some military personnel, it was regarded as a legitimate target and a Soviet submarine torpedoed it. The ship sank in just over an hour, taking over 9,000 men and women children down to their deaths, the few lifeboats and nearby ships only being able to rescue 1,250 souls. The book covers the gripping tragedy in the icy Baltic very well, and puts the ship in the historical context of the evolution of the Nazi regime from its popular, massively confident stance in 1937 to its Gotterdamerung in 1945. A very effective read about a relatively little known incident.

41john257hopper
març 5, 2021, 1:30 pm

21. Woke: A Guide to Social Justice - Titania McGrath

This is a short wickedly satirical book poking fun at the extremes of the "Woke" movement which often demonstrates how a ridiculous obsession with identity politics can distort and frustrate sound and decent aims to achieve justice and improve the lives of marginalised groups. Contrary to what readers might expect, the author is actually on the left, not on the right. A bit of light relief, though also a bit depressing.

42john257hopper
març 7, 2021, 12:26 pm

22. The Crucible - Arthur Miller

This 1953 play concerns the events of the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692, and was intended by the author to draw an analogy with McCarthyism, which at that time was scarring US public discourse. Given that the witch trials resulted in deaths of innocent people, an even more appropriate comparison would be with the denunciatory atmosphere of Stalinism, especially in the purges of the late 1930s. Another contemporary (to us) comparison that came to my mind was with the political echo chambers that exist, especially on social media, on both the right and the left; as the modern day universal narrator says in Act 1: "A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence". The play is a gripping drama, with an unfolding air of suspicion and malice that ends up swallowing almost all of the main characters. Even discounting its political significance, it's a great piece of literature.

43john257hopper
març 8, 2021, 3:16 pm

23. Middlemarch - George Eliot

I'm afraid I have stopped reading this very long novel a little over a quarter of the way through. While it contains some crisp and humorous dialogue and some good scenes, this is not enough to sustain my interest over a book of such length. For me this lacked the focus and atmosphere of Silas Marner or Romola. No rating.

44john257hopper
Editat: març 11, 2021, 2:19 pm

24. Doctor Who: The Witch Hunters - Steve Lyons

This is a Doctor Who spin-off novel set during the Salem witch trials of 1692, which I was inspired to read after reading Arthur Miller's Crucible. The First Doctor with his original companions Susan, Ian and Barbara visit at some point after the TV story The Reign of Terror (it's not clear if it's before or after Planet of Giants, though). Needless to say they are accused of being witches and face imprisonment, humiliation and death alongside the real historical victims of the witch hysteria. The story paints a grim picture of the stifling atmosphere of extreme Puritan religiosity and the fear of damnation that played a very real part in these people's lives with tragic and horrible consequences. Susan wants to change history to save the victims but, like Barbara in the TV story The Aztecs, must learn the hard way that it is not possible to change the pre-set course of human history (though the Doctor himself is also tempted to do so at times here). There are various twists and turns in time that I found slightly hard to follow, and overall this felt a much more grim read than other First Doctor Who novels, even ones with settings as equally grim on paper, which is a testimony to the quality of the writing, but also that I found rather depressing. Finally, I didn't like the format of the novel, divided into five sections, some of them very long, but not into individual chapters.

45john257hopper
març 14, 2021, 4:19 pm

25. Late Harvest - Fiona Buckley

I have been reading this author's long series of Tudor whodunnits for many years, but this novel is a family saga set in early 19th century Somerset, a pleasant drama full of the ebb and flow of the farming life of the main character Margaret Shaw and her family and close community, punctuated by brushes with the smuggling way of life enjoyed by her soulmate Ralph Duggan and, tacitly, by most of the community partial to a bit of contraband brandy or tobacco. Margaret is eventually reunited with Ralph after many vicissitudes in life and their both being married to other people. A pleasant and undemanding historical novel.

46pamelad
març 18, 2021, 5:33 am

>45 john257hopper: I've borrowed Queen Without a Crown on Overdrive. Going well so far.

>43 john257hopper: I had the opposite experience. Loved Middlemarch and gave up on Romola. Did you dislike Dorothea? I found her endearing.

47john257hopper
Editat: març 18, 2021, 5:49 am

I have been reading that series for 15 years so the characters are like old friends, even though the plots are often quite repetitive. She has a new one out next week in the UK.

I didn't dislike Dorothea (or her husband), it was some of the other characters and the situations that failed to hold my interest. On the other hand, I love Italy and novels set in the Renaissance especially, so found Romola a beautiful read.

48john257hopper
març 19, 2021, 4:50 pm

26. The Death of Caesar: The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination - Barry Strauss

This is an excellent account of probably the most famous assassination in history, an event that shaped the future development of one of the ancient world's greatest empires, and whose effects are thereby arguably still felt today. It explores the motivations of all the key players, so far as we can determine them based on the primary and secondary sources we have and reasonable surmise. It analyses the political and other factors that led to individuals and groups in Roman society supporting or opposing Caesar and his threat (or not if they did not see it as one or did not mind) to the ideals of the Roman Republic. This was a Republic that had flourished for four and a half centuries since an alleged ancestor of Brutus, one of the leading conspirators, threw out the last of the semi-legendary kings of Rome and established the Republic, so this was a very high stakes conflict. The story is dramatically and colourfully told, and the principal personalities brought out very clearly: this includes Decimus who, while playing as important a role in the conspiracy as Brutus and Cassius, is much less well known, probably largely as he is overlooked in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar. A great read.

49john257hopper
març 23, 2021, 4:56 pm

27. I am Livia - Phyllis T Smith

This is an autobiographical novel of the life of Livia, wife of Julius Caesar's great nephew and adopted son Octavian, better known as the future Roman Emperor Augustus. The relationship between the two of them is closer to being one of equals, intellectually at least, than any other such relationship of the time - Livia has been described as the most powerful woman in the history of ancient Rome. The Livia depicted here is Tavius's (Octavian's) closest political advisor, but also very humane and with a horror of the warfare which necessarily accompanies his rise to supreme power. He (and ultimately she also) regards this rise as being for the good of Rome, in putting an end to the civil wars which have disfigured the city and growing empire's life for many decades and have effectively put an end to the Roman Republic, whose ideals were embodied most effectively by such figures as Cicero and Cato. This is a very different Livia from the more famous manipulative and scheming murderess depicted by Robert Graves in I, Claudius. I prefer to believe this version of Livia, though historians have different views and we will never know for sure. What is sure is that she was declared a goddess after her death at the advanced age of 86 by her grandson, Emperor Claudius. A powerful and influential figure.

50john257hopper
març 27, 2021, 8:04 am

28. Strangers on a Train - Patricia Highsmith

This mid-20th century American crime novel was the basis for Hitchcock's famous film of the same name. The basic plot of the reciprocal murders of an unfaithful wife and a hated, overbearing father remains the same, though many of the details are different. Overall, I prefer the film, though that may at least partly because I have seen it many times, but never read the novel until now. The novel depicts well the increasing guilt that Guy Haines (a prominent architect as opposed to a tennis player in the film) feels at knowing the secret as to who murdered his estranged wife, and here, unlike in the film, he actually commits the reciprocal murder of Bruno's father. Bruno (which is here his surname not his given name) is a growing alcoholic - another degradation well described in the novel. There were parts of the story that dragged a bit for me, but overall I thought this was a good, psychological novel. I did miss the lack of incidents like the broken merry go round that kills Bruno in the film (here he suddenly commits suicide by jumping off a boat), but enjoyed it overall.

51john257hopper
Editat: març 29, 2021, 3:11 pm

29. Fear Stalks the Village - Ethel Lina White

This is the third crime novel I have read by this author who, for a brief period in the 1930s and early 40s was bracketed with Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, but who is now all but forgotten. Her most famous novel (relatively speaking) was The Wheel Spins, which was the inspiration for Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes film (one or two of her other novels were also adapted for less well known films). This one is about poison pen letters besmirching the reputations of ostensibly respectable community figures in a nameless idyllic village somewhere in "a hollow of the Downs" in the south of England. As sometimes with other novels written in the same era, the characters seem more outdated to me than those in some 19th century novels. The plot unravels fairly dramatically, with deaths and suicides following on from the early poison letters, and seemed more focused than one of her other novels I read last year, Wax. The mystery is eventually solved by an outside amateur sleuth. Quite a good read.

52pamelad
març 29, 2021, 4:42 pm

>51 john257hopper: I also enjoyed this one. Just checked and found that I have read 11 books by this author. The Wheel Spins, Some Must Watch and Step in the Dark were three good ones.

53john257hopper
Editat: març 30, 2021, 3:49 pm

30. The Debatable Case of Mrs Emsley - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This is one of the cases of potential cases of miscarriages of justice which Conan Doyle chose to investigate at the turn of the 20th century. Unlike the contemporary cases of George Edalji and Oscar Slater, though, this was already a 40 year old case. Mrs Emsley was a rich widow who had made her money through property management in the London East End of the mid 19th century. A sometime employee of hers, a plasterer James Mullins, was tried, convicted and hanged for her murder. The evidence was very largely circumstantial and even the trial judge was doubtful, saying "If you can even now make it manifest that you are innocent of the charge, I do not doubt that every attention will be paid to any cogent proof laid before those with whom it rests to carry out the finding of the law", though to no avail. Mullins had first drawn attention to the crime by accusing a cobbler John Emms of the murder and accusing him of concealing possessions belonging to the victim. Conan Doyle's conclusion is slightly ambiguous; he says that Mullins "was very likely guilty", but that the evidence was largely circumstantial, could point to other conclusions, and that the case cried out for the need for a Not Proven verdict, as in the Scottish judicial system. Unfortunately, this short book is nearly wholly a transcript of the actual trial, which is repetitive and not well set out here. No rating, as there is very little original material here.

