mumto2 Posted July 5, 2018 Share Posted July 5, 2018 I just finished the first book in a new cozy mystery series set in England and don’t want to forget to mention Beryl and Edwina’s adventures here.........Murder in an English Village is another post WW1 cozy in a Village in anywhere England but I think it has a rather fun twist, long lost friends reunited. It starts out with an American female adventurer (think Amelia Earhart ? which was totally in my imagination) escaping the press to England where she picks up a paper and spots an advertisement for a room rental in a small village. The really special thing about the ad was it was placed by her friend from finishing school who is apparently in dire financial straits......happy reunion blah blah......but our adventurer has perhaps too much imagination and when she realizes how much her friend is pitied by the villagers she starts a rumor regarding the dire financial straits, they are a cover story because they are spy’s. The ad was a secret code, part of the cover........that gossip starts a chain of events that turns them into detectives. For some reason these two women tickled me more than normal, maybe it’s my secret desire to be a detective, but it was a fun read and I plan to read more! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34297983-murder-in-an-english-village 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Granny_Weatherwax Posted July 5, 2018 Share Posted July 5, 2018 I finished The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins and give it 5 stars. Delightful, just delightful. One of many favorite exchanges Walter: "I don't count the time from today, Marian. All I have done today, is to ask another man to act for me. I count from tomorrow-" Marian: " Why from tomorrow?' Walter: "Because tomorrow I mean to act for myself." - Knowing that Wilkie is a friend of Charles Dickens, I had to look in my Dickens biography and determine the type and strength of the relationship. One interesting factoid: Dickens' daughter married Wilkie's younger brother, possibly out of spite but she married him nevertheless. Having read A Tale of Two Cities and The Woman in White, I can imagine Collins and Dickens sitting in Dickens' study, smoking a cigar or having a glass of port and challenging each other to write a book about usurped identity and personal crisis. 9 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lady Florida. Posted July 5, 2018 Share Posted July 5, 2018 Negin and Jenn, I'm loving your photos. Zebra I'm so sorry about your dh. I can't imagine the shock. Accidental Coach, I really liked The Woman in White. I had no idea there's a musical. My reading lately - I flew through the first six Sebastian St. Cyr books since the middle of June and have hit a wall with the seventh one. Besides the fact that it's not my favorite so far, I think I just read too many too fast. That happens to me sometimes with a series except this one is a library Overdrive loan. I have to keep my Kindle wifi off until I finish it. I've also been reading This Is How It Always Is for book club. Our meeting is Tuesday and I'm at 60% so I should have no trouble finishing it in time for the meeting. On the audio book front I listened to Fingersmith and really liked it. It dragged a bit in the middle but not enough to put me off. The narrator did a great job and I gave it four stars on Goodreads. After that I couldn't decide how to spend my Audible credit so I checked the Audible Channels for something free to fill the time and ended up listening to Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family and the Bloody Fall of La Cosa Nostra. Again, the narrator was fantastic. A few times he did seem to forget he was supposed to switch from the Mafia guy to the reporter and it took him a sentence or two to lose the wise guy accent. I know that The Sopranos is supposedly based on a different NJ crime family from this one, but some of the show's episodes seem straight out of this true story. There's even a contentious uncle-nephew relationship (the nephew is the prince in the title). I wouldn't recommend spending money on this but if it's free (library for print version, Audible channels for audio version) and if you like this kind of true crime, it's not bad. There are some gory parts when describing the violent murders. I ended up spending my credit on Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow. I'm among the few (along with Lin Manuel Miranda) who didn't find Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton tedious, so I figured I would like this. It's 41 hours long so I'm set with an audio book for a good while. There's a lot I didn't know about Washington's early life and after listening to that part (I'm still not far into it) I can understand why he saw his younger self in Hamilton and why he took him under his wing. 7 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aggieamy Posted July 5, 2018 Share Posted July 5, 2018 On 7/3/2018 at 7:49 AM, Penguin said: Well, you (plural you) have convinced me to read Woman in White for my Mystery square. I am not at all a mystery reader, but this looks like a book that I would enjoy. Updates: Thrush Green made me a Miss Read fan. I look forward to reading more from the series. The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande is an excellent memoir about immigration and its impact on families. The first half is about her childhood in Mexico. She and her siblings lived with relatives while their parents worked in the United States. The second half describes her life in the United States, beginning at about age 10. I found the book both heartbreaking and uplifting. 5 stars. I read my first Miss Read book about ten years ago and thought it was ... slow, dull, too gentle. I'm going to pick another one up because I suspect that younger Amy might not have been able to appreciate it for what it was. Younger Amy was a plot junkie. On 7/3/2018 at 7:30 PM, Robin M said: A bit of news - The Nobel Prize for literature has been cancelled for this year. However another group called The New Academy has formed for this year to ensure the literary prize is awarded. Talk about your rabbit trails - once I started looking into the WHAT and WHY behind the Nobel Prize stuff I was lost for hours. I'm ready for a Jeopardy category on Nobel Prize. 