Lunch In Paris by Elizabeth Bard. I found this in my book pantry and decided to give it a try.

The opening sentence : "I slept with my French husband half way through our first date."

Hmm.......intriguing .

yoyo, you keep books in your pantry??

It is a deep, narrow walk-in closet in our lower entryway with shelves top to bottom on three sides. I use the term "pantry" because it does store extra supplies in addition to other things that have no other place to live :0)

I reserve three shelves for books and the rest is for food/ paper supplies/odds and ends etc.

I’m still working on The Boys in the Boat, but like Kathy commented on her book, I’m finding it long and drawn out.

Donna.......perhaps you just need to watch the movie !

A Distant Grave, Sarah Stewart Taylor

LOL, Bon! I finally finished it last night. In my opinion, it could have been a couple of hundred pages shorter. 😁

I’m finally nearly caught up on the Murderbot books. I finished Network Effect and have picked up System Collapse (which I think is the latest book in the series, if not the final one).

I finished Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty and was a bit disappointed. After a very intriguing beginning, it sort of went nowhere ... via the long route. After reading this author's Big Little Lies, which I liked very much, I've hoped to find another book by her that I like as well. But after reading this book and Nine Perfect Strangers, I think I might give up the search. Unless one of you can convince me otherwise, of course. <smile>

I'm about to start Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D Houston. I'll be reading it for book club and already I have a negative attitude simply because it took two people to write it and also because it has a foreword that describes things I need to know to fully appreciate the book. In my opinion, good books don't need forewords and good books hardly ever have more than one author. So, wish me luck and an attitude improvement.

Kathy.......Bonne chance ! Being hog-tied and forced to "enjoy" a book chosen by a group of readers is one of my recurring nightmares !

I'm reading Easeful Death, a new Bill Slider book by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. I really like her books and was delighted to read that she is writing another in her Morland Dynasty series that for some reason her publisher had asked her to discontinue about five years ago. The series starts with the War Between the Roses and continues down through the wars and the centuries with members of the same family until into WWII. I'm assuming the new one will pick up there.

Carolyn, I have cards at two libraries and neither one has many books by CH-E. I really like her books, too.

I’m reading The Ghostway by Tony Hillerman. I’m working on his Leaphorn and Chee series.

Msmeow, my library doesn't have many CH-E books, either, except for the Slider ones. I bought all the Morland Dynasty ones in paperback (there are 36 or them), and my sister read them as I finished them. I think I will donate them to the library in my last will and testament! She has written a lot of non-series books, too, but I've not read many of them--not wanting to have to buy them.

Have I told you all about the young man who came to check that my furnace was working properly last fall? He looked into the living room and said, "I've never seen so many books in my life!" I told him there were more in the den.

Carolyn, you know I am also a great fan of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. If you haven't read her War at Home series, set during WWI, I can thoroughly recommend them as well. I have recently listened to her Ashmore Castle books with pleasure.

I have just finished listening to an ARC of The Cardinal by Alison Weir. She wrote quite a lot of nonfiction history books before veering off into fiction, and this is the first of hers I have sampled. Sorry to say it was a shocker. It was about the life of Cardinal Wolsey and there is plenty of interesting subject matter there. The book was spoiled for me by having too little history and too much emphasis on Wolsey's love for his mistress, and for Henry VIII. The book is full of repetitions of 'I shouldn't be having this affair, it's against the Church's rules, but God gave me these urges, so it must be alright'. He thinks this, says it to her, or she says it to him, ad nauseam. He also fawns over Henry, almost begging for his favour, for the whole book. My recommendation is don't bother.

Not only does Cynthia Harrod-Eagles written many books (none of which I have read . . shame on me) but sends in 'Letters to the Editor' to the 'Telegraph' quite frequently.

I have just finished an enjoyable Kate Atkinson Death at the Sign of the Rook the latest in her Jackson Brody series. KA is a clever writer but don't expect a run-of-the -mill tale of dead body found, neat police work, list of suspects then a tidy denouement. Many characters are introduced, most with no connection to the plot but all with interesting side-lines in the way-of-life as lived by thousands of us in the UK. I find I should read her books in a straight line over a few days, not by picking them up, reading a couple of chapters then coming back to them, as by then I have forgotten who and why. I think the travelling is better than arriving at the destination.

I'm reading The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. It's my first by her. Her writing is very vivid, with beautiful, magical descriptions. The main character, so far, is a 13-year-old girl. She's an orphan and has arrived at a family castle. Everything is perfect so far but we'll see what happens.