54john257hopper
març 31, 2021, 10:42 am

31. The Holocaust of Manor Place - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This is another of Conan Doyle's investigations in the early 20th century into a real criminal case. As in the case of Mrs Emsley, this is an older case, also from 1860. Unlike that one, there can be no plausible doubt as to the fact of the guilt of the accused William Youngman in the murder of his mother, younger brothers and sweetheart; the only doubt hinges on whether a plea of insanity would have been more appropriate. He made strenuous efforts to persuade his affianced, Mary Streeter, to take out life assurance before they married, the eventual taking out of which seems to have been the motive for her murder at least; his attempts to claim it was his mother who committed the murders and that he killed her in self-defence did not stand up to scrutiny on account of the strength needed to carry out these savage multiple stabbings. There was a history of insanity on both sides of the family. As in the Mrs Emsley case, most of this short book is a transcript of the trial, though it is generally more readable than the one in that case; prefaced with some background analysis by Doyle in which he seems halfheartedly to say there might have been another explanation for the murders, but I don't think he really believes it. Again, no rating as the original content is very short.

55john257hopper
Editat: abr. 3, 2021, 4:42 pm

32. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher; or the Murder at Road Hill House - Kate Summerscale

This is a dramatically written account of a very high profile murder in a large middle class household in Wiltshire in 1860, which caused a nationwide sensation. A 3 year old boy, Francis Saville Kent, is found missing from his nursery and his body found stuffed down an outside privy, having been stabbed and possibly suffocated. Mr Whicher is one of the inaugural detectives appointed by Scotland Yard back in 1842 and now an experienced detective with a nuanced appreciation of the criminal mind, called in to investigate the crime. He attempts to identify the murderer and, in what is now a fictional detective cliche, antagonises the local police by coming up with different potential solutions. Almost every member of the Kent family and servants is suspected by someone or other of involvement. The main theories coalesce around an accidental death caused by the child catching his father Samuel Kent in bed with one of the servants, and murder of the child due to sibling jealousy on the part of Constance and possibly William Kent, 16 and 15 year old children of Samuel Kent by his first wife. Whicher favours the second explanation, and Constance is summoned before magistrates but there is not enough evidence for her to be committed to trial. The mystery remains unsolved.....until five years later when Constance confesses her guilt. There are still holes in her story and the public and press are reluctant to believe in the guilt of such a young woman, but she is tried and sentenced to death, though this is commuted to 20 years penal servitude after a national outcry. Constance was released after her penal servitude and followed her brother William to Australia where she became a nurse and lived to see her 100th birthday under a false identity - though these facts were only found out by her descendants in the 1970s. This book is much more than just an account of this dramatic crime, it is also a history of crime and society in the mid 19th century and there is a lot of detail of other cases in which the highly esteemed Whicher was involved, and also comparisons with the growing literary genres of sensationalist and detective fiction during the 1850s and 60s, especially with Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Inspector Bucket in Dickens's Bleak House. I thought the book sagged a bit in the middle and become a bit repetitive with the hammering home of some of these theories, but overall this was a fascinating read.

56john257hopper
abr. 7, 2021, 3:45 pm

33. The Steel Beneath the Silk - Patricia Bracewell

This is the third book in the author's trilogy covering the colourful and dramatic life of Emma of Normandy, the only woman in English or British history to be Queen to two different Kings of the country, and a powerful and influential figure in her own right. The events of this novel cover the years 1012-17 when King Ethelred (the Unready)'s England is increasingly threatened by Danish invaders led by their king Sweyn (Forkbeard) and his son Cnut (Canute). Ethelred's weakness and stubborn mistrust of his several sons undermines the country's defence. Treachery and bloodshed abound and Sweyn's forces capture most of the country and he is recognised by many as king before his sudden death, whereupon Ethelred recaptures his country. Eventually the Danes, now led by Canute, win through, and after Ethelred dies, his surviving son Edmund finally has to agree to share the country with Canute. But Edmund too shortly dies of wounds in battle and Canute wins the day. Emma, desperately wanting to prevent further bloodshed, marries Canute, while her sons by Ethelred (including the future King Edward the Confessor) go into exile in Normandy. The themes from the previous novels continue here, Ethelred's being haunted by the ghost of his murdered elder brother King Edward (the Martyr), and Emma's romantic attraction to her stepson, Athelstan. The novel ends as Canute and Emma are crowned in early 1017 and there is relative peace in England. The author's note states that she has decided not to pursue the story through the remaining dramatic 35 years of her life and politicking.

57john257hopper
abr. 10, 2021, 7:58 am

34. The Murder on the Links - Agatha Christie

This year is the centenary of the first publication in the UK of Agatha Christie's first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring Hercule Poirot (the novel was originally serialised in the Times in early 1920 and published in book form in October of that year). Having read that a few years ago, I've now read Murder on the Links, the second Poirot novel, published in 1923. While the golfing reference might suggest the English countryside in which so many of her novels are set, this one takes place mostly in northern France in a fictional town between Calais and Boulogne. Mr Renauld is a British subject living in northern France who has built a golf course at his villa, though the golfing references are entirely incidental to the plot. Having implored Poirot to cross the Channel to help him with an imminent threat he is facing, Poirot arrives with his sidekick Captain Hastings in tow to find Renauld has been murdered during the preceding night. The plot is very complicated, with an abundance of false identities, ambiguous relationships, rival lovers, and a pair of identical twin sisters. The relationship between Poirot and Hastings is very much like Sherlock Holmes's with Dr Watson - though I much prefer the latter as a sleuthing duo.

58pamelad
abr. 10, 2021, 5:34 pm

I just watched The Wicked Lady. Very entertaining, and Margaret Lockwood was excellent.

59john257hopper
abr. 11, 2021, 7:45 am

>58 pamelad: Indeed. I started reading the novel on which it was based yesterday. Will probably finish and review it tomorrow.

60john257hopper
abr. 12, 2021, 2:09 am

35. Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton - Magdalen King-Hall

This is the historical novel that inspired one of the most popular and successful British films of the mid-20th century, The Wicked Lady, based on the supposed exploits of a 17th century aristocratic lady who, bored with her life, takes to the open road as a highwaywoman. It is colourful and well written and I greatly enjoyed it, though it has some structural differences from the film, which has long been one of my favourites. The first part of the novel concerns various hauntings by the macabre ghost of Barbara Skelton in in her old house and the local area in later centuries, and before this even, a short section where the old house is destroyed by bombing in 1942. Only after this are we taken to the young Barbara on her wedding day. The character played by Patricia Roc in the film is absent here, but the main lines of the plot play similarly here - though Jerry Jackson doesn't survive his hanging. The ending where Barbara is unwittingly killed by her new lover perhaps feels slightly rushed, but this is a great read.

61john257hopper
abr. 16, 2021, 4:17 pm

36. The Loving Spirit - Daphne du Maurier

This was du Maurier's first novel, published in 1931 when she was just 24, and epitomises her love of Cornwall. This is a family saga describing the lives of four generations of the Coombe family, from Thomas and Janet, living and raising their family of several sons and daughters in the simple town of Plyn in the 1830s. Time follows through one of their sons, the dark and brooding Joseph, and his son Christopher, who initially rejects the quiet Cornish life for London, and his independent-minded daughter Jennifer who rejects her London family to return to Plyn in the 1920s. The spirit of Janet Coombe dominates the following generations, with her almost incestuous spiritual relationship with her son Joseph, and reverberating down the generations through her representation as the figurehead in an eponymous boat constructed by her family. The sea and sailing is as much of a character as the people throughout the narrative. Much of it is a very evocative and atmospheric, but with a slightly bittersweet feeling throughout, as in other du Maurier novels. A lovely read.

62john257hopper
abr. 17, 2021, 5:58 pm

37. Young Blood - Andrew Barrer

This was an impromptu read after listening to a podcast interview with the author (of whom I had never previously heard) this morning. It is the first of a trilogy of novellas sent in a dystopian near future where climate change has caused a lot more damage and affected lives more thoroughly than heretofore. There has been a medical discovery that being injected with the blood plasma of young, healthy people increases the lifespan of older people. A corporation sets up "farms" to harvest this young blood, under the cover of paying off student loans and providing a life of hedonism, distracting from the problems of the outside world. An interesting scenario, though the execution wasn't as good as it might have been, I thought, with the point of view changing very regularly between two of the young people involved, and a scientist behind the scheme. It reminded me somewhat of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, though lacked the atmosphere of that more famous work. That said, I will read the succeeding novellas when they are published in a couple of weeks time.

63pamelad
Editat: abr. 17, 2021, 6:09 pm

>60 john257hopper: Glad to see that you enjoyed it.

>61 john257hopper: Adding this one to the wish list. It's a Daphne DuMaurier I haven't come across.

64john257hopper
abr. 23, 2021, 5:51 pm

38. Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams - Matthew Walker

Interesting and thought provoking, though often rather dense, book about the importance of sleep to almost all aspects of physical and mental health and wellbeing. The average number of hours of nightly sleep people get in western industrialised societies has declined markedly over the last century or so. The author is a renowned sleep scientist and this is quite a science-heavy book, with many reports of clinical trials and other research. There are interesting facts about the relative importance of both non-REM (deep) sleep and REM (dreaming) sleep at different stages of life, and how both are vital to cognitive development and health in different ways. The author rues the fact that sleep is not given the same prominence in public health messaging and funding as drink or drugs, when, for example, accidents caused by drowsy drivers are more frequent than those caused by drunk drivers. He makes an excellent case, though I do slightly feel that he interprets every problem through the medium of sleep, in the same way that other writers see every problem as stemming from poor nutrition and/or lack of exercise. As a frequent poor sleeper myself, though, this was a useful read, with a summary of 12 very useful tips at the back of the book. Well worth a look, though most readers will probably not want to wade through all the detail.

65john257hopper
maig 1, 2021, 4:04 pm

39. Heretic Dawn - Robert Merle

This is the third in a classic series of 13 French historical novels about the lives of a family of minor Huguenot nobles, the de Sioracs, in 16th and 17th century France, written by Robert Merle over a period of 26 years. This novel focuses on the run up to and the actual events of the infamous massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve in August 1572 when the weak French king Charles IX, led on by his mother Catherine de Medici, massacred thousands of Huguenot men, women and children, an act praised by the then Pope. Pierre de Siorac and his companions, finding themselves in Paris to seek a pardon for killing a local rival to his family who had been causing them trouble, fall in with the (historical) leading Huguenot Admiral Coligny, and after he is attacked and later murdered, must flee Paris to escape the murderous rage of a populace whipped into a killing frenzy by the Queen Mother and the Catholic leader Guise. Some very shocking scenes, mixed in with more humorous passages with Pierre's amorous entanglements with a large range of women from all walks of life he comes across. Pierre is a humanist, holding Huguenot religious views, but viewing with sadness the fratricidal war between his co-religionists and the Catholic majority. This is a great series, and I really hope the novels beyond the fourth one are translated into English.

66john257hopper
Editat: maig 3, 2021, 2:51 pm

40. Merchants of Virtue - Paul C R Monk

This novel is set in Louis XIV's France in 1685, at a time when he revoked the Edict of Nantes that his grandfather Henry of Navarre had introduced to bring in toleration for French Huguenots (Protestants). The plot follows the Delpechs, a Huguenot family in Montauban in the South of France. Rather than simply killing Huguenots en masse as had happened in the previous century, Louis hit on the solution of forcing them to accept soldiers being quartered in their homes, in the hope that the expense and depredations those soldiers caused would encourage Huguenots to abjure, i.e. convert to Catholicism. This worked for many, but not for the Delpechs. Forced to sell almost all their possessions to pay for these soldiers' upkeep, they are driven to economic ruin, and then further to family separation and in Jacob Delpech's case, to imprisonment and exile. But through it all, he will not betray his conscience. The novel, the first in a trilogy, finishes with Jacob and his fellow Huguenots kept in miserable conditions on a ship en route to the Americas. This short novel (

67john257hopper
maig 8, 2021, 8:38 am

41. The Court of Miracles - Kester Grant

I was intrigued by the concept of this novel and really wanted to like it. It is a sort of alternative interpretation of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, based on the underworld in the Court of Miracles districts of extreme poverty that are probably more famous from his Hunchback of Notre Dame. In this version, the Court is divided into nine guilds, based on various criminal or other pseudo-professional roles, governed by complicated rules of honour that keep the balance of power between the guilds in a steady state. Each guild is ruled by a Lord or Lady who is the effective father or mother to each member, superseding any biological family relationships. The central character is Nina (Eponine), the black cat of thieves, daughter of the innkeeper Thenardier. Despite the fascinating backdrop and my love of the original Hugo novel, I found this a challenging read and not very appealing, consisting of quite grim set pieces and a lack of narrative flow. So much so, that I gave up on it two thirds of the way through, though I might re-attempt it some day when I am more in the mood.

68john257hopper
maig 12, 2021, 3:54 pm

42. Imperial Sunset: The Fall of Napoleon 1813-14 - R L Delderfield

To mark the bicentenary of Napoleon's death, I decided to read this account of the extraordinary period in Napoleon's life between the ignominious failure of his invasion of Russia in 1812, through his temporary successes in restoring his fortunes and to his defeat and exile to Elba. Napoleon was a unique figure in Europe at the time, able to inspire huge loyalty in the rank and file soldier unlike his aristocratic counterparts in the allied countries he faced, who were far more distant from their soldiers, motivated by a desire to preserve their monarchies, despite the liberal rhetoric they used in the campaign against their French opponent. However, while this is well written, I found myself bogged down in the detail of the battles and I have stopped reading this for the moment, half way through the book. It's not the book, it's me, though and I will surely return to it at some point. I think I need some comfort reading at the moment. No rating.

69john257hopper
maig 18, 2021, 4:10 pm

43. The Girl Who Fought Napoleon: A Novel of the Russian Empire - Linda Lafferty

This novel is a fictionalised account of a real historical Ukrainian girl, Natasha Durova, who fought disguised as a man (Alexandrov) in Tsar Alexander's army fighting against Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. Natasha grows to love the military life from a very young age as her father tours the Empire on his duties and later runs away from home to join the army. The bulk of this novel is actually about Tsar Alexander as he grows up, his relationship with his grandmother Catherine the Great and his father, the mad Emperor Paul. Durova/Alexandrov disappears for large portions of the novel and sometimes came across to me as a bit of an afterthought. While this was a good read, I thought it lacked the beauty and atmosphere of Lafferty's other novel, I've read, the Shepherdess of Siena. I have several more of hers, though, which I will certainly look forward to.

70john257hopper
maig 23, 2021, 4:57 pm

44. Heloise and Abelard: A Medieval Love Story - James Burge

This is an account of one of the most famous love affairs in all history, that of the 12 the century French philosopher and writer Peter Abelard and the writer and religious Heloise. But it is not just a love affair as they produced a series of letters and other works that place them at the heart of the 12th century Renaissance in learning and religion, what one might describe as the first infusion of reason and enlightenment into the religious life of the country.

Abelard was a major name in philosophy and influential in the direction of independent religious thought, a logical thinker who frequently annoyed and antagonised those in authority. To him, religion was not unthinking contemplation, but should be subject to reason. In one of his most famous sayings, "by doubting we come to inquiry; by inquiry we come to truth". He left behind "a comprehensive corpus of books on logic, theology and ethics, amounting to about a million words in all". On the other hand,
Heloise, while her writings are only known from a few of her letters to her mentor and lover in the author's view, "manages to keep her train of thought fluid and clear. She is such a good writer and what she says has such a ring of truth that her letters transcend whatever aspects of style time may have rendered incomprehensible. That is why on the strength of only three letters her writing has become famous. Very few authors can equal that achievement". All in all, a remarkable couple in many ways.

71john257hopper
maig 27, 2021, 5:31 pm

45. Voyage of Malice - Paul C R Monk

This the second volume of the author's trilogy about the lives of the Delpechs, a late 17th century French Huguenot family who have fallen foul of King Louis XIV's rules enforcing Catholic uniformity. At the end of the first book, Jacob was exiled to the New World, while his wife Jeanne has escaped to Geneva, a Calvinist stronghold. Most of the book follows Jacob's grim voyage and further travels, including falling in with pirates and coming across a former enemy from France in a new guise. Jeanne's exploits are less dramatic but she faces rivalry from local traders as she tries to earn a living in Geneva, while the city comes under pressure from France to give up the Huguenot refugees. At the end of the book, it looks like they are shortly to be reunited in London. This book was good, but for me lacked the dramatic flow of the first book. Will look forward to the final book in the trilogy, though.

72john257hopper
maig 31, 2021, 10:29 am

46. War of the Wolf - Bernard Cornwell

This is the eleventh novel in the author's Uhtred series. King Edward the Elder is declining and different factions are jockeying for influence and allies with an eye to the succession to his throne. Uhtred himself, having finally recaptured his ancestral home Bebbanburgh in the previous novel, is lured across the country to Mercia and becomes involved in the power struggle. He also faces yet another enemy in Skoll against whom he has a very personal motive to seek revenge. I have run out of things to say about each successive novel in this series, good action scenes but repetitive bloodshed and mayhem.

73Tess_W
juny 6, 2021, 3:57 pm

>71 john257hopper: sounds great---I'm going to look for volume 1

>72 john257hopper: I've read a few Cornwell's. I don't like them because to me they seem formulaic.

74john257hopper
juny 8, 2021, 2:05 am

>73 Tess_W: I know what you mean about Cornwell, especially this series.

75john257hopper
juny 8, 2021, 2:06 am

47. The Cross and the Curse - Matthew Harffy

This is the second in the author's series of novels set in early Anglo Saxon England featuring the young warrior Beobrand from Kent who is now in Northumbria and serving the new king Oswald based in Bebbanburg (Bamburgh). In reward for his efforts, Beobrand is made a thegn and is given his own land. However, Beobrand faces conflict from his Pictish neighbours and finds his loyalties challenged in various ways, including by the actions of his old rival Wybert. The plot is full of drama and tragedy for our hero, and, once again, I find this more plot driven and with more interesting characters than Bernard Cornwell's Uhtred series, with which this invites inevitable comparisons. I will keep reading this series.