5 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kareni Posted July 5, 2018 Share Posted July 5, 2018 I recently finished a re-read of Anne Cleeland's Murder in All Honour which I enjoyed once more. Now I'm waiting for the library copy of the next book in the series. Regards, Kareni 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robin M Posted July 6, 2018 Author Share Posted July 6, 2018 On 7/4/2018 at 7:50 AM, Zebra said: Thanks ladies for your kind words about the job loss. We did the best we could over the years to try to be ready for something like this. We're trying to see this as an opportunity, and we'll be okay for (what I hope is) a reasonable amount of time. FWIW, DH is without a job during SUMMER, IN MAINE! Lucky us, lol! RE A Suitable Boy, I am thinking you read this in the last few years, Robin? Which is where I got the idea? I took it out from the library maybe a year ago, and realized there was NO WAY I would get it finished in 3-5 weeks, despite being a fast reader. So I was thrilled to find a cheap copy. I like it so far, but, right now I am having a hard time keeping the characters straight. I'm glad they have a chart of the characters in the beginning, I keep flipping back to it. And I must say, it's such a HUGE BOOK it's really hard to read comfortably! I need an e-book version! Fun summer adventures to look forward too! Yes, I read it a couple years ago. Enjoyed the book and become very emotionally invested since it is a huge book following 4 different families. I think towards the middle I stopped getting confused over who was who. I'm still waiting for Vikram Seth to finish Unsuitable Girl, sometime this year, hopefully. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robin M Posted July 6, 2018 Author Share Posted July 6, 2018 How was everyone's July 4th? We had m-80s and fire crackers bursting all around our neighborhood. At least our next door neighbor stopped at 10:00. We huddled inside with the tv volume up loud, James wearing his noise cancellation earphones and watched Minions. The movie wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. 4 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JennW in SoCal Posted July 6, 2018 Share Posted July 6, 2018 Robin -- are fireworks legal in your neck of California? They are not here, due to fire concerns, though of course there are always a few renegades shooting off some brought in illegaly. It stays fairly quiet around me and it helps that we are far enough away from the nearest municipal show. I never posted a reading update. I'm currently listening to and captivated by Circe, and am reading a PD James mystery, A Certain Justice. I'm glad it didn't take too long for the murder to happen so Dalgleish and company can arrive on the scene. What an unlikable cast of characters she introduces -- I wonder how many of them are going to wind up dead before the book is done? While on my trip I read the third of the Sebastian St Cyr books, the one with Mermaids in the title. I'm still enjoying them and will use Kathy's experience as a reminder to take my time with the series! I also read a great memoir which I bought at a store in Perth, Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks -- the author of People of the Book. I loved it as she is roughly my age and the memoir is framed by her youth in Sydney and her pen pals around the globe. Another excellent book I finished was Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. It is an epic about two dysfunctional families sharing the same old large house in Perth post WWII through the early 60s. Much of the plot is fairly grim, but it never feels that way because the writing is funny and poetic and simply beautiful. This is apparently often voted the best Australian novel, and I can see why. I'd love to read more by Winton, and highly recommend Cloudstreet. I have been listening to, and often falling asleep to Neil Gaiman reading his Norse Mythology. The stories are great, and he is a wonderful reader. I'm just falling asleep because it is bedtime!! I slept through most of it on my flight home, and have gone back to listen to the parts I missed. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robin M Posted July 6, 2018 Author Share Posted July 6, 2018 4 hours ago, JennW in SoCal said: Robin -- are fireworks legal in your neck of California? They are not here, due to fire concerns, though of course there are always a few renegades shooting off some brought in illegaly. It stays fairly quiet around me and it helps that we are far enough away from the nearest municipal show. No, fireworks aren’t legal, but that doesn’t stop folks from going a bit nuts. Our neighbor has a relative who works in Nevada making fireworks. The neighbors have been laying low for a couple years after a big kerfluffle but evidently they have gotten over it and are back at it again. 3 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loesje22000 Posted July 6, 2018 Share Posted July 6, 2018 Just finished Murder at Honeychurch Hall. A light reading perfect to alternate with summer cleaning / decluttering... 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kareni Posted July 7, 2018 Share Posted July 7, 2018 Currently free for Kindle readers ~ Pineapple Pack mysteries by Amy Vansant A Dangerous Deceit by Alissa Johnson (historical romance) Run to Ground by Katie Ruggle (contemporary romantic suspense) fawn by Nash Summers (LGBT story) Regards, Kareni 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mumto2 Posted July 8, 2018 Share Posted July 8, 2018 I spent some time catching up on my book accounting today ? and have completed the Tulip spelling challenge. T........To Dave’s Jones Below by Carola Dunn U.......The Unpleasantness at the BellonaClub by Dorothy Sayers L.......The Last Wolf by Maria Vale I.......I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith P......Death at Bishops Keep by Robin Page 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robin M Posted July 8, 2018 Author Share Posted July 8, 2018 Link to week 28 - please continue conversation in new thread Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.