I’m reading The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods and enjoying it so far. Also still working on Bleak House.

Vee - North Woods by Daniel Mason was my community's One Read book for this year. I read every word of it, which was no small feat for me, because I didn't really enjoy it. If you feel you missed important parts because you fell asleep, well, I felt like I was missing something the whole time I was reading the book.

Thanks Kathy. The parts that I remember I found rather unsettling, bodies in the cellar, apple pips sprouting from 'innards'. I had wondered if it was chosen because it was read during Halloween? I haven't come across this writer before.

You have me chuckling, Kathy T. I think I will cross that book off my possible book list.

I started History of the Rain by Niall Williams for my book club. This book was chosen because we lost a friend and extraordinary human being in a tragic accident. He was an avid reader and had organized a book group of his rowing teammates from university. This was the last book they read together and one of the men quoted it at his funeral.

I'm listening to The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff as I walk and do mindless chores around the house. An Indian woman's husband abandons her and the village gossip is claiming she did away with him and has gotten away with it. Then, other women in the village come to her asking her to help them do away with their abusive husbands. Oh, dear!

Merryworld, I am so sorry for the loss of your friend. Niall Williams is a wonderful writer, altho I haven't read that particular book. What a lovely tribute to your friend to have him quoted at his funeral.

I'm still reading The Gathering Storm by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. It is a 600-page pocketbook, the print is quite small, and its predecessor was written five years ago, so it's pretty slow-going. I'm sorry to say I'm disappointed in the book. I remember devouring the series and ordering from Book Depository, so I didn't have to wait so long. This one skips from character to character every few pages.

I'm almost exclusively reading downloaded library books now because I can increase the font size. Now I'm struggling both with the print and the story. Bah. humbug!

I'm trying to read When We Were Grownups while waiting for a copy of The Secret Book Society by Madeline Martin from our library. Also listening to The Tiffany Girls which very enjoyable.

I finished The Lost Bookshop this morning, and I really enjoyed it. Thanks, Yoyobon! I can’t think of a synopsis that doesn’t give away parts of the plot, but it’s a very intriguing story with some interesting twists.

Donna

PS - yes, still working on Bleak House. LOL

I finished Paris Revealed and mostly enjoyed it. I wonder how much of the information about places to eat and shop is still relevant, as it came out in 2011, but it did whet my appetite for Paris and give me a handful of places to research further before my trip.

I also read Notre Dame: The Soul of France by Agnes Poirier. It's a short history of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, starting with the 2019 fire and then going back to the beginning. Poirier seems to have started writing it shortly after the fire and the emotions in the first chapter are raw and touching, while the rest of the book is informative even if it is quite short and jumps across years and centuries to touch on important periods in the building's history. After finishing it, I added Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris to my TBR list. Tempting as it is to carry the book with me to Paris and be seen romantically reading it in cafés, I think I will just download the ebook from Project Gutenberg ;-)

We tried the places to eat in the Madrid guide books and so did too many others! Long queues waiting to get in to them so we looked elsewhere and found small interesting places to try.

We don't speak Spanish but the obliging waiter pointed to parts of his body to demonstrate the meats on the menu! We all had a good laugh and an enjoyable dinner there!

I just finished The Impossible Fortune, the latest entry in the Thursday Murder Club series. It introduces some new characters in a complicated plot involving Bitcoin. You don't have to know anything about Bitcoin--I don't--to follow the mystery. If you like this series, you will probably enjoy the book. It's more about the various characters and their back stories than anything else. I give it a C+. Making seriously violent criminals amusing is a stretch too far for me.

I have finished The Gathering Storm, finally. It ended much better than it began, although the quick shift in characters continued. This must be the last one because she used a few pages at the end labeled P.S. and told what happened to all of them later in life. The book ended on the day WWII began for England. I like Cynthia H-E a lot and have read all her Bill Slider mysteries as well as the army series. She is a prolific writer.

Carolyn, I like her writing, too. Unfortunately my libraries don’t have many of her books. I’m currently reading The Black Pearl. I have a ways to go to WWII!

Donna

msmeow, my library only has her Slider books. I can't imagine why--they have a lot worse books. I've gone on to Jan Karon's My Beloved. It's been a while since her last Father Tim book, too, and while I was exploring Barnes & Noble, I got the new Elizabeth George and Ken Follett books as well. Since the pandemic I've been downloading books from the library and had forgotten how much fun it is to buy them. Expensive, too! Time for me to return to downloading.

I have just finished Ann Cleeves latest Jimmy Perez mystery in her Shetland series. I have to reset as I am thinking of the TV series which is different! As Ginny mentioned, the reader cannot guess the mystery as there are no clues to follow. It is more a story and shows that evil morphs into modern guise as well as the lesser crime of plagiarism. I enjoyed it.

I'm still settling in from my move, so not much reading time lately. But a friend gave me a book that has been perfect for this time in my life. It is Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving by humorist and TV personality Mo Rocca. This is not a read-front-to-back book, but a pick-and-choose series of descriptions of the lives of interesting celebrities and historic figures. I've been enjoying it. So much I didn't know about Thomas Paine (who Mo refers to as a second-tier founding father), Prussia (the obituary of a country), and Elizabeth Taylor (who Mo deeply admires).

We have certainly needed some cozying up here after the latest storm 'Claudia' hit. Not that it was cold, just very wet, windy and dark. The area to the West of us (Welsh border) badly hit by flooding.

Pianos and Flowers by Alexander McCall Smith reached the spot. A collection of short stories built around old and rather murky photos. A mixture of serious and slightly frivolous. I read one a night!

A couple of items from Australia that may interest you. There is a last book in the Phyrne Fisher series by Kerry Greenwood, "Murder in the Cathedral" out now.

There is a translation of "War and Peace" into Australian vernacular! A labour of love apparently.

I realized that Rebecca is the only book by Daphne DuMaurier that I have ever read so I am now reading Jamaica Inn. Good as of 100 pages in but perhaps not as good as Rebecca.

Ann, I watched the TV series about Phyme Fisher but have never read the books. Do you like them?

KathyT, I don't think Thomas Paine was so much a second-tier Founding Father as one whose writings and speech stirred up fervor for American independence. The pamphlet Common Sense is what he is most famous for. He kind of went off the rails later on in life so did not get the adulation that other Revolutionary War-era figures received but was always included in school curriculums in my era.

Ginny, I read the books a while ago and enjoyed them but preferred the Corinna Chapman series. Greenwood stopped the Fisher series for a while then made a time line muddle when she resumed, which her readers pointed out! Upsetting when your readers know more about your characters than you do!

I liked the Corinna books, too, but didn't care for Phryne.

Ginny, none of her books is as good as Rebecca.r

Ginny - You and Mo Rocca agree about Thomas Paine.

Ginny and Carolyn - I agree that Rebecca is a wonderful book. But I did enjoy Jamaica Inn also,

Some of the other books by Daphne du Maurier that I have enjoyed are The Scapegoat (set in France) My Cousin Rachel and The House on the Strand (time travel) and don't forget her short stories.

I also enjoyed almost all the du Maurier novels very much .

I gave up trying to read Kills Well With Others. Although I liked the first book, Killers Of A Certain Age, I could not enjoy/tolerate the sequel.

Thank you for all the helpful replies re Daphne Du Maurier. She certainly is popular. I hope to finish Jamaica Inn today. I'm finding it more brutal and violent than I expected.

I could have finished it last night but wanted to watch the first episode of The American Revolution by Ken Burns. Coincidentally, the series starts with several quotations from Thomas Paine. Funny how things like that happen as we have just been talking about him here.

I revisited an old favourite from my teenage years, Anna frá Stóruborg by Icelandic author Jón Trausti. It's a historical novel, published in the early 20th century and based on real people and events in 16th century Iceland. I find it interesting how reading the same book at different times of one's life feels different. Sometimes an old favourite is a disappointment, and at other times one notices things one didn't on previous reads but still enjoys it, but in a different way. When I first read it and on many subsequent rereads, I was focused on the dramatic love story and the hardships the lovers endured before their happy ending, but while I still enjoyed the story on this read, I was more focused on the language and style and was thinking about how I would love to try to translate this beautiful prose into English.

I was very happy the other day when I found a book by Terry Pratchett that I hadn't previously read: The World of Poo. It's a children's book that's mentioned in one of his Discworld novels as being read by Commander Vimes to his young son and features people and places from the Ankh-Morpork part of the series. As the title suggests, it's scatological in nature, but without being too mucky and is quite funny in places.

Another book I enjoyed was Her Ladyship's Girl by Anwyn Moyle, which seems to have previously been published under the title The Skivvy. Moyle went into service at 16, in the 1930, and lived through a period when conditions for servants were changing in Britain. She worked as a kitchen maid ('skivvy'), lady's maid, housemaid and cook, and ended up as a successful businesswoman. The book is based on her diaries, but reads like a novel and I found it an interesting companion to another, less polished, servant narrative I read a few months ago: Below Stairs, the memoirs of Margaret Powell, who was a servant at a slightly earlier time. I don't know why, but when I was going through my library to record what books I have, I found four books on the subject of service and servants: these two and one more memoir and then a sociological study of the relationship between servants and their employers.

Netla, I have read Monica Dickens books which cover her jobs "in service".

I had a personal glimpse though from the stories my grandmother told me.

She worked from age 13 in a number of middle class houses as she left after a year usually to take a month off to be at home with her mother before getting another situation.

It was hard work but she had some fun too. She learned a few tricks on the job, like how to hide a broken plate (in the middle of a large stack!) as broken china had to be paid for but on the low wage that was impossible!

She said that the servants used to wish the employers had to do their work but was sorry when that happened when the money diminished from the war and taxation. A Duchess had to clean the lavatories in one Stately Home when the cleaners did not turn up for the Home Open Day.

Annpan, when we moved to our small village in the late70's, many of the older families had worked for the local Estate. The men on the farm, in the woods, gardeners, gamekeepers etc. The women had been employed in the 'Big House', the laundry, the green houses and so on. A friend had been nanny to the family's children and married the head woodman. Many of the villages house were let, at peppercorn rents to these people. The last 20 or so years have brought many changes. Many of the houses have been sold-off on the open market, very few men work on the farm and except for a housekeeper I think all the jobs previously be done by women have disappeared. Even the young Lord B no longer lives in the Big House but runs the estate via an agent and lives between London and Bath . . . but then he is an artist and led a wild reckless youth!

I have had Support Workers for over 15 years and they are hard for the Agency who provides them to keep for long!

They have many reasons for working and it is interesting to hear their stories. One paid for the agistment of her horse from her wages and another told me she had worked at a Government House but preferred cleaning lavatories to all the curtseying required!

The library has sent me the new Richard Osman "The Impossible Fortune" so that is my weekend sorted!

What interesting books you all have mentioned. All new to me. Somehow I suspected that life below stairs was nothing like Downton Abbey.

I finished the new Jan Karon book, My Beloved, and was a bit disappointed in it. It has been several years since she wrote a Father Tim book, and either I have changed or she has!

I have now just started the next Miss Julia book in her light-hearted bossy life.

Carolyn, I was wondering about the new Jan Karon. i think I am behind on the series; I think the last one I read was when Dooley got married.

I am currently switching back and forth between a fe books, depending on my mood. right now I am working on Mrs. Endicott’s Splendid Vacatuon by Rhys Bowen, as well as The Keeper of Magical Things by Julie Leong, and the latest Travis Baldree, Brigands and Breadknives.

Annpan, I loved reading Monica Dickens‘ memoirs. I own a copy of One Pair of Feet, about her time as a nurse, and have been looking for a copy of One Pair of Hands, about her time in service, which I found to be the funnier of the two. Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey make it all seem so glossy, but it was often-times foul work, always hard and with long hours and very little gratitude from the people whose households the servants kept in order. I have only read about people who were in service in the 20th century, when modern household appliances were starting to make their work easier, but it must have been so much harder for servants before electrical appliances and gas heating!

I supplemented my income with housework for a while when I was in university - the municipality sent me to the houses of elderly people to clean for them. Most of them were lovely, but a couple of times I met with the attitude that they felt they were above me because I was doing housework, which I find to be a stupid and classist attitude - after all, if it wasn't for me and people like me, they would have been living in their own dirt! I can only imagine how hard it would have been for full-time servants to face this from not only their employers, but even from the upper servants.

Netla, a friend did cleaning for elderly people and some said not to bother, they would rather chat and do their own housework instead!

My grandmother put up with a lot when she worked. The staff would be lent out to other houses for balls, had to work into the small hours, then get up at 6am as usual and asked if they had enjoyed seeing the ball! One employer called her by a French name, smarter apparently!

She did have some good experiences though, being taken to Guernsey on a working holiday and no work expected on Sunday with one other family of Sunday Observers.

Annpan, I had the same experience - some of them just wanted to chat. They were obliged to offer me tea/coffee and snacks, and we would often sit and chat and drink tea for an hour or so, as the permitted housework never took very long and I was allotted 4 hours in each home. I even suspected that some of them did a little cleaning themselves before I came, so as to have more chat time. I sometimes thought to myself that the municipality really should just send out young people to visit the elderly, because some of them were so lonely and I got the impression that having me come and talk to them was the high point of their week.

Thank you for writing about your grandmother - her experiences seem similar to those of Moyle and Powell, with some good employers and some bad.

Netla, the Guernsey holiday was a hoot apparently. She was asked to marry by a local man but refused as she would be away from her family. Just as well as the Channel Islands were occupied by the Nazis and although she was in London for the Blitz, it was better than that experience!

These are such interesting comments. From what you all say, people who are house-bound or disabled need company and socialization as much as household help.

I have a dear friend, not nearby, who has been paralyzed with MS for many years. She has home health aides and is very grateful but she does prefer the ones closer to her age. She says they have more to talk about than the young ones altho she is grateful for all of them. Altho in her case she needs every bit of help she can get.

I finished History of the Rain by Niall Williams and loved it. Humor and tragedy and a hopeful ending. Absolutely beautiful writing, especially the love story between the narrator's parents in the second half of the book.

Not sure what's up next, perhaps time to choose some holiday reading.

I took a break from The Black Pearl (one of the Morland Dynasty books) to read The Seven Rings by Nora Roberts. It’s the third book of the Lost Bride trilogy. The story was interesting enough, but I don’t like her writing style much.

I was going to go back to the Morlands, but an ebook I was waiting for became available yesterday, so I may start it next.

And, yes, I’m still working on Bleak House. Nearly done, hoping to finish by the end of Nov.

Donna

I took a break from the above mentioned books and reread Bridge of Birds, and The Story of the Stone, both by Barry Hughart and am now back to reading The Keeper of Magical Things.

The new James Benn book, A Bitter Wind, came in for me from the library, so I have spent a lot of time reading today. WWII is drawing to an end in this lengthy series I hope he keeps writing. I've really liked his books.

Picked up a second hand copy of Rosamunde Pilcher's Carousel and as soon as I started it I thought "Hang on. Haven't I read this before?" A girl with an arty job and a demanding mother "Why aren't you married, you're on the shelf at 23?" An escape to a beautiful Cornish house, staffed by lovable locals, an artist (although it could have been a hansom farmer or a fisherman) picnics on the beach, walks on the cliffs . . . But no, it was just very similar to a book I read a few months ago. Pilcher is a good descriptive writer. It is just a pity that her plot-lines are so similar.

By contrast Us by David Nicholls is one of those books with then-and-now short chapters. Told by a husband who has arranged a once-in-a-lifetime trip with his rather bohemian wife and difficult teenage son to visit all the major art galleries of Western Europe. The premise of the book is oil and water don't mix. The free spirited artist and a tick-box bio chemist are poles apart in interests and in how to raise a child with rather too much emphasis on 'father-son-relationships' or lack of. Why should parents want to be best friends with their children? The answer wont be found in the book.

Just want to say a quick Happy Thanksgiving to all who are gathering to celebrate today. I hope everyone near and far has a wonderful day.

I finished The Black Pearl (Morland Dynasty) and finally finished Bleak House! Glad to move on to something else after those two very long books.

Donna

Donna - Good for you for staying with those long books. I'm not sure I could have.

I like long books except I keep reading madly to see "and then what happened."

Ginny - I liked Jamaica Inn, though not as well as I liked Rebecca. But my absolute favorite book by Daphne du Maurier has always been Frenchman's Creek.

Maybe it is time for me to read it again.

I am yearning for one of those " can't put it down breakout novels of the year"

(was I supposed to hyphenate that whole phrase ?! lol)