76john257hopper
juny 9, 2021, 2:57 pm

48. Founder, Fighter Saxon Queen: Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians - Margaret C Jones

This fairly short book covers the life, achievements and influence of one of the most significant female figures in early English history. Famous as the daughter of King Alfred the Great and sister of King Edward the Elder of Wessex, she was absolutely a significant figure in her own right, effectively co-ruler of Mercia with her husband Ethelred, and sole ruler after his death for seven years, defending her adopted country against Viking incursions and acting as a bridgehead between Mercia and Wessex as the dominant state ruled by her brother. Her settled role was so strong that she even named her own daughter Alfwynn as her successor, though King Edward intervened to overthrow his niece after a short period of time, thus uniting Wessex and Mercia under one crown as the nucleus of the future state of England.

Alongside and indeed as integral to her remarkable political and military achievements, Aethelflaed effectively founded or developed many of the towns of the West of England, especially Gloucester, Tamworth, Stafford, Warwick and Chester, thus shaping large parts of the urban pattern of today's England. Yet for large parts of the 1,100 years since her death, her reputation has been overshadowed by those of her famous male relatives, especially of course that of her father. She should be better known. This is a highly readable book, making use of the limited sources about the subject's life to create a proper biography, albeit of course with very many details unknown and unknowable.

77john257hopper
Editat: juny 16, 2021, 4:14 pm

49. Alfred's Britain: War and Peace in the Viking Age - Max Adams

This is a very well researched and written account of the period of Viking influence on the whole of the British Isles and Ireland, from the infamous initial attack on the Holy Island, Lindisfarne, off the Northumbrian coast on 8 June 1793 (I was on the island on the day of the anniversary this year), covering a period of some 160 years until the last Viking king of York was defeated by the English king Edred in 954 and England became, more or less, a united country (the Viking influence continued later on and of course Danish Canute and his sons ruled England for some 26 years in the following century). There is a lot of discussion of literary and archaeological evidence and the reader gets a strong sense of the patchwork of small kingdoms, alliances and struggles across the country, and how far the country was from being a united England, even after the efforts of Kings Alfred, Edward and Athelstan to unite the main kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, and attempt to exert influence over East Anglia and Northumbria. Viking influence on what would later become France is also covered to some extent, as it illustrates how the Vikings divided their attempts and focused on one country to allow the other country to recover somewhat before it was fit to be raided again for riches and resources. This book is richly illustrated and has genealogical tables and many footnotes. It is a worthy and deep look at this crucial period in the history of the British Isles

78john257hopper
juny 19, 2021, 6:51 pm

50. Secret Asset - Stella Rimington

This is the second in the author's series of intelligence-themed thrillers featuring MI5 officer Liz Carlyle, obviously based on the author's own experiences in the organisation before she rose to become the first female and the first publicly acknowledged Director General of MI5 in 1992. The plot involves radicalised Muslim youths, a disaffected MI5 officer and, more peripherally, Irish republican terrorists, combined in a way which I found rather unconvincing though, again as with the first novel, the fact of the author's background makes one wonder whether this is a fair judgement. Liz Carlyle is a sympathetic and well-rounded character though, and I will continue reading this series.

79john257hopper
juny 25, 2021, 4:50 pm

51. The Day of the Jackal - Frederick Forsyth

This is a brilliantly written thriller based on a fictional assassination attempt against French President Charles de Gaulle in 1963. While we know from history that he won't succeed, the novel focuses on the Jackal's thought processes, how he devises his plans, develops a weapon and constructs several false identities. It follows the manhunt and how the efforts of the various French agencies to track him down are frustrated by a combination of the killer's resourcefulness, bad luck and a mole in the authorities' midst. Even when he is cornered in Paris he almost succeeds in carrying his audacious plan. This is deservedly a classic of the genre, focusing on detail in almost an instructional sense, but still managing to be a gripping narrative which never flags.

80john257hopper
juny 28, 2021, 4:40 am

52. Pietr the Latvian - Georges Simenon

This was the first novel by Simenon featuring his famous detective creation, published in 1931. I had mixed feelings about this. There was a great attention to detail in the writing and construction of the narrative around the title character and his (plot spoiler) identical twin brother, though I found it curiously unengaging and didn't really develop any feelings, positive or negative, towards Maigret himself. The story also began very suddenly, it felt to me almost as though an introduction or a couple of chapters had been lost from the start. I wonder whether the translation had anything to do with my ambiguous feelings towards it.

81john257hopper
jul. 5, 2021, 6:16 pm

53. Vanessa - Hugh Walpole

This is the fourth and final novel in the main series of the author's Herries Chronicles, following the lives of the Herries family in the Lake District in the late 19th century and early 20th century, almost up to the time of the book's publication in the 1930s. The book begins with the death of the family's matriarch and heroine of the previous two novels, Judith Paris on her hundredth birthday in 1874. Her old rival Walter passes a few years later and the family rivalries descend to the younger generations, though these rivalries seem much less dramatic and vital than earlier ones. Vanessa, daughter of Judith's son Adam, is of course the heroine, shunned by most of the family, and loves her relation Benjie, who is similarly rejected by his kin. The relationship between these two is at the heart of the novel and they have an illegitimate daughter Sally. Apart from these characters, though, I found much of the novel more commonplace than its predecessors, and I thought it lost wind after Vanessa's death at the end of part 4 (of 5). However, the narrative still gave a sense of a strong flow of passing events and political and social changes, and beautiful descriptions of the Lake District countryside. I am sorry this series has ended.

82john257hopper
jul. 7, 2021, 5:40 pm

54. A Brazen Curiosity - Lynn Messina

I read this light-hearted Regency whodunnit as it was said to be set in the Lake District, where I am currently on holiday. While it is nominally set there, the setting is barely mentioned and completely immaterial to the narrative, which takes place entirely within the house and grounds of the aristocratic Skeffingtons. Our heroine Beatrice Hyde-Clare is an idiosyncratic young lady who has been orphaned and brought up by her conventional and socially pretentious Aunt Vera. After she stumbles on a dead body in the library in the middle of the night, she attempts to solve the mystery with the grudging co-operation of the overbearing Duke of Kesgrave. There is a complicated series of motives and back stories, of course. While I was slightly disappointed that the Lake District did not in fact feature at all in the story, this was an amusing and light-hearted read, with the verbal sparring between Beatrice and the Duke causing some laugh out loud moments. So I may well at some point pursue this series (despite the occasional irritating and jarring Americanism).

83john257hopper
jul. 11, 2021, 7:05 am

55. Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets - Thomas de Quincey

This is the last of my Lake District reads from my annual holiday there. Thomas de Quincey is better known, or notorious, for his work Confessions of an English Opium Eater. But here he is giving pen portraits of the three main Lake poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, largely from his own experience or those of people he has talked to in later years. In places the book gets rather bogged down in abstruse details of philosophy or literary arguments, but overall gives a good feel for the interconnected personal and intellectual lives of these poets, in their beautiful Lake District setting. There are also retelling of some of the famous Lake District stories such as the Maid of Buttermere and a tragic story of a couple who die in the mountains above Grasmere one night and their children have to fend for themselves. A good read.

84john257hopper
jul. 23, 2021, 11:17 am

56. China - Edward Rutherfurd

This is the latest of Rutherfurd's huge works covering generations in the lives of inhabitants of a country or place. His Russka and Sarum are among my very favourite works of historical fiction over the last 30 years or so. Unlike these novels, though, China does not cover centuries or even millennia, but a period of around 60-70 years in 19th century Chinese history from the Opium Wars of the 1840s to the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and its immediate aftermath. I would have preferred a greater period of coverage, though this focus does enable a detailed exploration of a crucial period of Chinese history when Britain and other western countries were more or less forcing the reluctant Celestial Kingdom to open up for trade and commercial exploitation. There are recurrent characters such as John Trader on the British side, but I found those on the Chinese side such as Mei Ling and the eunuch Lacquer Nail much more interesting and, looming over all in the latter stages, the powerful figure of Dowager Empress Cixi, one of the most powerful females in world history. I found the clash of civilisations dimension really interesting, especially as, like most even well-read westerners, I know relatively little about Chinese history compared to European or American history. So a good read, as ever with this author, though I still would have preferred a wider spread of historical coverage.

85john257hopper
jul. 24, 2021, 3:05 am

57. Once Upon a Time in the North - Philip Pullman

This is a spin off novella from Pullman's His Dark Materials series, featuring an early episode in the life of Texan aeronaut Lee Scoresby where he first meets Iorek Byrnison in a rough and ready industrial town in the north. It's a decent story and the book also includes some nice illustrations and a few slightly odd pictures of documents. The novella is also padded out with an extract from another novella Lyra's Oxford and from The Book of Dust.

86john257hopper
jul. 25, 2021, 7:22 am

58. Mr Harrison's Confessions - Elizabeth Gaskell

This novella is a prequel to Gaskell's more famous novel Cranford , featuring the amorous and other travails of Dr Frank Harrison in the fictional town of Duncombe (based on Knutsford in Cheshire). His name is amorously linked to almost every woman of note in the town due to comedic misunderstandings. At the same time, there are some poignant moments, such as the death of little Walter and the medical disagreement he has with Dr Morgan over whether a local gardener's arm needs to be amputated after an accident. I enjoyed this and prefer it to Cranford, which dragged and whose characters didn't appeal to me.