PS--Does anyone know how to pronounce 'Goudge'?

ginny ^^^ -- I believe her name is pronounced "goo-j" (difficult to think of a phonetic spelling!) but I am sure vee or someone else will know how it's done. I've been an anglophile all my long life, but am certainly not au courant with all the pronunciations, lol.

I'm happy you have discovered this excellent author! I just finished her trilogy about the Eliot family but have not yet read The Little White Horse. Looking forward to it!

Re Goudge Roxanna sounds about right, so not pronounced as 'gouge' ie when someone tries to remove an eyeball in a painful way.

My first 'adult' book by that author was Island Magic set on the island of Guernsey where EG had lived. Another I enjoyed was Towers in the Mist set in Oxford university in the Elizabethan age.

Kath, I have read the War at Home books. I'd forgotten about them. Vee, interesting that she frequently writes letters to the editor.

I'm now reading The Stolen Letter by Paige Shelton, part of her series set in an Edinburgh bookstore. I've read the first few, off and on, but this one is about to go beyond my incredulity point. Our heroine has just met an older woman who looks just like her and who claims to "come back" every so often, this time as Mary, Queen of Scots.

Enjoying this memoir very much !

“Fiction Ruined My Family had me laughing out loud, which I almost never do, with one jaw-dropping scene after another. On nearly every page there’s some sentence that's so perfect, in an old-school Oscar Wilde/Dorothy Parker sort of way, that it made everything I've ever written or said seem like dull, drunken mumbling.” – Ira Glass, host of This American Life

I finished Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D Houston . It's an OK book and certainly includes good information about what it was like for U.S. citizens of Japanese descent to live in the retention camps during World War II. Although, it is told from a child's viewpoint, as the authors frequently remind us, a viewpoint that may be different than an adult's. I learned a lot though.

The subject matter of Village Affair by Joanna Trollope ( dubbed unfairly Queen of the Aga Sagas) must have been quite dated even when it first came out, some 30 years ago, dealing in part with a naive young artist and mother meeting the spoilt daughter of the village 'squire' and falling for her bohemian charms. The people of the way too charming and pretty country village are shocked by such carrying-on and shun the young woman especially once she casts her husband aside. Trollope 'does' small children well and her setting reminds me of the Cotswold village in which my parents lived for several year.

I read Holmes is Missing by James Patterson, the second in the Holmes, Marple and Poe series. HM&P are private investigators in NYC. It was okay.

Now I’ve started Cathedral by Ben Hopkins. It’s set in Germany in the 1220s and centers around remodeling a cathedral to a design being used in France. Not sure if I will continue. It’s not really grabbing me yet.

Donna

PS - put aside Cathedral to read To Die For by David Baldacci. It’s the third book in his 6:20 Man series.

I'm reading No Reserve by Felix Francis. Somehow, I missed the books written after Dick died and am enjoying catching up on them now, although I do think Dick was the better writer (knowing that Felix helped with the last few of his).

I read Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and found it quite interesting. I didn't understand how a book about writing could be a memoir, but to a large degree, that was the case. The first part of the book describes his childhood, during which his propensity for writing started early and continued to grow. I found this section quite entertaining. In the middle part, he provides lots of advice about writing. As a former technical writer myself, I found myself agreeing with basically all his advice. But I grew tired of it and began skimming until I reached the last part, which went back to traditional memoir, describing the period in his life that included his terrible, near deadly, experience of being hit by a car. Again, the story was well told. And a nice surprise at the end is a list of books that Stephen King had read and liked in recent years. He reads a lot!

Listening to My Friends by Fredrik Backman as I'm out walking my daily route and enjoying it.

After almost finishing How Fiction Ruined My Family, I have become weary of reading about her abysmal life choices and I've tossed it on the DNF pile.

I read On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer. This is a lightly edited version of the hand-written journal that 23-year-old Rick Steves kept during a mostly overland trek across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal in 1978. I just loved it!

I picked up A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland quite by chance at the library and found it was about a 'local' subject. The woman in question is a doctor who works and lives only a few miles from here, in an area covering both the beautiful Wye Valley and the Forest of Dean. Morland had been sorting out her mother's stuff and had come across an old paperback "A Fortunate Man" written in the 60's about a GP who by coincidence worked in the same area as the 'Fortunate Woman' and where Morland herself now lives. She had recognised the area from the b and w photos!

I know neither Morland nor the Dr but my DH used to live in that hill-top village and well-remembers how the locals talked fondly of the 'Fortunate Man'.

