A Work in Progress

The Light of Paris by Eleanor Brown

Eleanor Brown's The Light of Paris is for me one of those contented sigh of satisfaction reads.  It was just what I needed right now--frothy but well written, thoroughly enchanting escapist fiction.  Don't be put off by the word frothy.  I mean that in the best sense.  It is a light read in that you know (or are at least pretty sure) that there will be some kind of happy outcome, though there might be a rocky path in getting there.  Brown is a great storyteller and while there is plenty of heavy-heartedness the story is also peppered with lots of humor, which I loved.  I don't need to necessarily like the characters I am reading about, but it is nice when I find them real and relatable.  In this case I could see aspects of the protagonists' personalities in my own, which made the story even more satisfying.

The Light of Paris is a dual narrative story set in contemporary Chicago and the small town of Magnolia, which sits somewhere between Memphis and Little Rock, and 1920s Washington and Paris.  Since Madeleine happens across her grandmother's diaries maybe this is more her story than Margie's, but the plotlines are so tightly woven both women's stories provide a nice counterbalance to each other.  Both narratives are equally compelling and I was never disappointed at the switch, only left with that feeling that I wanted to see how each woman's story would turn out.

This is a story of dreams that seem unreachable, of finding yourself and finding happiness despite being stuck in impossible situations and feeling the pain of being a square peg in a round peg society.   Neither woman is the belle of the party, they're more like wallflowers.  For Margie, stuck in the polite society of 1920s middle class respectability her mother fears she will never find a spouse, so plain and bookish is she.  But Margie's dreams extend from her reading.  She would love nothing more than to be a writer.  It's not to say she doesn't harbor a few school girl fantasies of being swept off her feet by a handsome young man, but the only interest thrown her way is from a colleague of her father's looking for a 'wife' rather than a lover.  When an offer is made for marriage she literally runs from the room so unhappy is the prospect.

Madeleine, her granddaughter, has always thought of her grandmother as a serious and very proper woman who spent her time on all the right committees supporting her husband and being the right kind of wife a successful businessman needs.  She has passed away before Madeleine, returning home to Magnolia to escape her own unhappy marriage, comes across diaries Margie kept while traveling in Paris.  Reading them opens up a world and a life Madeleine had never known existed, one she cannot imagine her proper grandmother living.  Since Margie has embarrassed her family by her marriage refusal, she is sent off to Paris, but it is not meant to be a pleasure trip.  She is meant to act as chaperone to her wild cousin.  Of course it goes horribly wrong.  Rather than return home in utter humiliation, Margie finds a job in an American expat library and falls in with a group of artists.  Paris in the 20s is a magical life and she begins to realize her dreams.

For Madeleine reading about Margie's Paris adventures is eye opening and she sees bits of herself in her grandmother's situation.  Stuck in a life she does not like and that will never make her happy, she grasped at the only opportunity likely to pass her way.  Madeleine, too, is stuck in an unhappy situation.  She has turned away from every dream--to be an artist, to live as she likes even if it means being unmarried and more plain and frumpy than elegant and svelte.  Instead she marries a man (surely the only one and best one likely to come her way according to her mother) she does not love and who really doesn't seem to like her much either.  She is perfect wife to his successful businessman and ordered world.  He doesn't want her to work or to eat too much or to look frumpy.  And so she doesn't.  She denies herself almost everything and certainly everything that makes her happy.

Madeleine's return home to Magnolia and the place where she started, the people she knew in school throws her world into a muddle.  She sees where she came from and where she has ended up and the people she left behind have turned out to be different people than she expected.  Magnolia turns out to be a place to came home to rather than a place to flee.  And it is her grandmother's diaries that give her hope and courage. 

I didn't mean to ramble on so about this and don't worry as I have not spoiled the best bits, but if you are in the mood for a good summer read, this is it.  I'm not quite sure where to turn to next, as I am still in a frothy mood.  I am quite enjoying D.E. Stevenson's Miss Buncle's Book (thanks to all who suggested it, you were right), but I have also picked up Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl as it looks fun and amusing and just different enough plotwise but similar in feel for a next book.  (And hey, my first-finally-Anne Tyler novel?!).