87john257hopper
jul. 31, 2021, 5:06 pm

59. Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China - Jung Chang

This is a well researched biography by the author better known for Wild Swans. Cixi was the most powerful woman in Chinese history effectively exercising executive power over the largest state in the world for most of the period between 1861, when her young son became Emperor Tongzhi, and 1908 when she died. The role of the concubine in the Chinese imperial hierarchy could be very powerful if she was the mother of the emperor, and she exercised power in the early years of this period with her husband's Empress, Zhen, a much weaker figure personally and politically, though apparently they got on well. Tongzhi assumed power for himself for just a couple of years before he died, possibly of syphilis, in 1875. The next Emperor was Cixi's adopted son (actually nephew) Guangxu, another boy over whom she could exert influence and rule herself (though there no real other candidates for the imperial role). She struggled to bring China into the modern age through bringing in trains, telegraphs and industry through more positive relations with foreign countries. There were several foreign invasions with nearly all the Western powers, plus Japan, invading and obtaining chunks of Chinese territory in the name of trade and economic expansion. So the difficult balance for Cixi was to learn from the west to bring China into the modern age, while patriotically fighting their imperial pretensions against Chinese territory. This contradiction was most clearly demonstrated in the nationalist Boxer uprising in 1900. After nearly being dethroned, she managed to draw on deep wells of support and come back to power, instituting what by Chinese standards, a fairly radical programme of reform, including abolishing footbinding and torture, a wider curriculum for mandarins beyond the Confucian classics and including travel abroad, promoting education for women, legal reform and even an outline for a form of parliamentary democracy, albeit still with imperial executive power ultimately still intact. Historians differ over the interpretation of these events, with the author challenging the traditional view that Guangxu was behind these reforms and Cixi conservatively opposing them. Jung Chang's interpretation seems more likely given the thrust of her life and policies over the decades of her rule and Chang considers that "Few of her achievements have been recognised and, when they are, the credit is invariably given to the men serving her. This is largely due to a basic handicap: that she was a woman and could only rule in the name of her sons – so her precise role has been little known." Cixi seems a fascinating and contradictory figure, a mixture of the Medieval and modern, a cautious reformer but with a capacity for ruthlessness that shocks on occasion.

88john257hopper
Editat: ag. 5, 2021, 5:24 am

60. Wedding Station - David Downing

This is a prequel to the series of novels featuring English journalist John Russell, living and working in Berlin in the run up to and after the second world war. In this one, Hitler has just come to power and the Reichstag has just been set on fire. Separated from his German wife Ilse, Russell's position in the country is precarious, though he wants to remain to be a father to his six year old son Paul. He investigates a variety of crimes for his paper Morgenspiegel, some political and some ordinary criminal. The ways in which he can cover the former become more restricted, especially when it emerges that some of these crimes have been committed by Hitler's SA (the brownshirts). Dodging (or failing to dodge) a variety of dangers, Russell inadvertently discovers information that plays into the struggle between the SA and the SD (Blackshirts). There is a lot packed into this novel, though the connections between the various crimes, if there were any, was sometimes rather unclear. The novel gives a good sense of the increasing despair and bafflement of Russell and liberal-minded Germans immediately after Hitler's rise to power - can this really be happening in the land of Beethoven, and can people really fall for Hitler's rubbish? Surely this must only be a short aberration....The novel ends with Russell meeting actress Effi Koenen, who becomes his girlfriend in the later novels.

89john257hopper
ag. 8, 2021, 1:10 pm

61. The Wolf Children - Cay Rademacher

This is the second in the author's murder mystery trilogy set in the ruins of post-WWII Hamburg, featuring Chief Inspector Stave. I loved the first novel in this series, but wasn't so keen on this. The reason for the horrible murders of a number of youngsters didn't seem plausible and the endless details of the complicated smuggling plot I found frankly rather dull. Stave has an interesting backdrop - an anti-Nazi whose view of the Allied liberators is tempered with the tragic loss of his wife Margarethe in a British bombing raid, and whose son Karl was an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth who ended up in the Gulag. In trying to lay hands on the perpetrator of the murders, an exasperated public prosecutor Ehrlich remarks ruefully that "not so long ago it was less of an administrative task to annihilate an entire race than it is now to bring one man to trial". I was waiting for a twist at the end when Stave was chasing the then unidentified culprit, but there was none. Overall, I found this somewhat disappointing compared to The Murderer in Ruins.

90john257hopper
ag. 13, 2021, 7:04 am

62. Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru - Karen Lee Street

This is the second literary mystery featuring Edgar Allan Poe teaming up with his fictional detective, Auguste Dupin, this time in his native Philadelphia, investigating a mysterious case involving real live and stuffed birds and treasure books brought back from darkest Peru. I didn't find this as gripping as The London Monster, perhaps partly because Victorian London seemed to me like a more appropriate setting for such a dark story, though this feeling makes no sense given Poe's nationality. It seemed a bit too convoluted and fantastical, and I found the info dumps on species of birds a bit much. It was well written and I will read the third in the trilogy, but was left feeling a bit dissatisfied with this one.

91john257hopper
ag. 20, 2021, 4:12 pm

63. The Dreamer - Mary Newton Stanard

This is a fictionalised biography of the life of Edgar Allan Poe, published in the early 20th century. It is written in a elaborate, poetic style that suits its subject; some modern readers might find it too flowery, but for the most part I liked it. Some of the references to the inspiration for The Raven and Annabel Lee seemed rather forced and excessive, but for the most part this was an atmospheric read that was redolent of the style of its subject matter.

92john257hopper
ag. 21, 2021, 8:47 am

64. Prisoners of Geography - Tim Marshall

This book looks at the political geography of ten countries or regions and examines the factors that brought them to their current state of political and economic success or otherwise. The ten are: Russia; China; USA; Western Europe; Africa; the Middle East; India and Pakistan; Korea and Japan; Latin America; and the Arctic. We sometimes assume that a country's success or otherwise is determined wholly or mainly by the political and economic choices it makes; while of course these are always a big factor, the basic objective reality of geography is often underestimated. It is at the heart of why historically, the USA and Western Europe have been generally economically successful and politically stable through, for example, wide networks of navigable rivers that enhanced transport and trade from an early age. So too it is the heart of why Russia and China have sought to create buffer states around them due to their fear of invasion across the plains of North Europe and central Asia. Russian policy in the Balkans and Chinese policy in Pakistan have been partly driven by the need for warm water or deep sea ports to expand trade. The physical reality of the Himalayas has prevented any major conflict between the great civilisations of China and India. And Africa's lack of development as a continent has been partly caused by having few natural harbours and rivers with many waterfalls which make them much less useful as trade routes. The list goes on. This is a great introduction to this important dimension for understanding the world and its future, especially, for example, competition between nations with a stake in the Arctic to the increasingly greater accessibility of natural resources such as oil and gas previously trapped under the ice, as the polar cap melts. Fascinating stuff.

93john257hopper
ag. 23, 2021, 4:38 pm

65. Peter Abelard - Helen Waddell

This is a well researched and erudite historical novel about the famous love story of the Medieval religious and intellectual figures Abelard and Heloise (despite the latter not getting her due billing in the title). While their story is fascinating and colourful, I found this novel somewhat disappointing in that I thought it sometimes got bogged down in its erudition at the expense of telling the story, and I found the narrative sometimes confusing as the order of events in their life story, with which I have some familiarity, was confused.

94john257hopper
ag. 26, 2021, 6:29 pm

66. Notre Dame: The Soul of France - Agnes Poirier

This short book was written after the tragic fire in April 2019 that almost destroyed this Medieval cathedral that is the very heart, the very quintessence of Paris. Despite having no real French or Catholic connections, I felt personally affected by this event. After recounting the shocking events of that night, the book then goes to recount the cathedral's central role in French political, religious and cultural life, from the beautiful, functional and intricately designed plans of the unknown architects in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, through its partial transformation to a Temple of Reason during the French Revolution, its restoration during the mid 19th century following the publicity engendered by Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, and its symbolic role in its bells ringing in the liberation from Nazi occupation and De Gaulle's triumphant re-entry into his capital.

Notre Dame is a centre of French existence in a way that no equivalent British building really is, despite the many wonderful, historic buildings we have. Despite the separation between state and Church in 1905, which "was a defining moment for the young republic, an act of emancipation from a power which had ruled over and stifled French society for centuries" the author considers that the fire "revealed that a staunchly secular country had its roots firmly grounded in history, a history that was Christian.....Atheists and believers can find here the same memories, for they are France’s memories. Notre-Dame belongs to every French citizen and every one of them will want to have a say in her future".

95john257hopper
set. 12, 2021, 3:47 pm

67. Prime Minister Boris and other things that never happened - Duncan Brack

This is one of a series of books of counterfactual historical essays edited by Liberal Democrat historian Duncan Brack and Conservative radio host Iain Dale. The title essay is obviously out of date now, this book being published in 2011; in this scenario Boris becomes PM in 2016 in a set of circumstances unrelated to the UK's membership of the EU, but deriving from an earlier collapse of the Coalition government due to disagreement on anti-terror legislation.

Nearly all the essays relate to British politics, with the earliest dating from the First World War (Lloyd George and J M Keynes drowning in the same ship where Kitchener died; and proportional representation being introduced for the 1918 general election which, to my surprise, did nearly happen, with both Commons and Lords supporting a form of PR but unable to agree on a system). The exceptions were two US ones (Nixon beating JFK in 1960; and Hillary Clinton as the 2008 Democrat candidate instead of Obama) and one Russian (the 1991 coup against Gorbachev succeeding and the Soviet Union surviving in some form).