The book follows the day-to day work of the 'now' Dr and how far so-called modern medicine has come especially since Covid; not always for the better.

To anyone even though if not from England, it might prove a strong contrast to how local medicine/health care takes place.

I’m reading Murder in an Irish Village by Carleen O’Connor and enjoying it very much.

Donna

I'm reading Before Dorothy by Hazel Gaynor. Its quite interesting!

I have finished The Invitation by Lucy Foley. I didn't like it at first, but it grew on me. It is quite different from other books that I've read by her. This one is set in Spain, going back and forth between the Spanish Civil War and post-WWII.

I've been reading the Hugo nominees lately, but interspersed with that I am listening to The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. By modern standards it is overblown, and the heroine keeps fainting, but it does have its suspenseful moments. I recommend listening rather than reading because the descriptions of landscapes can be dreary to read. I would otherwise be tempted skip them. It is 30 hours long just to listen! At this point I have 12 hours to go.

Our English teacher read us some of The Mysteries of Udolpho to illustrate the kind of novel that Jane Austen parodied in Northanger Abbey, our set exam book. (O-level, Vee!)

We said we preferred it and I have never liked that JA novel and only have it in a collection.

I suppose it was chosen as the heroine was a teenager and we were sixteen then but actually loved dashing Regency heroes.

Annpan, I well remember those O/A level books we had to read for Eng.Lit! Bronté's Jane Eyre and either Mansfield Park/Emma? a year later. Our school was run by nuns and I'm sure had there been RC authors to chose from we would have read those. As it was the poetry section was confined to Gerard Manley Hopkins an impenetrable writer (and Jesuit priest) if ever there was one . . .The Wreck of the Deutschland many many verses long concerning the foundering of a ship carrying nuns, off the Dogger Bank, was mind-boringly dull. Even the teacher was defeated by it and suggested a little light Browning instead!

We were luckier with poetry, I liked TS Eliot and we read Triumphal March as a radio play.

I think we would have liked Mansfield Park. I am watching a doco about JA and was annoyed that it made it appear that Fanny was sent home because she asked her uncle about slavery. Not so!

There is a lot of breast beating these days about things that happened in the past and history gets seen from different angles and perspectives which differ from actualities of the times, I think. Changing the story of an old novel is dishonest IMHO.

So true Annpan. Almost daily we see TV plays/show/programmes where incorrect facts and misinformation are given as the Gospel Truth. A friend has just this afternoon described a production of Macbeth she saw recently where the text had been altered, several of the cast were apparently cross/trans gendered and the costumes bore no resemblance to any known period of history.

I decided to try listening to On The Hippie Trail while on my daily walk . Rick Steve as narrator is not as enjoyable as I'd hoped. His reading cadence is very singsong and the narrative seems like an adolescent wrote it. I suspect it would have been more enjoyable simply read as a book. Four hours of him is getting to be too much !

That makes me smile, yoyobon. The book is a "lightly edited" journal that Rick Steves wrote at age 23, while he was still a piano teacher, and not a writer at all, so if it sounds like it was written as an adolescent, that's not far off. I don't think I would have liked it as an audiobook either. The paper version is full of wonderful photos along with the text, and I mean a LOT of photos. And I will admit, that having done a bit of backpacking around Europe in my own college years, I related to some of his stories. Except his experiences were rougher and more exotic on the Hippie Trail across Asia.

I agree that the book version would have been MUCH more enjoyable. I felt it was not so much that it was his " younger" writing, but that his reading voice is annoying !!

We get smidgens of it when we watch his PBS series ....but four hours of it is waaay too much "chirpy" !

Ha! I didn't know that Rick Steves did his own reading in the audio version. I know what you mean about his voice, so I can imagine it would get on your nerves.

I just finished Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow and enjoyed it very much. Rusty Sabich (the main character in Presumed Innocent) comes out of retirement to defend his fiancee’s son on a murder charge.

Donna

This afternoon I finished Heartwood by Amity Gaige. I was attracted to it because it was about a female State of Maine Warden whose group was charged with finding an Appalachian Trail thru-hiker who had gone missing and was assumed lost in the thick Maine Woods. The thru-hiker was a middle-aged woman, a nurse, who had been hiking for months and was finally near the conclusion of her long endeavor. It was pretty interesting learning how they go about their searches. It got a little weird in the middle, but then I suppose that was almost necessary to make this into a novel. Overall, I liked it.