It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Well, last week wasn't a great reading week for me. Only finished one book, and didn't really do much blogging - didn't even post a "What Are You Reading?" update. I'm a little preoccupied with other stuff right now - mostly getting ready for our upcoming trip to Texas. We'll be leaving next week, and we'll be away from home for about three weeks. And since I'm not really such a great traveler, it takes me a couple of weeks just to get myself mentally prepared, not to mention all the list-making, errand-running, packing, unpacking, and re-packing. Which doesn't leave a lot of time for doing things I'd really prefer to be doing, like reading and blog-hopping. But, enough of that. Here's how things stand this week:

• Read in the last two weeks:
  
  Book of Shadows. Alexandra Sokoloff. Working on a review of this one. Read it for the RIP/V Challenge - a mystery with a Halloween setting and paranormal elements, perfect for this time of year.
  
  
  After Claude, by Iris Owens. This was an Early Reviewer book from Library Thing. I should have a review up, over there, later today. I'll probably wait until a little closer to the November release date before I post a review on my blog. Strange book - haven't really decided exactly how I feel about it.
  
  
  
• Recent reviews:
  
  The Inheritance, by Simon Tolkien. Interesting mystery novel set in 1950s England and France, by J.R.R.'s grandson. See my review here.
  
  
  
• Reading this week:
  
  I'm determined to finish up Stephen King's The Dark Half this week.
  
  
  Also want to start on the ARC of Kate Morton's The Distant Hours - I might be taking that along on the trip (it's such a chunkster, it just might need its own bag!).
  
  
  

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. If you want to let the world know what books you're going to be reading this week, head on over to her blog and leave your link. It's also a great way to discover new books and new blogs.

Booking Through Thursday: Foreign Favorites

This week's BTT topic ("Name a book (or books) from a country other than your own that you love. Or aren’t there any?") is a good one, but it presents an almost impossible task. At least, it seems pretty daunting to me.

Because so many of my favorite books are from countries other than my own, once I get started listing them, we could be here for the rest of the week. And choosing just one favorite would be seriously impossible.

What would it be? Lewis Carroll's Alice books? See – that's two already. Just about anything by Barbara Pym or Anthony Powell? Wuthering Heights? Something by P.D. James, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers? Du Maurier's Rebecca? Virginia Woolf's Orlando?

And that's just the British Isles. What about Borges' Ficciones? Magister Ludi by Hermann Hesse? Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Nabokov's Lolita? The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez Reverte?

See my point? And I could go on. But I won't (you lucky people, you!). What I will do is direct you to a list of favorites, written several years ago (I really should update it one of these days), and then take myself off to look at your answers. Should be fun because you've got a long list, too – am I right? And I love reading lists of books almost as much as I love reading the books themselves!

Teaser Tuesdays: The First Inspector Barnaby

This week, my teaser lines come from Caroline Graham's 1987 whodunit, The Killings at Badger's Drift. It's the first book in her series of Chief Inspector Barnaby novels, and I haven't actually started it yet. I have read several of the later novels in the series and enjoyed them very much, but somehow I missed out on the book that started it all. Sounds like me.

This snippet is from page 12 and caught my eye because it establishes one of the funniest traditions of the novels (and one of the things I've always liked about them) - the fact that Joyce Barnaby, the Chief Inspector's wife, is a horrible cook. As he says, she has many other wonderful abilities, but cooking (alas) is not among them:

It was almost nine o'clock. Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby sat at the dining room table facing a plateful of leathery strips, black and shiny as liquorice, surrounded by coils of yellowish green paste.

"Your liver and greens are spoiled, dear," said Mrs Barnaby, implying that there had once been a time when they were not.

Again, sounds like me. I can definitely identify with poor Joyce because I have the same problem: I am probably the world's worst cook. Even though my husband has always said (lovingly, if rather un-diplomatically) that I'm only the world's second worst cook because his mother was the first. So I suppose I got lucky there, even if he didn't.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or take part yourself, just head on over to her blog.

And please feel free to leave me a link to your Teaser Tuesday post in a comment here.

It's a Wilde Day!

Celebrate the birthday of Oscar Wilde.
Do something unconventional!

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
(16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900)

Photo: Wikipedia

Booking Through Thursday: Rewrite

This week BTT asks: "If you could rewrite the ending of any book, which book would it be? And how would you change it?"

First, I want to say thanks to Deb for using one of my questions this week (thanks, Deb!). And second, I want to say what was I thinking???!!!

Seriously, it's not that it's such a terrible question; it's just that now I'll have to come up with an answer. And an answer that isn't too much of a spoiler, too! And after giving the question a lot of thought this morning, I have to admit I'm usually pretty satisfied with the endings of the books I read. Probably because I'm just not imaginative enough to think of anything else!

Of the books I've read lately, though, I can think of a couple that had endings that really disappointed. First, there was Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop. It's about a widow in the 1950s who opens a bookshop in a small English village. It's very hard to say much more about the book without giving away too much, so I'll just say that while I know the ending was inevitable, I found it really maddening. (But the book is definitely worth a read, even with the frustrating ending.)

