Sunday Salon: A Romance and Greek Mystery Novels

I finished and reviewed Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn, a retelling in modern times of the King Lear story. I have decided to read others in the Hobarth Shakespeare series as well.

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler retells The Taming of the Shrew. It was an enjoyable, light read, basically a love story about 29-year-old Kate, whose scientist father engineered a romance by matchmaking her with his research assistant, Pyotr. Kate is unwilling to help her father - he needs to keep Pyotr in the country to continue his research, and Pyotr's visa is about to expire. Kate's father tries to persuade Kate to an arranged marriage so that Pyotr can legally stay in the country. 

How Pyotr manages to win her over is the theme of the story, and Tyler has done a marvelous job with her retelling of Shakespeare's story. 

Another book I finished recently was a Greek mystery, The Lady of Sorrows by Anne Zouroudi.
Set on a remote Greek island, the plot surrounds the poisoning of a local fisherman and the possible connection to the icon of Our Lady of Sorrows in the local church. There are also questions about the catacombs beneath the church and the secrets kept by some of the colorful local people of the village. The investigator is a visitor to the island, the enigmatic detective Hermes Diaktoros, whom the novel refers to only as the Fat Man. A good plot and an intriguing setting, the book looks at another side of of an otherwise beautiful tourist island.


I have downloaded two of the other books in Zouroudis' Greek Detective mystery series - The Whispers of Nemesis and The Feast of Artemis.

Visit The Sunday Post  hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer,  It's Monday, What Are You Reading? by Book Date.

Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar: Book Beginning

Salt Creek, a debut novel by Lucy Treloar, published February 28, 2017 by Picador Australia. This is an historical novel about the Finch family who move from Adelaide, Australia during hard times to a remote part of the South Australian coast. The award-winning book covers "colonialism, race relations, social expectations on women, love, family, and duty."

Book beginning:

Chichester, England, November 1874

Mama often talked of this house when I was a child, and of its squirrels with particular fondness. She missed them as she missed all about her life here. They were fastidious, she said, and always prepared for flight. Their plumy tails jerking, they would hold a nut in their tiny hands, turning it and turning it looking for the weak point, angling their heads and tilting the nuts, their tiny teeth flashing, yet could not always penetrate the shell....

Page 56:

The cheese-making began, using the small moulds from the old dairy farm. I washed them and dried them to make them ready. 

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader

It's Monday: The Wife by Alafair Burke

It's Monday, What Are You Reading? by Book Date. Also visit Mailbox Monday

The Wife by Alafair Burke, January 23, 2018, courtesy of Harper
Genre: thriller, suspense
This book by Edgar-nominated The Ex asks how far a wife will go to protect the man she loves: Will she stand by his side, even if he drags her down with him?

I am also trying to read more in the Hogarth Press Shakespeare series and have borrowed these from the library:
Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler, a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew
Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood; a retelling of The Tempest
New Boy by Tracy Chevalier; a retelling of Othello
I've started on two of them so far.

Somewhat slowly, I admit, because of reading in a different language, I am finishing up the French thrillers by Michel Bussi, which I'm really enjoying: 
Ne lache pas ma main, set on the French island of Reunion, and 
N'oublie jamais, set on the coast of Normandy, the Spanish version 

In other news, we managed to rake up most of the leaves for today's pick-up by the city trucks. Many leaves are still on the trees, so I imagine raking will go on for another few weeks.

What are you reading this week?

Book Beginning: Peculiar Ground by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Peculiar Ground by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, January 9, 2018, Harper

Genre:  historical fiction

... a great English country house novel, spanning three centuries, that explores surprisingly timely themes of immigration and exclusion.

Book beginning:

1663

It has been a grave disappointment to me to discover that his Lordship has no interest- really none whatever - in dendrology. I arrived here simultaneously with a pair of peafood and a bucket full of goldfish.It is galling that my employer takes more pleasure in the creatures than he does in my designs for his grounds.  (from an uncorrected proof; final copy may differ)

Memes:  visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader

First Chapter: The Fire by Night by Teresa Messineo

The Fire by Night by Teresa Messineo, October 3, 2017, courtesy of William Morrow Paperbacks,
is a debut novel about two American nurses who served in different countries during WWII - France and the Pacific.

First chapter:
Jo McMahon
Spring 1945, the Western Front

The main problem was her hands. They were raw and cracked and bleeding, and she couldn't get them to heal. A shell exploded outside the tent - somebody screamed and somebody laughed and someone else just said "fuck." Jo steadied the rickety supply rack in front of her, pressing her body against the shifting white boxes, pushing the brown glass bottles back into place with her thigh. The generator made a grinding noise as the lights flickered, went out, came back on. Her hands felt along the highest shelf, searching for a stray box of penicillin someone might have left behind in the initial rush to pack up, when the order to pull out had first come down.... 

Based on the first paragraph, would you go ahead and read more? 

MEME: Every Tuesday Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros sharing the first paragraph or two, from a book you are reading or will be reading soon

Sunday Salon: November Rains are Cold-ish

New Boy

Hag-Seed

It's good reading weather. It has been overcast, raining all day, and cold.  There has been no encouragement to go outdoors the past two days, and more cold rain is on the way! Oh, November!

I am reading:
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, November 14, 2017, Harper
Genre: dystopian thriller 

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler, a contemporary novel which retells The Taming of the Shrew. 

I'm also finishing up a few ebook mysteries in French, brushing up on the language.
No new books have arrived, but that's not a problem, as I have a very tall TBR stack waiting.

Two new books I'm interested in are retellings of Shakespeare's plays, published by Hogarth Press. Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, October 11, 2016, retells The Tempest.  Also New Boy by Tracy Chevalier, May 11, 2017, which retells Othello. There are others in the series I hope to get to soon.

What are you reading this week?             
Visit The Sunday Post  hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer,  It's Monday, What Are You Reading? by Book Date.

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich: Book Beginning

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, November 14, 2017, Harper

Genre: dystopian thriller 

Book beginning:

When I tell you that my white name is Cedar Hawk Songmaker and that I'm an adopted child of Minneapolis liberals,  and that when I went looking for my Ojibwe parents and found that I was born Mary Potts I hid the knowledge, maybe you'll understand. Or not. I'll write this anyway, because ever since last week things have changed. Apparently - I mean, nobody knows - our world is running backward. Or forward. Or maybe sideways, in a way  as yet ungrasped. I am sure somebody will come up with a name for what is happening, but I cannot imagine how everything around us and everything within us can be fixed. What is happening involves the invisible, the quanta of which we are created. Whatever is actually occurring, there is constant breaking news about how it will be handled - speculation, really, concerning what comes next -  which is why I am writing an account. 

Page 56:

My parents are both lawyers....Which is to say, they are shrewd as only market-based -society suspicious trust-fund liberals can be.

I was at first wary of the term "dystopian" to describe this book, as I am not a science fiction or dystopia lover,but the term "thriller" after the word dystopia sealed my interest in this novel. As does the name of the author, Louis Erdrich, whose previous books set among the Native Americans in the West I have really liked.

The narrator, Cedar Hawk Songmaker is, so far in my reading, a very intriguing personality and I am enjoying following her into her future discoveries, and into her dystopian world!

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader