Sparkling Cyanide

June 24, 2020 / Eleanor Jane / Leave a comment

I have been reading Agatha Christie’s Sparkling Cyanide with a lovely group of people on Instagram and have been thoroughly enjoying it.

I haven’t read any Christie for a while and it has been years since I read this one. So much so that I genuinely had no idea whodunnit – which makes a nice change for me when I’m re-reading a book. This was a good one too – a long list of suspects who all seemed pretty plausible. Early on I did single out the love interests and write them off as suspects but then I remembered that Christie is not Ngaio Marsh or Georgette Heyer. Anyone could have done it – including either or even both of the love interests – so they went back on the list.

In the end, I only guessed a few pages before the reveal which is always satisfying. I like to be able to work out the solution before the detective but it’s not so great when you work out the murderer right at the beginning of the book!

It was a lot of fun reading this with the others. There are always so many things which come up in the chats that I just don’t notice for myself when I’m reading and it is lovely to share my ideas with other people. We might not be able to have in person book clubs at the moment but this is just as good (especially as my book club would never read a lot of the books I would like to choose!).

Working and Reading

June 17, 2020 / Eleanor Jane / Leave a comment

With the re-opening of shops this week, I have been called back in to work. I spent a long time thinking about the perfect book to take with me – it needed to be nice and cosy but not too gripping because I wanted to be able to leave it at work when I went home.

In the end I decided on Pat of Silver Bush. L M Montgomery is always the best comfort read for me and, although I remember thinking that Pat was very similar in character to me, I haven’t read it for quite some time. I hoped that would mean I would be drawn into the story and it would be a distraction if things got too stressful at work.

In fact, I have hardly read at all over the past few days. We are working shorter days which means we get less time for lunch and I only get through a few pages. Then when I get home I am completely drained and just want to collapse on the sofa in front of the television (I have been binge watching Miranda and it is just as wonderful as I remember).

Hopefully though I will settle back into work fairly quickly and I’ll soon be reading more again. I am very much looking forward to my day off and the extra hours of reading time that will bring!

Literary Picnics

June 10, 2020 / Eleanor Jane / 2 Comments

In our continuing efforts to make our weekends different to the rest of the week, we have taken a picnic lunch out to the field almost every Sunday since lockdown started. Our first one made me feel like Judy from Daddy-Long-Legs. Like Judy and Jervis, we carried a table out to sit under the trees.

Our next attempt was right in the midst of my Swallows and Amazons re-read and so I was much more ambitious. I called up everything I could remember from the books and all of my old Girl Guide knowledge to build a campfire and cook our lunch over that. I was quite proud of my success – and also surprised about how relatively easy it was. We repeated the exercise on another Sunday and it is such a fun way to cook lunch, even if you do end up smelling strongly of smoke!

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I even did some rummaging and found the flag I made when I was first reading Swallows and Amazons as a child. You can’t really tell but it is a sparrowhawk flag made to look like Swallow’s and I was very proud of it. It made our picnic feel like a proper camp too.

Having eaten lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoons just sitting with tea and books. It is the most restful way to spend a day and I always ended up feeling incredibly calm and peaceful. I shall be sorry to lose these days as I return to work but am determined to find some way to fit them into my life anyway.

Book Review – The Fowl Twins

June 3, 2020June 3, 2020 / Eleanor Jane / Leave a comment

I was so excited to receive a review copy of Eoin Colfer’s new book The Fowl Twins last autumn. My sister was obsessed with his Artemis Fowl books as a teenager so out of curiosity I picked one up myself. I was instantly hooked and have loved them ever since. It took me far too long to get around to reading this one but I’m glad I finally did.

Publisher’s Blurb

Criminal genius runs in the family…

Myles and Beckett Fowl are twins but the two boys are wildly different. Beckett is blonde, messy and sulks whenever he has to wear clothes. Myles is impeccably neat, has an IQ of 170, and 3D prints a fresh suit every day – just like his older brother, Artemis Fowl.

A week after their eleventh birthday the twins are left in the care of house security system, NANNI, for a single night. In that time, they befriend a troll on the run from a nefarious nobleman and an interrogating nun both of whom need the magical creature for their own gain . . .

Prepare for an epic adventure in which the Fowl twins and their new troll friend escape, get shot at, kidnapped, buried, arrested, threatened, killed (temporarily) . . . and discover that the strongest bond in the world is not the one forged by covalent electrons in adjacent atoms, but the one that exists between a pair of twins.

Starting this book was like stepping back into a familiar world. Artemis himself wasn’t around and neither were Holly Short or Butler but this book fits right in with the original series and I felt very at home there. I loved Myles and Beckett and NANNI was just genius.

The plot is full of twists and turns and although I saw most of them coming it didn’t at all detract from my enjoyment of the book. After all, it is aimed at children significantly younger than I am! This is a fun and exciting start to a new series and I am already eagerly awaiting the new book.

Book Details

The Fowl Twins by Eoin Colfer

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

ISBN: 9780008324810

RRP: £14.99