Weekend Bookishness

It was so hot over the weekend (two record breaking days and one that was one degree shy) I found it hard to even enjoy bookshopping.  Almost anyway.  I must not have felt too inspired (or was just overwhelmed by the idea of walking home in the heat with a bag of new books maybe), but two bookstore visits netted only three books.  Hard to believe.  I guess it was the heat that addled my brain.

I had a coupon, however, so I couldn't walk away without at least one book, so I settled on Kate Moore's Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women which I have been eyeing since it first came out in hardcover.  It is not a subject entirely new to me as I listened to an audio book several years ago called The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum.  It was really riveting and they touched upon the women who worked in these radium factories.  I can't wait to start reading this one.

I spent a nice chunk of cool time in my favorite used bookstore.  There were a few other books I had in hand but in the end I choose just two.  I have a couple of Paul Gallico's books, but when I saw this and the charm of the design I had to have it.  I actually bought it with the story content unknown (other than sampling the first page).  It's such a pretty little book, Love of Seven Dolls.  And now I have the description:

"A young girl called Mouche is about to throw herself into the Seine, when her attention is attracted by a voice. It turns out to be the voice of a glove puppet, called Carrot Top. She then meets Reynard the fox, Gigi, Alifanfaron, Dr Duclos, Madame Muscat and Monsieur Nicholas. The story is about her relationship with the seven puppets and their grim puppetmaster, Capitaine Coq, and what happens when she joins their travelling show."

It sounds kind of fairy tale-ish and will be a fun, quick read.  Apparently it was the inspiration for a film called Lili and the musical Carnival.  Going by reviews it seems the two adaptations are fairly different than the story in the book, but it will be fun to explore them nonetheless.

The other book I had in hand, set back and then picked up again (and there was another by the same author I wish I had bought as well--isn't that always the case--regret for not buying something).  I was thinking that I had read something by Patrick white, but maybe I only own a book or two by him.  Maybe this last unfinished novel is not the best place to start, but I liked the sound of the story so I will tuck it away for just the right moment.

"Two children are brought to a wild garden on the shores of Sydney Harbour to shelter from the Second World War. The boy's mother has died in the Blitz. The girl is the daughter of a Sydney woman and a Communist executed in a Greek prison. In wartime Australia, these two children form an extraordinary bond as they negotiate the dangers of life as strangers abandoned on the far side of the world."

Have you read him and if so where should I start with his work?  The book I left behind is Happy Valley.  The up side for showing restraint in my book buying this last weekend is I have saved a little money for the next book buying expedition.

I did manage to finish two books from that pile and I made inroads on several others including finishing the first section of Edith Wharton's Custom of the Country.  Undine Spragg is now married and honeymooning in Italy.  I only wonder how a newlywed can be in Italy with her love and be so unhappy?  Only Undine!

I'm contemplating my next reading prompt and deciding on my summer reading project, but more about those later this week.

May 25: Long Weekend Reading Notes

Here's  my (long-yay) weekend reading pile.  I am hoping to (finally) finish the Susan Hill book of essays.  I have been meandering my way through, but I think I am ready to finish the last few essays.  It was last month's prompt.  Merry Hall, this month's prompt, will also be dipped into this weekend, but it has been staying in my gym locker (poor Beverley Nichols hates being cooped up there, he would have prefer to be outside in a garden).  And I have already started my list of possibilities for next month's prompt!

Light of Paris has been my comfort read and I am thoroughly enjoying it.  I hope to finish it as well.  I love both the heroines-they are very likable and I see many habits and shortcomings and personality traits in myself as I do in them.  I am going to have to find something equally escapist as a follow up to it.

Do you see Edith Wharton there?  Undine Spragg has been languishing (and fuming for being so ignored) on my night table.  I started it (I am embarrassed to say) at the start of the year.  I didn't want to set it aside, as I was really loving the book (if not Undine so much) but I just was not managing to squeeze it in.  Then earlier this week I grabbed it and tucked it into my bookbag and it has been going with me everywhere this week.  I find Undine maddening, but I have to say I am also sort of mesmerized by her.  She is so full of herself.