The essays are a bit of a mixed bag, almost always intriguing but some more plausible than others. Among the ones I thought were implausible were Mrs Thatcher settling with the miners in 1984; the consequences of Ken Livingstone returning to the post of London mayor in 2012 defeating Boris Johnson; and Pope Benedict XVI being assassinated on a visit to Britain by someone disillusioned with the Catholic Church's handling of child sex abuse. Some of the more interesting ones personally I thought were more recent scenarios such as Tony Blair remaining Prime Minister beyond 2007; Gordon Brown actually calling an election in autumn 2007; and two relating to the Coalition government, one where the Tories win sightly fewer seats, and Labour and the Liberal Democrats slightly more, thus making the negotiations more open-ended and the final Coalition less secure, and one where Nick Clegg opts for a looser confidence and supply agreement with David Cameron rather than full Coalition.

An intriguing set of essays and I will read more in this series. 4/5

96john257hopper
set. 21, 2021, 5:02 pm

68. The Murder at the Vicarage - Agatha Christie

This was the first Miss Marple novel, published in 1930. It's not one of the greatest or most exciting Christie novels, but it is a classic of the genre in that it reflects all the key elements of a Christie whodunnit that makes them so popular - a relatively confined area (the fictional village of St Mary Mead, in the fictional county of Downshire), a small number of suspects who may have a reason for disliking the unpopular churchwarden Colonel Protheroe, and any number of red herrings. As in other Miss Marple novels, what strikes the reader for most of the novel is just how minor a character she is. In no way does she drive forward the plot, but only comes into her own when she reveals the final solution to the mystery that has eluded everyone else. The narrator is the vicar Reverend Leonard Clement (which prompts the reflection that it seems to be rare for a first person narrative to be written in the opposite gender to that of the author). A solid Christie novel.

97john257hopper
set. 26, 2021, 12:30 pm

69. Land of Hope (The Huguenot Connection Book 3)

This is the third volume in the author's trilogy about the 17th century French Huguenot family the Delpechs, who have had to flee their home and find themselves separated on different continents following persecution by King Louis XIV. Jacob finally makes his way back across the Atlantic to London at the time when the Protestant William of Orange lands in Britain to assume the kingship from the Catholic James II. As a result, he is pretty much expected to join William's army fighting against Catholics in Ireland. At the same time, Jacob's wife Jeanne is a weaver in London, forced to work for an English employer with whom she has a tense relationship. At the end of the novel, they are finally reunited. I have enjoyed this trilogy a lot, though this mostly wasn't as tense as the first volume.

70. Before the Storm: A Prequel (The Huguenot Connection)

While reading the third volume of the Huguenot Chronicles trilogy, I discovered this short prequel novella. It covers events when the first rumours of serious persecution of Huguenots reach the ears of the Delpech family in Montauban, and they debate how seriously to take them and how to react. It also features earlier events in the lives of other characters in the trilogy. An ominous and dramatic prequel.

98john257hopper
set. 27, 2021, 3:48 pm

71. The Tapestried Chamber - Sir Walter Scott

This is a short ghost story by the classic author better known for his historical fiction. Too short for any great depth, but it's quite a haunting little story about a chamber in a castle haunted by a wicked ancestress of the current owner.

99john257hopper
set. 30, 2021, 4:26 pm

72. The Silver Locomotive Mystery - Edward Marston

This is the sixth novel in the Railway Detective series set in mid 19th century Britain. This one concerns the theft of a silver coffee pot shaped like a locomotive and a related murder. The story was reasonable, and the "obvious" suspect far too obvious; indeed the last two chapters altered the view of the leading suspects and victims. And a romantic ending as Inspector Colbeck finally proposes to Madeleine Andrews. This is never going to be a great series, but I am starting to warm more to the characters. Even Colbeck's boss Superintendent Tallis was more human in this one.

100john257hopper
set. 30, 2021, 6:03 pm

73. The Mysteries of Paris - Eugene Sue

This immensely long early 19th century French novel is by an author little known today but who was described by Victor Hugo as the French Dickens. In describing the lives and activities of a wide variety of strata of Parisian society of the time, this is an accurate description. There are moving descriptions of wretched poverty and the gap between rich and poor, redolent of Dickens. Perhaps more pertinently, this novel is also seen as a precursor of Hugo's Les Miserables, and so it is in structure and multiplicity of characters of various backgrounds. There are some colourful characters, especially the villains, though they lack the grandeur of the leading personalities of Hugo's masterpiece. I haven't quite managed to finish this novel and have stopped reading it some 80% of the way through - though I may be tempted to finish it some day. This definitely should be better known.

101john257hopper
oct. 5, 2021, 3:52 pm

74. Foundation's Edge - Isaac Asimov

The Foundation series is my all time favourite science fiction series. This was Asimov's return to the series after a gap of several decades and the difference in style of a novel written in the 1980s to the original stories in the 1940s and 50s is stark. This one is even more than its predecessors a novel of ideas and concepts, not of action. Nevertheless there are slightly more rounded characters than in those earlier novels. I think this lacks slightly the impact of those books, but builds on their sweeping future history and is still an excellent novel of ideas.

102john257hopper
oct. 8, 2021, 1:35 pm

75. Illegal Action - Stella Rimington

This is the third in the author's series of intelligence-themed thrillers featuring MI5 officer Liz Carlyle. Unlike the previous two dealing mostly with Islamic terrorism, this concerns an apparent plot to murder a Russian oligarch in London. The plot is not what it seems, but all the same struck me as rather less dramatic than its predecessors and somewhat inconsequential, so I enjoyed this one rather less

103john257hopper
oct. 15, 2021, 4:54 pm

76. I, Asimov: A Memoir - Isaac Asimov

This is the third volume of autobiography produced by the great SF writer and scientist, a more thematic and distilled version of a two volume autobiography he had produced some ten years previously. It is very long, over 500 pages, divided into some 166 very short chapters, each dealing with a theme or a significant person in his life. For the most part, this style worked for me, though occasionally it felt a bit bitty. I only discovered Asimov's SF in 1987 and spent the next few years devouring them (the Foundation saga, then the empire novels, then the robot novels), with several of them becoming among my all time favourite novels. I was gutted when he was died in early 1992. This autobiography brings across well the vast range of his writing interests, and his desire for a simple and peaceful life, with an antipathy towards travelling. I found his descriptions of his declining years quite difficult to read. While he was 72 when he died, given a few differences, he could have lived longer and given us more great works.

104john257hopper
oct. 18, 2021, 3:28 pm

77. Starship Troopers - Robert A Heinlein

This is the second Heinlein SF novel I have read and I am fairly sure it will be the last. While Stranger in a Strange Land was overblown and too long, it did have some interesting ideas about clashing cultures. This one however, was to me just a rambling and disjointed account of troopers in some future Earth engaged in an interplanetary war with an alien race known only as Bugs. Published in the early years of the Cold War, the Bugs were clearly mean to represent the Communist bloc. There are a few interesting philosophical discussions, but for the most part this was rather dull military doings and didn't hold my interest. While Heinlein is regarded as one of the Big Three of SF between about 1950 and the late 1980s, he is for me not a patch on Asimov or Clarke.

105john257hopper
oct. 21, 2021, 4:00 pm

78. Childhood's End - Arthur C Clarke

This is another awe inspiring novel by the British SF master. Mysterious aliens appear in the sky over Earth and somehow become benevolent dictators over the whole planet. But the aliens' own motives are not at all straightforward, neither as benevolent as many humans take them to be, yet at the same time not evil in the normal sense of the word. The denouement was sad and wonderful (in the literal sense of inspiring wonder), and very thought provoking about the role of different species towards each other. I didn't think this novel was quite as consistently wonderful as The CIty and the Stars or Rendezvous with Rama as I thought it sagged just a little in the middle, but the initial chapters were intriguing and the final few mind boggling in their implications for both the human race and their new alien overlords. A great read.

106john257hopper
oct. 24, 2021, 4:11 pm

79. Trafalgar: An Eyewitness History - Tom Pocock

This is a well constructed eyewitness account of this most famous of naval battles on 21 October 1805, using accounts from a wide range of participants on both the English, and the French and Spanish side under Napoleon. This battle was seen, first and foremost, as "the final defeat of Napoleon’s hopes of invading the British Isles" and the battle that "had given Britain command of the sea, however many more battleships Napoleon might build". It therefore probably deserves to be seen alongside other such existential threats to Britain as the Normans in 1066 and the Nazis in 1940. This account shows each stage of the battle, through the run up to it, the course of events on 21 October including of course the death of Nelson, and the aftermath, including the storm that dispersed many surviving ships, and the transport of Nelson's body back to London for his funeral. One of the most poignant themes is the mixed feelings of Britons, relief at the victory of Britain over Napoleonic forces, mixed hugely with sadness at the death of Nelson, a genuine popular hero with ordinary landlubber Britons as well as with the rank and file sailors in British ships; in the words of one seaman in Nelson's flagship the Victory, "Great God! I would rather the shot had taken off my head and spared his life".

One minor criticism I had is that perhaps the extracts from eyewitnesses dominated the text a little too much, and I could perhaps have done with a little more analysis and commentary on the events.

107john257hopper
oct. 30, 2021, 4:11 pm

80. Master and Commander - Patrick O'Brian

This is my second attempt at this book by the author described by The Times on the cover as "the greatest historical novelist of all time". This is the 40th anniversary edition of the first edition that spearheaded a series of 20 novels featuring Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr Stephen Maturin, with a 21st in preparation when the author died in 2000. The author's research is exhaustive and he makes a cast iron attempt to recreate the ethos of naval life in the year 1800, with vast amounts of nautical terminology abounding. Unfortunately, for me, this is at the expensive of a clear narrative drive, and there are a series of set piece incidents, usually based on real historical naval engagements, but no sense of overall plot. But the style does not really work for me.

108pamelad
oct. 30, 2021, 6:01 pm

>107 john257hopper: I had a similar reaction to yours and failed to finish.

109john257hopper
Editat: oct. 31, 2021, 9:11 am

81. Men-of-War - Patrick O'Brian

This is a short book about the 18th century navy written by Patrick O'Brian as background to his Aubrey and Maturin series. Understanding naval terminology in detail is pretty much essential to really appreciating his novels - something that I haven't managed to do. Has some useful diagrams of ships and tables with useful information about ship sizes and naval ranks, etc.

110john257hopper
oct. 31, 2021, 6:05 pm

82. The Last Seance - Agatha Christie

Quite a spooky little short story for Halloween, about a medium scared of her powers who is exploited by a customer desperate to make contact with a deceased daughter. Only why is this included in a mammoth collection of Miss Marple short stories when she is not in it?

111john257hopper
nov. 6, 2021, 1:27 pm

83. Foundation and Earth - Isaac Asimov

This was, chronologically, the last of Asimov's Foundation series. Golam Trevize and Janov Pelorat embark on a search for the legendary original home planet of humanity, which Trevize believes may be linked to the crucial decision he has made in Foundation's Edge that will profoundly affect the future of the galaxy. I love the quest nature of this novel which is probably my favourite Foundation novel in terms of a story. It also deals with profound issues such as personal freedom vs. collaborative action and behaviour , and the nature of myths and legends and their relationship with recorded history. A great end to the saga.

112john257hopper
nov. 9, 2021, 5:51 pm

84. Go Swift and Far: A Novel of Bath - Douglas Westcott

On my first visit to Bath for over four years, I have read this novel by a local property developer set against the background of the post war history of his home city, one of my own very favourite cities. The story made a strong start with the central character Yann Morris's birth in the rubble of a bombing raid on the city in 1942 when his mother is buried for two days in the ruins of a bombed house. The young boy's childhood and teenage years are filled with tragedy and difficulty, with the tragic deaths of many of those closest to him and a lonely and bullied school experience, tinged with anti-semitism. These experiences give rise within him to an intense desire for self reliance and independent financial security. Changing his forename to Ian to avoid prejudice, he becomes one of Bath's leading property developers at a very young age (presumably to a degree emulating the author's own experiences) but also comes across as a rather cold and calculating figure with whom I sometimes found hard to sympathise. There were rather too many detailed descriptions of property transactions in places to hold my interest. Overall, also, despite the novel being quite readable, I was left with a feeling that the Bath setting was less integral to the novel than its subtitle would suggest - a backdrop to the story rather than an integral element of it. Despite these weaknesses, I have however bought the sequel.

113john257hopper
nov. 15, 2021, 3:42 pm

85. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Until now I was no doubt one of the very few people who had read every Jane Austen novel except Pride and Prejudice. Having made an abortive attempt to do so 8 years ago after attending the Bath Christmas market, I have now succeeded it doing so after another visit to Bath last week. It will never be my favourite Austen novel (that is Northanger Abbey), but I enjoyed the gentle ironic style, and tensions between the five Bennet sisters and their mother and other relatives. A pity we don't get to see more of the shy, bookish Mary Bennet! I rather like their long-suffering father, isolated in a house of females too.

114john257hopper
nov. 21, 2021, 11:09 am

86. Jane Austen: A Life - Claire Tomalin

This is a brilliant biography of Jane Austen; I anticipated it would be, as I read the author's biography of Dickens back in 2012. She combines excellent, detailed research with an ability to tell a story of the subject's life that combines colour, incident and intelligent speculation based on her sources. This is more than just a literary biography, but also a history of the Austen and Leigh families, tracing their history back to the late 17th century; one of her great uncles born in the 17th century survived until Jane's teenage years. George Austen's clerical life combined with Cassandra Leigh's aristocratic descent in a successful marriage that produced six sons and two daughters. Jane was the shortest lived in a family that generally avoided the early mortality of most large families at that time and for long afterwards. There were plenty of scandals and jealousies and tensions as in all families, though Jane seems to have attempted to get on with all factions. Her literary career was very uneven, with her producing lots of short stories and poems from her teenage years, and before her 25th birthday having already written the first versions of what would later be published as Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and (after her death) Northanger Abbey. Then she wrote almost nothing in the first decade of the 19th century, a decade punctuated by the death of her father, and moves around the country, including an unhappy period in Bath, before her final literary period in Chawton, near Winchester. In this small village her activities are described by the author as "making the very modest house into one of the great sites of literary history" - in a period of just six years Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, Pride and Prejudice in 1813 – and three further novels were written here, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion (Northanger Abbey was written earlier in the 1790s). She also wrote the first 12 chapters of a new novel which was eventually published as Sanditon over a century later. Her early death at the age of 41 in 1817 in Winchester deprived the world of a great literary talent - if she had lived into her 70s as did her father and most of her siblings (and her mother lived to 87) just imagine what further works would have flowed from her pen. A great biography.

115john257hopper
nov. 22, 2021, 10:18 am

87. Lady Susan - Jane Austen

This short epistolary novel covers the doings of Lady Susan Vernon, who unlike other leading Austen female characters, is a thoroughgoing nasty job - deceitful, manipulative and entirely self-centred, particularly in the case of her daughter Frederica. Her cynical and cold treatment of her still shocks even 230 years on. Considering this was written when the author was only around 15-16, it shows a maturity of writing not far short of her adult full novels. Well worth a read.

116pamelad
nov. 22, 2021, 2:31 pm

>115 john257hopper: Have you seen the film, Love and Friendship, which is based on Lady Susan? I enjoyed it.

117john257hopper
nov. 22, 2021, 4:53 pm

>116 pamelad: no I haven't. I'll check that out. I wonder why they chose the title of a different one of her early works.

118john257hopper
nov. 23, 2021, 5:52 pm

88. The Loved One - Evelyn Waugh

This is a rather odd short novel about rivalry between two morticians in Hollywood, one a luxury provider of funerary services. the other specialising in pet funerals. It is blackly comedic and bizarre. Not sure if I would say I liked it, but it was short enough to take the risk. This is the first Waugh novel I have ever read - I first heard of it back in the 1980s as there was a Doctor Who TV story that partly satirised this satire.

119john257hopper
nov. 27, 2021, 4:45 pm

89. Coming Up for Air - George Orwell

This is my second read of this wonderful 1938 novel, possibly my favourite Orwell novel (along with the very different and later 1984), and indeed one of my favourite novels of all time. George Bowling is a lower middle class middle aged man with a nagging and remorselessly downbeat wife and two annoying children, and the novel is essentially his search, ultimately fruitless, to recapture the simplicity and happiness of his youth in a small town before the Great War. He recognises life was far from perfect then, with his parents' generation facing the potential threat of the workhouse if their shop went out of business, but he is searching for the elusive inner happiness and peace that I guess many of us search for all our lives and may sometimes find: "what was it that people had in those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren’t secure. More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they’d got to die, and I suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn’t know was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things would go on as they'd known them."

Taking advantage of a win of as much as £17 in a bet, he takes off in his car with his new found riches to enjoy a week on his own to stay in a hotel and enjoy good food and drink and look up the town where he grew up. He searches, but he finds it unrecognisable - swallowed up in a larger urban area where his family and way of life are forgotten. He doesn't rail against this, it is more of a bittersweet resignation to the inevitability of change. Mixed with these emotions is his fear of the impending war with Hitler's Germany changing the whole nature of existence: "The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool — and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside — belongs to the time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler". There is a really striking and often quite bleak and stifling atmosphere of the impending war and the totalitarian future that George believes will be that war's inevitable follow up, reflecting Orwell's fear of the twin totalitarian extremes of fascism and communism. One can almost see George Bowling transmuting into 1984's Winston Smith. He says: "I’ve enough sense to see that the old life we’re used to is being sawn off at the roots. I can feel it happening. I can see the war that’s coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think". This description may make this sound like a bleak novel but it is anything but - it is a humorous and bittersweet story, and is truly wonderful, especially if you're a middle aged man yourself!

120john257hopper
Editat: nov. 28, 2021, 11:56 am

90. The Janeites - Rudyard Kipling

A few days ago I stumbled across an article online claiming that in the First World War shell-shocked Tommies were sometimes prescribed the novels of Jane Austen as a tonic for their mental problems. Indeed Rudyard Kipling wrote this short story about the phenomenon, published in a collection of his short stories in 1926. It's quite hard to understand the vernacular of the soldiers here, but the attachment of these un-book learned soldiers to Jane and her works as a symbol of England is quite touching.

The story begins with a touching poetical tribute:

Jane lies in Winchester-blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made!
And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain.
Glory, love, and honour unto England’s Jane

They revel in the fact that the novels are slow paced: "Why, she was a little old maid ‘oo’d written ‘alf a dozen books about a hundred years ago. ’Twasn’t as if there was anythin’ to ‘em, either. I know. I had to read ‘em. They weren’t adventurous, nor smutty....". But it made a difference to their later lives: "I read all her six books now for pleasure ‘tween times in the shop; an’ it brings it all back-down to the smell of the glue-paint on the screens. You take it from me, Brethren, there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place. Gawd bless ‘er...".

Worth a look as a curiosity.

121booksaplenty1949
nov. 28, 2021, 9:12 am

>117 john257hopper: Perhaps filmmakers wanted to avoid choosing between Austen’s actual title (Love and Freindship) and the correctly spelled version. I’ve seen both titles on published copies.

122john257hopper
nov. 29, 2021, 3:35 pm

91. Revelation of the Daleks - Eric Saward

This is a novelisation of a Doctor Who TV story from 1985 written by the original scriptwriter. It was a blackly humorous TV story, usually regarded as the gem in what was widely regarded as a sub-standard era in the show's long history. This is quite a good novelisation, expanding on the broadcast story with some extra scenes, one fairly significant extra character and some backstory for some of the other characters. A tale of nefarious goings on in a giant funeral parlour presided over by the Great Healer, in reality Davros, creator of the Daleks, it was a satire on the Evelyn Waugh novel The Loved One. which I read last week (there is a reference to a character having died of Waugh's Disease). A good read (though I was a little disappointed that the hovering glass Dalek did not make it into this novelisation).

123john257hopper
des. 5, 2021, 12:09 pm

92. Prelude to Foundation - Isaac Asimov

This book was Asimov's retrospective account of the early years of Hari Seldon as he groped towards founding his science of psychohistory, with which he later guided the work of the Foundations that he caused to be set up in the original Foundation trilogy in order to bring order to the chaos of the declining and disintegrating Galactic Empire. This is a story of Seldon's flight through various sectors of the imperial capital planet Trantor from the mysterious hostile forces pursuing him to gain the secrets of psychohistory that they believe he holds. There are some great characters in here and a good narrative drive. This was Asimov at the height of his SF writing powers during their second wind in the 1980s.

124john257hopper
des. 12, 2021, 7:04 am

93. Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir

This is Andy Weir's third hard SF novel, and is more in the vein of The Martian than Artemis, a race against survival using limited resources. A deadly phenomenon arises on the sun, minute entities that reduce the amount of heat and light coming to Earth (christened "astrophages", i.e. star eaters). The Hail Mary mission is sent into space to investigate and try to address this problem before life on Earth is wiped out through global cooling (in an ironic twist on real life events, before the mission launches, an attempt is made to reduce the cooling by deliberately destroying part of the Antarctic ice shelf to accelerate global warming). By the time the story begins, the lone survivor of this mission, Dr Ryland Grace, meets a being from an alien civilisation which is suffering the same terminal problem. To cut a long very hard SF story short, Dr Grace and the alien find a solution, though there is a bittersweet ending to the story for the human hero. I found the constant flitting back and forth in time a little annoying, and I would have preferred a more linear narrative, but this had some good tense moments

125john257hopper
Editat: des. 12, 2021, 7:05 am

Aquest missatge ha estat suprimit pel seu autor.

126john257hopper
Editat: des. 12, 2021, 7:05 am

Aquest missatge ha estat suprimit pel seu autor.

127john257hopper
Editat: des. 15, 2021, 3:27 pm

94. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton

This novella was my first book by this author, but it won't be my last. I enjoyed her writing style, which is quite straightforward, with evocative descriptions of the landscape. In the first chapter Ethan Frome is a broken middle aged man, and the rest of the book explores the his past twenty years earlier, his relationship with his bitter wife Zeena, and his passion for her cousin, Mattie. In the end, this passion results in tragedy, leaving a sad ending for all concerned. Quite moving and a good read.

128john257hopper
des. 18, 2021, 7:09 am

95. The Warlord of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs

This is the third book in the authors series starring Virginian John Carter's adventures on Barsoom (Mars). As usual, it is mostly action and fight sequences as, following on immediately from the end of the previous book, Carter covers a lot of ground once again to rescue his princess Dejah Thoris. I did feel there was a bit more plot in this one though, which will keep me (slowly) working my way through the series.

129john257hopper
des. 20, 2021, 2:12 pm

96. The Vanishment - Jonathan Aycliffe

I have read one of Jonathan Aycliffe's excellent ghost stories in the run up to Christmas for a number of years, and I thought this was one of the best. Author Peter Clare and his wife Sarah come to stay in a remote house in Cornwall to get away from the stresses in their lives. But the house harbours a guilty and horrifying secret dating back to the late 19th century when a lady who is now a vengeful ghost committed a horrific crime against her family. Sarah disappears and Peter must face the loss of others close to him as he tries to exorcise the ghost. There are twists until right near the end and this was a brilliant atmospheric read.

130john257hopper
des. 24, 2021, 1:17 pm

97. Twas the Night Before Christmas - Clement Clark Moore

This is nicely illustrated edition of this children's Christmas poem composed in the early 19th century, originally for the author's own children and printed in a newspaper, before being distributed more widely. Famous for introducing the names of Santa's reindeer, it is genuinely funny and heartwarming.

131john257hopper
des. 27, 2021, 8:18 am

98. Dickens and Christmas - Lucinda Hawksley

This book recounts the connections with Christmas in Dickens's life. While he is most famous of course for A Christmas Carol published in 1843, this was just the first in a series of five Christmas books published over most of the next few Christmases; and for almost the whole of the rest of his life, much of Dickens's life each year was devoted to the Christmas editions of the magazines he edited, Household Words and All the Year Round. This publication treadmill caused Dickens more and more difficulty and stress as the decades rolled by, contradicting his public image as the embodiment of the evolving Victorian Christmas. The Victorian era was the time when many of the modern Christmas traditions first evolved, or at least became more widespread: Christmas trees (though the first known one is attributed to Queen Charlotte's, George III's wife); Christmas cards (originally pictures of the sender's family, not seasonal images); Christmas cakes (as opposed to Twelfth Night cakes, 25 December having taken over from Twelfth Night as the focal day of the Christmas season during the middle part of the 19th century, and the season having effectively reduced from 12 days to three); Christmas shopping. Complaints about the commercialisation of Christmas are nothing new; even before the Victorian era, "each ageing generation complained that Christmas was not as it had been in their childhood. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a feeling that too many Christmas traditions had fallen out of fashion and that a Christmas renaissance was needed", it being felt "In this still new century, .......by many critics that there was too much emphasis on money and possessions at Christmas time". Some things never change.

132john257hopper
Editat: des. 28, 2021, 7:03 am

99. Ambrosio; or, The Monk - Matthew Lewis

This is a classic Gothic horror novel published in 1796 at the height of the Gothic novel golden age, an era usually deemed to be epitomised by Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. This one is a full on embodiment of the Gothic genre, with corrupt monks and nuns, the Devil, satanic agents disguised as nuns, cross-dressing, moral and physical decay, dank, dark dungeons, burial alive, murder, torture, illicit sex, rape and incest. The latter are not described in a modern, explicit sense, but still in language that is explicit for the time and which earned the condemnation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge who wrote in a contemporary review "Not without reluctance then, but in full conviction that we are performing a duty, we declare it to be our opinion, that the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale". At the same time Coleridge praises the quality of the writing and the author's precocious talent; indeed, Lewis was only twenty-years-old when he wrote and published this novel. It drags slightly in places, but overall is an entertaining fantasy read; in the words of the (anonymous) introduction to the Delphi edition, "Lewis has thrown everything into this novel and there is a resultant over-the-top almost camp appeal to the whole thing".

133john257hopper
Editat: des. 29, 2021, 12:51 pm

100. The Amazing Mr Blunden - Antonia Barber

My 100th book of the year, hurrah! Though I've scraped it more narrowly than in any recent year.

I read this book after watching the very good TV adaptation on the Christmas Day just passed. It's a great children's time travel ghost story that satisfies on an emotional level and tells a good story. The TV adaptation was very close to the novel, which was published in 1969, so the only real differences are in children's and society's attitudes 50 years apart. The villainous characters are effective, and there is strength in the ambiguous characters who make weak or wrong decisions, especially Mr Blunden himself - it is not surprising that the TV adaptations have centred on his name rather than the commonplace original novel title The Ghosts. Enjoyable.

134pamelad
des. 29, 2021, 2:46 pm

Congratulations on the 100!

135john257hopper
des. 30, 2021, 6:47 am

>134 pamelad: thanks Pam. I'm squeezing in a couple more short ones!

136john257hopper
des. 30, 2021, 7:21 am

101. The Battle of Life - Charles Dickens

This was the fourth of Dickens's original series of five Christmas novellas published in the 1840s, and starting of course with A Christmas Carol. This one is hardly known now, has nothing to do with Christmas, and indeed has no supernatural or religious elements. It was, however just as popular as the others on its publication in December 1846. The story draws comparisons between an old battlefield on which is the village where the story takes place and struggles within the families there. Alfred Heathfield is engaged to be married to Marion Jeddler, but she realises that he really loves her sister Grace, and therefore disappears, eloping with a man she seems not really to love, Michael Warden. So it is a novel of self-sacrifice, but not one of redemption. There are some wonderful pairs of comic characters, the servants Benjamin Britain (yes, really) and Clemency Newcome and the lawyers Snitchey and Craggs. Having been unimpressed with this story when I first read it exactly a decade ago, I now think this is rather a forgotten gem in Dickens's minor fiction.

137john257hopper
Editat: des. 31, 2021, 4:35 pm

102. Sherlock Holmes and the Giant's Hand - Matthew Booth

My final book of 2022!

This is a small collection of three Sherlock Holmes spin off stories. I always judge such spin offs by how authentically Holmesian they feel. These are really good, the personas of Holmes and Watson and the writing itself feel genuinely Conan Doylesque. The plots of two of them were reasonable, though the other one contained a rather implausible crucifixion in Chislehurst. I'd read more Holmes pastiches by this author.

138john257hopper
Editat: gen. 6, 2022, 3:50 pm

Aquest missatge ha estat suprimit pel seu autor.