Month: July 2021

Olympic Reading

/ Eleanor Jane / Leave a comment

This has been a slow reading week for me. I have some excellent books on the go (I am very much enjoying Amari and the Night Brothers) but the Olympics have started and as usual I am absolutely hooked. Of course, many of the events are happening in the middle of the night for me when I would not normally be reading – not that it stops me getting up to watch!

However, much of my reading time is taken up with the Olympics now. I watch sport whilst I eat my breakfast and even manage to do so in my breaks at work. I do still have a book with me but honestly it’s hard to focus on reading when we are fighting for a medal! In fact, my reading right now mainly consists of the schedule of events.

However, I am itching to read more and in fact the amount of dressage I have been watching has made me very keen to pick up the next book in the Romney Marsh/Punchbowl series by Monica Edwards. I love these books and am so much looking forward to being immersed in that world again. First though, there are medals up for grabs in the middle of the night and I need to get some sleep before then!

Powering Through

/ Eleanor Jane / 2 Comments

This week I have a great feeling of accomplishment because I finally finished a book I started in (I think) November.

I first picked up The House of the Seven Gables because L M Montgomery raved about it in her journal and I thought that if she liked it I probably would too. I read George Eliot’s Romola for the same reason and that turned out very well so I had high hopes. The book is a bit slow to get started but I was enjoying it and I was definitely invested in the characters.

Then I got to chapter seventeen and it suddenly became very rambling and had a completely different feel to it. I found myself reading sentences several times and still not really taking them in. I kept going but found that the next chapter was even stranger. I finished chapter eighteen one evening, put the book down and didn’t pick it up again for months.

I was so close to the end though that I didn’t want to give up so I did eventually make myself read on. In the very next chapter the narrative reasserted itself and I raced through the rest of the book. I even enjoyed it. It was a very odd experience because apart from those two chapters I thought it was a great book. They were enough though to put me off trying another Nathaniel Hawthorne any time soon!

Keeping Track

/ Eleanor Jane / Leave a comment

Back in January I wrote about trying to read my way through my unread shelves. Every so often I try to make a bit of an effort to do that but it is never long before I can no longer resist the urge to get something new. Sometimes I’m just not in the right mood for something on the shelf!

This time I was determined things would be different – hence my drawing of all the unread books I owned at the beginning of the year. I had a hundred and every month I get to colour in any books I read in a new colour. You can probably see that I started off very enthusiastically but things have trailed off a bit!

Nevertheless, the drawing does help. The idea of going a whole month without colouring in a book is terrible and as for ending up with more books than I had before – that would be a disaster! If I only colour in one book a month that would at least be something. Of those original one hundred books I have now read thirty three so I am in high hopes that I might have read half of them by the end of the year.

Besides having the drawing to colour in, I am also keeping a tally of the total number of unread books I own – so every month I subtract those I’ve read and add on those I have acquired. This is currently giving me a less pleasing figure (84) but at least it is still fewer than in January! Keeping this account is definitely making me better at not buying books I am not going to read straight away – very nearly every book I have acquired this year has been read within a couple of weeks which is a definite improvement for me.

I now have two main problems. The first is that I have read through most of the easy reads on my shelf and am left with the ones I am not so enthusiastic about. Some of them I have my eye on to just admit I’m not going to read them and get rid of them. Others I still want to read – just not right now! If you can see any you think I should pick up straight away, do tell me! The other problem is very minor. I need to find the rest of my coloured pencils. I know they are around somewhere but if I don’t find them one month’s books will have to be coloured white and, well, that just isn’t going to work!

Book Reveiw – The Appeal

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Last week I received a reading copy of The Appeal by Janice Hallett and I knew I had to read it immediately. I adore The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L Sayers and this sounded like it had a similar premise. In fact, it goes much further and is a collection of a whole range of documents about this particular case.

Publisher’s Blurb

Dear Reader – enclosed are all the documents you need to solve a case. It starts with the arrival of two mysterious newcomers to the small town of Lockwood, and ends with a tragic death.

Someone has already been convicted of this brutal murder and is currently in prison, but we suspect they are innocent. What’s more, we believe far darker secrets have yet to be revealed.

Throughout the Fairway Players’ staging of All My Sons and the charity appeal for little Poppy Reswick’s life-saving medical treatment, the murderer hid in plain sight. Yet we believe they gave themselves away. In writing. The evidence is all here, between the lines, waiting to be discovered.

Will you accept the challenge? Can you uncover the truth?

I could not put this book down. As each of the documents were fairly short it was very easy to keep reading ‘just one more’ and before I knew it a whole hour had gone (I was very nearly late for my virtual orchestra rehearsal). All the time I wasn’t reading it I was puzzling over the snippets of information I had gleaned, trying to work out what had happened and then who had made it happen.

The plot had many twists and turns I wasn’t expecting – although I worked out some answers I didn’t get them all and there were several moments that took me by surprise. I’ve read a lot of crime recently but this is the first one in a while which has really got my brain working to try to solve the problem rather than just enjoying the story and character development.

It was a great book and one I have recommended many times in just a few days. I know I will be reading it again – I wanted to restart it as soon as I finished just to see if I could pick up on the clues I missed the first time round! Thank you so much to Viper Books for sending the review copy.

Book Details

The Appeal by Janice Hallett

Publisher: Viper Books

ISBN: 9781788165303

RRP: £8.99