More recently, a book that had an ending I found really disappointing is Brunonia Barry's The Map of True Places. Actually, I was a little disappointed by the whole book, but I thought the ending was especially weak – as if Barry had run out of steam and just wanted to tie everything up neatly. I felt the (**spoiler alert!**) relatively happy and uplifting ending just didn't really fit with the rather dark tone of the rest of the book. I would have been happier with a few loose ends and a more realistic wrap-up. (I should probably say here that I read an ARC of the book – I suppose it's possible that the ending of the published version might be a bit different; I should take a look at the finished product and check that out.)

I do remember, as a girl, being very upset about the ending of Little Women – I was really hoping Jo and Laurie would get together, and when that (** spoiler alert!**) didn't happen I was very disappointed. But then, if they had married, Jo would never have met Professor Bhaer, and they never would have decided to start a school together, and Louisa May Alcott never would have written Little Men, which turned out to be an even better book than Little Women. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere about authors knowing what's best for their characters and their readers.

If I gave it a little more thought, I'd probably come up with many more examples. Probably way too many examples. So I'll let it go at three. And how about ya'll? Any disappointing endings you'd like to rearrange?

Reading Report: The Inheritance

Written by Simon Tolkien
Minotaur Books, 2010; 325 pages

Description from the publisher:

When a famed Oxford historian is found dead in his study one night, all evidence points to his son, Stephen. About to be disinherited from the family fortune, Stephen has returned home after a long estrangement—and it happens to be the night his father is shot to death. When his fingerprints are found on the murder weapon, Stephen’s guilt seems undeniable. But there were five other people in the manor house at the time, and as their stories slowly emerge—along with the revelation that the deceased man was involved in a deadly hunt for a priceless relic in Northern France at the end of World War II—the race is on to save Stephen from a death sentence.

Everyone has a motive, and no one is telling the truth. Unwilling to sit by and watch the biased judge condemn Stephen to death, an aging police inspector decides to travel from England to France to find out what really happened in that small French village in 1945—and what artifact could be so valuable it would be worth killing for.

My Thoughts:

I have to admit I picked this one up because the Tolkien connection caught my attention: Simon is the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien. And while I'm not a huge Lord of the Rings fan, I did read and enjoy the epic fantasy saga many years ago in college. (Frodo lives!) So I was immediately interested. And I was not too surprised (and very relieved) to find that Simon is his own man, literarily speaking. He has his own style and voice, and even though the story does revolve around the search for a lost ancient artifact, there are absolutely no intimations of Middle Earth in this book.

The blurb on the front cover calls The Inheritance "half Christie and half Grisham," and while I can't vouch for the Grisham comparison, Christie's Witness for the Prosecution did come to mind occasionally as I was reading. There's the courtroom setting, of course; but I believe the Christie-ish atmosphere is the result of the book's being set in the 1950s more than any similarity of plot or style.

There's a lot going on in this book, and it mixes several different genres – historical fiction, legal thriller, traditional whodunit, revenge drama, family saga. And Tolkien does a fine job of keeping the mix from getting confusing or off-balance. He does give away the identity of the murderer rather early in the book, but you have to be really observant to notice; and he still manages to keep you guessing and rethinking and going over the clues right up to the end. The book also includes some fairly disturbing bits of brutality and one or two really nasty characters – not uncommon in a thriller, of course, but definitely something to keep in mind if you're looking for something a little more "cozy."

So, would I recommend it? Well, it's probably not an "A" effort, but I'd say it's a solid "B+" – so, yes, I think it's definitely a book worth reading. And Tolkien's Detective Inspector William Trave of the Oxfordshire CID is a wonderful creation, worthy of his own series, or at the very least a sequel.

Teaser Tuesdays: Book of Shadows

Over the weekend, I started reading Alexandra Sokoloff's Book of Shadows, so I'm taking this week's teaser lines from that one. It's a mystery novel involving the search for a sadistic serial killer, but it also has supernatural elements that make it a really different and (so far) fascinating kind of thriller. This excerpt comes from page 101, a little farther along than I've actually gotten. And to set the scene – Adam Garrett, the Boston homicide detective in charge of the investigation, is meeting up with the mysterious Tanith Cabarrus, a practicing witch from nearby Salem who claims to have had psychic visions concerning the case:

He saw her instantly; she sat alone at a table near the fire, the flames flushing her face. She wore a silver blouse and black skirt, and her dark riot of hair was for the moment pulled severely back. His memory had not exaggerated – she was heart-stoppingly beautiful.

Is it just me, or does it seem like all the women in novels these days are always "heart-stoppingly beautiful"? Wouldn't you think at least one of these writers could come up with a character who was just slightly overweight or had a crooked nose or big ears, or at least a bad haircut once in a while?


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or take part yourself, just head on over to her blog.

And please feel free to leave me a link to your Teaser Tuesday post in a comment here.