Charlotte Bingham's memoir is an easy breezy read and also a library book which will have to go back in just a week so I hope to make a very big dent in it this weekend (and then move on to the second book of her memoirs--also a library book and also due soon (no pressure there). 

Kristin Harmel's The Room on Rue Amelie has floated to the (well bottom in the picture) top of the pile--I have to start it this weekend in order to finish it by book club night.

And drum roll please, I have chosen D.E. Stevenson's Miss Buncle's Book for my Persephone readathon book!  I had pretty much decided on it before I read all your comments, but now I am sure I made a happy choice!  It seems well regarded and just the ticket for a long summer weekend.  Although the readathon is next weekend I am getting a head start now.

I'd say that is a pretty good weekend lineup.  I have a graphic novel as well, and there will be a chance of a movie or two.  It is promising (threatening more like) to be very hot and sticky so I will be wherever I can find a cool place to read.  I hope you are also enjoying a long weekend, or at least a very bookish one, too!

Mini Persephone Readathon: June 1-3

I tend to shy away from readathons and readalongs in general as I am hopeless at actually achieving the goal of reading straight through for 24 hours or in a timely manner if it is a weeklong or monthlong event.  I love the idea of reading with others in tandem--it does help me stay focused.  Unfortunately I am a really slow reader and a haphazard one, too.  I tend to read according to whim and mood, which is a good thing but lately I more often just dip into books rather than pick one up and read straight to the end.  It's become a bad habit, which I am trying to break myself of (at least to the crazy degree I have let it go).  

That said, one of the things I wanted to do this year was read more Viragos and more Persephones.  So, this is a perfect kick start.  Jessie at Dwell in Possibility is hosting a Mini Persephone Readathon June 1-3.  I have read one Persephone and two Viragos so far this year.  A little thin for what I had hoped for, but there is still time and while I am not likely to read an entire Persephone novel in one weekend, I can choose one now and read along in spirit.  If I start reading in earnest now I might manage a good chunk next weekend.  So, now is the task pleasure of picking a Persephone to read.

I had a quick look at my Persephone piles and thought I would pick five that jumped out at me (only five?  I know!).  I may change my mind but here are the five I am thinking about and must now decide on just one.

Heat Lightning by Helen Hull -- "The plot is simple: Amy Norton comes home for a week’s visit to her hometown in Michigan (the town is unnamed but must owe a lot to Albion, where Helen Hull grew up): ‘Now that she was back in the town of her childhood, standing on a corner across from the village triangle of green, a small pyramid of luggage at her feet, Amy’s one clear thought, over the fluttering of unimportant recognitions, was “Why on earth have I come?'"

Miss Buncle's Book by D.E. Stevenson -- "Barbara Buncle, who is unmarried and perhaps in her late 30s, lives in a small village and writes a novel about it in order to try and supplement her meagre income.  ...mostly this is an entirely light-hearted, easy read, which can be recommended unreservedly to anyone looking for something undemanding, fun and absorbing that is also well-written and intelligent."

Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins -- "Harriet is based on the 1877 'Penge Murder Mystery’, the death by starvation of a wealthy young woman called Harriet Richardson, who had led a protected life because her very limited intelligence meant that her mother kept her at home in the belief that she would never be able to lead a normal existence. But one day she has the misfortune to meet an attractive, unscrupulous young man who decides to marry her for her money."

House-Bound by Winifred Peck -- "The story never moves out of middle-class Edinburgh; the satire on genteel living, though, is always kept in relation to the vast severance and waste of the war beyond."

Saplings by Noel Streatfeild -- "...her tenth book for adults, is also about children: a family with four of them, to whom we are first introduced in all their secure Englishness in the summer of 1939. 'Her purpose is to take a happy, successful, middle-class pre-war family - and then track in miserable detail the disintegration and devastation which war brought to tens of thousands of such families,' writes the psychiatrist Dr Jeremy Holmes in his Afterword."

They all sound good, but choosing is always so hard.  So, the inevitable questions.  Have you read any of these?  Will you be joining in and if so, which Persephone are you going to read?

Sight by Jessie Greengrass

When I first started reading Jessie Greengrass's Sight I was so impressed that I was hoping if nothing else it would make it to the shortlist of the Women's Prize for Fiction, which happily it has.  The novel is unusual in that so much of it seems to take place internally in the narrator's mind, so this is a story without much action, but it is thoughtful and elegantly told nonetheless.  Interspersed with her thoughts and reflections are bits of medical history which at first seem a little incongruous and as if the author is wandering off a different storytelling path entirely.

The novel is separated into three sections and one interlude and the medical bits differ from each other yet upon further reflection they actually work quite nicely with the narrator's story enhancing it and shedding a kind of light on what is happening in her mind and in her life. 

The story moves around in time so her reflections on events aren't strictly linear, but they eventually mesh into a cohesive story that is like a mosaic of colorful pieces creating one larger whole.  I think ultimately this is a story of mothers and daughters, yet it is also a story about looking inside and seeing--not just literally but figuratively as well--seeing to understand.

The narrator, an unnamed woman going through some inner turmoil, is expecting her second child at the outset of the story.  But the story goes back in time with her reflecting on meeting her partner, Johannes, and her struggle with the decision whether to have a child or not.  She has just lost her mother to illness and is grieving for her, trying to put her life back in order.  She reflects on her childhood and the summers she spent with her grandmother, her mother's mother, who was a psychoanalyst.

So these are some of the elements of her life that are swirling about, all of them world shifting--life and death, marriage and children, loss and new beginnings.  Each life event quite momentous in its way.  So it makes sense that the stories interwoven in the narrative, scientific medical shifts in world history offer a more cerebral reflection on the way we see the body and mind.  Emotional disruptive events on one side and more thoughtful reasoning events on the other.  They may feel a little incongruous at first but they are also complementary in their way, too. 

Rontgen's work with the X-ray comes at the time she is dealing with the death of her mother.  After all the upheaval of caring for her the narrator is left with time to fill and she spends hours in the library reading about Rontgen and the discovery that we can see inside the body. 

"I began to believe that if I could see how these two events fitted together, the way that simultaneity tied them, then perhaps I might see also through the lens the fame on which my own life had been constructed, its underlying principle, or how it was that I should be considering motherhood when it seemed that I had barely altered from unhappy adolescence."

She was barely into her twenties when her mother fell ill and she had to turn all her attention to her mother.  It is Freud and his daughter Anna who was also not just caregiver of sorts for her father but also his case study for his own work that sheds light on her relationship with her mother and particularly with her grandmother.  As a child she would spend her summers with her and took to daily journaling (or her version of it) like her grandmother in order to try and outgrow her childhood. It is the last section that for me was the most evocative with John Hunter's medical experiments in human anatomy and his desire to perform a caesarean operation in the 1700s that paralleled so vividly the narrator's own pregnancy.

I wasn't quite sure about it as I was reading but now that I have finished it all seems to come together nicely as a whole and a different an unusual reading experience.  How perfectly the medical stories peel back the skin and even look into the mind in a way that evokes in an almost visceral way the same introspection that the narrator is undergoing.  What I found most relatable was the grief she felt at the start of the story.  Greengrass captures so perfectly that feeling of being at swim when someone close is dying.  After losing my own father last fall it really resonated with me in such a real and truthful way.  I can see where this form of storytelling might not be for every reader, but It was a memorable read for me.

Teaser Tuesday: Coronet Among the Weeds

This memoir from 1963, Coronet Among the Weeds, is kind of crazy.  It was written by Charlotte Bingham when she was only twenty looking back at her (and at twenty not so very far back) debutante years.  Charlotte Bingham has had a rather long career as a very prolific novelist of mostly historical and romance novels along with work in television including the famous Upstairs Downstairs. 

She comes from an illustrious family, and kind of a colorful one at that.  Her father was a Baron (she is an "Honourable") and a secret MI5 member who happened to write detective novels and her mother was a playwright.  They were a literary family and it sounds like Bingham's youth was filled with interesting escapades that she has written about in a series of memoirs.  The third one MI5 and Me: A Coronet Among the Spooks has only just been released and it is that latter book that caught my eye and put me on to the first two. 

I suspect the books can be read in any order, but I do like my books tidy so I am starting with the first.  I have a feeling that it is not all that common for such a young woman (especially in the 60s) to not only have a memoir published but for it to be reviewed enthusiastically by not only the London Sunday Times but also The Times Literary Supplement, blurbs by both fill the entire back cover.  The first paper notes that "the personality revealed in 150 burbling pages is droll, intelligent, and attractive."  And as for the TLS calls the book "short, quick, genuinely funny."  Who knows, maybe it helped to have a father and mother who were a Lord and Lady and whose family can be traced back to the year 1273!

In any case the book is very amusing and if you are looking for verisimilitude in your reading, you really can't beat a book about growing up as a deb in the London of the Swinging Sixties written by someone who lived it.  If it was a movie I could picture the heroine narrating her story directly to the camera and then flashing back into the stories she relates--a little bit kooky and wry, charming but with a big splash of 1960s psychedelic color.

The book is written in a very breezy, chatty style as though she is telling you these stories face to face.  As the London Sunday Times describes it--burbling!  When Charlotte left school she went to Paris with a friend and stayed with a French family.

"As soon as I did speak a little French, I started to go to French dances, but I didn't have much success with Frenchmen as long as they knew I was English.  They weren't keen on English girls.  Luckily I didn't look very English, because I had one grandfather who was French, so the often got let in for something they hadn't bargained for.  But they couldn't stand it for long.  So I wrote myself a French dance-type conversation, timed it to last half an hour and learnt it off by heart.  It turned out to be a jolly good thing.  I'd just dance away quite happily having this conversation, then I'd change partners and start all over again.  They all said what a marvellous accent I had and you'd never think I was English, and I'd tell them about this French grandfather of mine, and they'd say, ah, that explained everything.  They even thought I was witty."

She cracks me up.  This is definitely on the frothy and light side and the fun comes from the stories rather than the prose, but I am curious to see how the next two books compare.

A Baby's Bones By Rebecca Alexander

Sage Westfield, Rebecca Alexander's protagonist in the recently released A Baby's Bones reminds me of Alaskan sleuth Kate Shugak.  I was first introduced to Kate last fall.  I'm not sure what it is about Sage, and maybe it is only peripherally that the two women are alike, but the two characters are reminiscent of each other.  They have a very similar spirit of independence, both has a cerebral approach to the mystery at hand and the two women are not what we normally expect to see in a traditional mystery.

Kate is petite but a force to be reckoned with.  She is a former D.A. investigator who has moved home to the National Park in Alaska to be closer to her Aleut roots.  She is methodical and precise in how she orders her life and pretty fearless.  Sage also has a slightly unconventional background.  Her father is not just an Isle of Wight islander, but a West-Wighter coming from a tiny hamlet called Five Houses.  Her mother is from Kazakhstan rendering Sage's features exotic to the point that no one believes she is a native of the island.  Her wide cheekbones and almond shaped eyes hint at her Turkic heritage.  And like Kate, Sage has only recently returned to the island.  Educated as an archaeologist it is work on a local excavation which will involve her in a centuries old murder mystery.  And one other thing about Sage and her personal life . . . she is very pregnant and very single having fallen for a man with (unknown to her at the time) a wife and children.

Sage has been called in to excavate a Tudor era well that had been filled with Medieval rubbish.  The family living in the historical manor house had only wanted to build an extension on their home but had to have an archaeological survey done before they could begin their work.  What had been assumed would be simply a very conventional and ordinary dig turns out to unearth more than just a few pieces of broken pottery.  It is only the start of a series of problems.  Especially when Sage and her two students find bones in the rubbish.  The bones appear to belong to a woman and a baby and they have not been recently buried there.  It still seems as though it might be simple and very standard work of pulling up the finds and noting them and then filling the well back in, but very curious things begin to happen.  It doesn't help that the manor house already has a  number eerie stories and a few myths attached to its long history.

This is a dual narrative novel, two stories separated by centuries told in parallel.  Sage's story is set on the Isle of Wight today but interspersed with her excavation and the drama surrounding her work and life in the Manor are diary entries and daily accounts written by the steward of the 16th-century Lord Banstock, the previous (hundreds of years removed) owner.  Vincent, the author of the accounts is the bastard brother of the Lord of the Manor, so he has an insider's and family view of the inhabitants of the manor and island.

The story is tinged with elements of the supernatural with the stories surrounding the manor and the feeling of dread contemporary residents and visitors have.  There are eerie wails and sicknesses attached to the house.  Are there really ghosts, or is it just stories and our imaginations filling in the blanks?  The diary entries flesh our some of the history and backstory so the reader gets more details yet follows Sage as she investigates the history of the manor and tries to find out who the bones might have belonged to and why they ended up in a well and not in a proper burial plot. 

All the elements work really well together and both storylines are absorbing.  Of course it is Sage who really pulls the story off.  She is smart and likable but also very human and her situation shows how messy life can be even for someone as savvy as an academically minded 21st century woman.  I do hope this is only the first book in what has lots of potential for a continuing story.  Thanks to Titan books for sending this my way.  Every so often a surprise will come in the mail from them and this author has been a happy discovery for me.

May 18: Weekend Reading Notes

Did you catch the first episode of Little Women on PBS's Masterpiece Theater?  I had the time wrong so only caught the last few minutes of the first episode but thank goodness for streaming media as I was able to watch it later in the week online.  Whether it was truly like they depicted it or not, it felt very real to me.  I was impressed and really loved the adaptation.  I loved the novel when I was little but when I reread it a few years back as an adult I liked parts of it very much but was put off by the overly moralizing tone of it. I realize Louisa May Alcott was writing for a particular audience at a particular time so it is not surprising, but I was a little jarred by it.  I wonder if I should try it yet again or leave it as a happy childhood memory and just enjoy the film.   I'll read this and then reassess my opinion!

Of course it made me want to read some other book with a similar setting/time period, so I might have a browse at my bookshelves.  I did pull out a book by Kaye Gibbons I had never read that at least touches upon that era, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon.  Many years ago I binged on her work and I think I wouldn't mind revisiting it now.

I guess you can tell what I like to read.  For once I have read most of the books on this list.  Actually it is a little curious really, as I didn't think I tended to like the 'supernatural', but then maybe I just think of these books as being ghost stories (which I love).  The few I have not are totally new to me, so I am off to check them out now.

Speaking of mysteries the nominees for the Anthony Awards have been announced.  I have read one (the Jane Harper) and have another couple my reading pile (the Anthony Horowitz and nonfiction by Mattias Bostrom).  I can see I really need to read Attica Locke as her book (previous books,too) keeps popping up all over the place.  I wonder if it matters if you read her books out of order?  And the book is also being adapted to TV!

I love Shirley Jackson and need to get back to her books (so many books and authors I need to get back to, you know how that goes!).  I see that a "psychological thriller" is being filmed about her.  How interesting.  Not just a film adaptation of her work, but of her life? 

I'm not sure if I have ever heard of the Indies Choice and E.B. White Read-Aloud Award before?  It is an award voted on by independent booksellers, however, so I am all for it.  The 2018 awards have been announced and pretty much all the awards for adult literature are either on my radar or on my reading pile.  Nudge, nudge.  I know I need to read these and I want to read them.  Send more free time please.

I need to do more of this!  (I think that is the case for some of those award winning books that I mean to read but are maybe just a little outside that comfort zone).

This podcast on Agatha Christie sounds interesting and I think I need to add it to  my 'listening list'. 

More short stories!  The O. Henry Award winners have been announced and I will be watching for the collection in book format (I think it comes out in the fall--unless I can track some of them down in their original publications).

So, the wedding of the year is now upon us?  Will you be watching?  I am not really a Royal Family-watcher, but I might have a glance or two out of curiosity.  It's a bit hard to avoid the news anyway. 

Otherwise my weekend will be filled with a movie or two, a podcast or two and a ticket to see Wicked on Sunday.  And then squeezing in whatever reading I can manage in the rest of the nooks and crannies. 

Have a great weekend everyone.

Book Club Read: The Room on Rue Amélie

I think I only mentioned it in passing, but earlier this month I went to the inaugural B&N Book Club (because everyone it seems, even celebrities, has a book club these days).  Their selection was Meg Wolitzer's The Female Persausion, which after an initially uncertain start I ended up quite liking (and I know I am quite behind in writing about the books I have been reading/finishing . . . is it possible to have 'writer's block' as opposed to Writer's Block, which I am not, if you know what I mean . . . but I will get to them eventually).

It was a small group of ladies who met at the local B&N made up of varied ages and backgrounds and book interests.  It's always interesting to hear other reader's takes on a book and I end up noticing things about the story I had not realized I missed.  The discussion took place in their cafe and was just under an hour (perfect for me on a work night).  It sounds as though B&N will be continuing with the book club, but the next selection is not being announced until June 2! 

Everyone enjoyed it so much we decided to hold our own 'interim' discussion before the next big read.  We chose Kristin Harmel's The Room on Rue Amélie as our next read.  I just picked up my copy and it looks quite promising.

". . . this powerful novel of fate, resistance, and family—by the international bestselling author of The Sweetness of Forgetting and When We Meet Again—tells the tale of an American woman, a British RAF pilot, and a young Jewish teenager whose lives intersect in occupied Paris during the tumultuous days of World War II."

I have been a little reluctant of late to pick up stories about the war era (at least that are directly about the war).  I think I've just read so many that I needed a little breather, but hopefully this won't have too much tragedy and heartache.  It seems to have gotten positive reviews and I am in the mood for some good historical fiction, so this might be just the book to read next.  I'll let you know how it goes!

Teaser Tuesday: Merry Hall

Can a book that is pretty darn charming possibly get even more so as the story progresses?  Apparently so if you are Beverley Nichols, the book is Merry Hall, and you are writing about cats!  I have been earmarking pages as I go thinking I really need to share this.  And this.  Oh, and this would be good, too.  But then we come to the end of a chapter (and I typically have been reading a chapter a day--this being my treadmill book) that ends:

"I sat down and meditated on the general impossibility of women."

"Into the room, with great dignity, stalked 'One' and 'Four'.  They had mud on their paws, and the naturally decided to sit on my lap.  They smelt of moss and loam, and they both set up a slow, tranquil purr."

"'Cats,' I thought, 'are best'."

In the next chapter we will learn why."

So, now comes the hard part.  Aside from having to wait until the next day to read said chapter, the whole thing is so charming, how do I pick just one excerpt?  He has a knack for ending one chapter in just such a way that you really want to keep reading and not tuck in your bookmark for the next sitting.  Best to start at the beginning perhaps?

"This book--as you may by now have gathered --is not really a book at all; it is only a long walk round a garden, in winter and summer, in rain and in sunshine, and if it bores you to walk round gardens you will long ago have chucked it aside.  So neither of us need worry."

"But if you would like to go on walking, then this is the moment when we must stop and turn our heads.  For we are being followed."

Let me mention now that both One and Four have been making little appearances in Nichols's narrative.  Curious names, don't you think?  I was a little bewildered at first but the names are growing on me now.  The story goes--Nichols wanted over his lifetime to own a hundred cats and as names can be tricky to bestow on our little furry friends he decided to number them.  So, yes, he began with One.  Unfortunately Two and Three became ill and passed away, but Four seems a pretty sturdy fellow.

I had a chuckle at his quip to friends when they said your cats are following us, just like dogs!

"Which is enraging.  It is not at all extraordinary that a cat should follow you; it merely means you are worth following."

I agree.  Cats are smart and never do something without good reason (or no reason at all maybe but that makes complete sense when we are talking about cats).

Much like the Susan Hill book, this is chock full of wonderfully bon mots!  I could post on it endlessly, but I think it best really to just press the book into your hands and you can enjoy it as much as I am.