Continuing to progress my learning of Italian, I have started to read Agatha Christie's A Murder in Announced in Italian! Although I have not read the novel in English before, I found the juxtaposition of Italian language and quintessentially English placenames and character names highly incongruous and amusing! Why am I posting this... it is… Continue reading Translation: A Murder is Announced, Agatha Christie
Category: Bookblogger
Top Ten Tuesday: May Flowers
The daffodils are out in force, the apple trees in my garden are ablaze with blossoms, new buds are bursting from the trees in the woods opposite. We are truly in the grip of springtime in the UK. We know this because over the course of the long May Day bank holiday weekend we have had blazing sunshine, heavy winds, torrential rain and thunder! So I thought this would be an easy TTT list to compile: of the 3189 books in my Calibre library - How did that number creep so high? Is this a healthy number of books to own? - I was sure there must be dozens, hundreds, with "flower" or similar in the title... but no! It was a real struggle to find them! It is apparently a component of book titles that repels me. Who knew?
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Top Ten Tuesday: Petty Reasons You’ve DNF’d a Book
Good evening and welcome to another TTT. The theme this week is focused on books that we have not finished... not books that we have set aside temporarily or that we have not finished yet but books that we have made a conscious decision not to continue with. This is a tricky one for me as I do not tend to make that decision. There are many books that I have begun, not been gripped by and put aside only to return to it later and end up loving it! These might be books that I am not emotionally ready for, or I am too tired for, or which are too close to a particular issue at that moment... or a book might be too similar to a few other books you've read recently and you're just craving something different! There are some examples however, and let's look at a few of the reasons I may have chosen or perhaps at least been tempted not to continue with a book. I'll leave it to you to decide whether they are petty or not!
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Top Ten Tuesday: Books Read During Hiatus
Life chose to become complicated and difficult for a little while back there! Following on from the stress of the landlord giving us notice to quit, the process of finding a new house, deciding to investigate buying rather than renting, negotiating mortgages and making offers and putting together deposits and instructing solicitors... all took some time and generates some stress. And alongside that, my dad's health took a rapid down hill plunge. He had been suffering from cancer for some years but it had spread from prostate to bowel to bones. In the space of ten days he went from being active enough to be considering going for a drive to unable to manage the stairs to bedbound and then died. Over the last couple of months, I have been travelling up and down to Kent, a four and a half hour trip at the best of times, to initially visit and provide and arrange care, to support my mum when he died, to sort out funeral arrangements and the will... Some things had to give and for a while, the blog was one. There were things that I did keep going to maintain my own mental health though: I kept up my Italian lessons and completed DuoLingo's course, I kept up my running and of course, I kept up my reading.
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Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Quick Reads/Books to Read When Time is Short
Well, it has certainly been a week this week: we have just had the landlord around for a property check, during which he chose to give notice to quit the property by the end of May... which feels very close at the moment. And there are not that many homes available in the limited areas in which we are looking in order to avoid disrupting our daughter's schooling too much... And today, out of the blue, I discover that my boss has been suspended pending investigations... So, the chance to reflect on short book, books to devour in a day, or when time is short, feels rather fitting! Many thanks to Jennifer @ FunkNFiction.com and Angela @ Reading Frenzy for submitting this topic. I may not have managed to keep all of these under 150 pages but the Claire Keegan's - real gems of tiny novellas - are so short my average is probably about that level! And there are a couple of series here, all of which fit the criteria really... so I have only added the first book in each series.
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Top Ten Tuesday: New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2023
Is it my imagination or are the days starting to stretch out a little bit again? It's still pitch dark on my morning runs but I don't feel that I am both driving to and home from work in the darkness! And this week's theme is a lovely one, a celebration of the books I have read in 2023 - which already seems a very long time ago and we have not yet finished January! - from authors I have not come across before. We all have those familiar favourite authors, don't we? Those writers who we just know we will feel welcome and comfortable and familiar with, even in a new book - and that is a wonderful thing! And alongside that, it is a joy to uncover a new author whom we might also fall in love with, possibly with a weighty backlist to enjoy, potentially with a future of more books to come. It is also a feature that I track on my reading spreadsheet - I am such a geek! - so I can easily share my full list of books by new-to-me authors, of which there were 22.
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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Meant to Read in 2023 but Didn’t Get To
Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Previous Top Ten Tuesday Topics 7th November: Book Titles That Would Make… Continue reading Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Meant to Read in 2023 but Didn’t Get To
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Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Goals for 2024
As a mood reader, bookish goals area a sort of movable feast - an inchoate mass of vague ambition and hopes. Will I be concerned if I don't meet these goals and ambitions? Not a bit! Is reading a chore or a joy? Definitely a joy for me, and a slavish adherence to goals neither motivates nor inspires me! If they do for you, then I am happy for you but it feels too rigid for me.
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Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the First Half of 2024
The upcoming year holds promise with several anticipated book releases from beloved and potential new favorite authors. From Kiley Reid's "Come and Get It" to Natasha Pulley's "The Mars House," a diverse array of intriguing plots and characters await. The year promises to be a great one for readers!
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Top Ten Tuesday: Favourite Books of 2023
Birnam Wood is on the move... Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned. But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker - or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?
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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Hope Santa Brings/Bookish Wishes
Merry Christmas everybody! Or whichever holiday you celebrate and observe! For me, I love Christmas time. We have our tree up - and have had for two weeks now. We have wreaths on the door and around the mantleplace, lights up sort of everywhere inside and out, presents waiting to be wrapped. Batches of mince pies, gingerbreads which we decorate on Christmas Eve, chocolate crackle cookies, heavy fruit cakes that have been steeped in alcohol for two years now, pannetone, pudding, yule log. Christmas does seem to have become very food-oriented! And of course it is a bookish holiday. Books as gifts. Books set around Christmas time - yes I have just finished Hercule Poirot's Silent Night and have The Christmas Appeal and a Christmas Jigsaw Murder lurking around on my TBR. Old recipe books dug out. And bookish Christmas trees!
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Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My Winter 2023-2024 To-Read List
Some of you may have noticed that I have missed a couple of Top Ten Tuesday posts recently - which is unusual for me - and also that I've become very much behind in my reviews - which is distinctly not unusual by this point in the year! Things had got a little on top of me recently, I have to say - my father's illness, my daughter's needs, my own health (a burst ear drum, minor in the big picture!) And then an Ofsted Inspection on top of everything else, with mock exam marking... But, I am back and let's return to the books with the regular seasonal tbr update. As always, please bear in mind that I never really have a to-be read list, nor do I really plan my reading at all. I am - as I have said before - totally a mood reader. But, at the moment these are the books that I might get around to reading over the winter. Let's start with my current read: the gentle, familiar milieu of Sophie Hannah's Poirot in a Christmas setting, and the final parts of the Children of Blood and Bone...
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Top Ten Tuesday: Reasons Why I’m Thankful for Books
This is a lovely sweet topic - a nod towards Thanksgiving in the USA - and pretty useful considering I am in the midst of Ofsted inspection at work. Day one is done; day two still to go! So, as I assume that we all are readers - I mean, who else would be attracted to a blog entitled The Book Lover's Sanctuary? - we are all grateful for books in our lives... but can I enunciate why?
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Top Ten Tuesday: Mainstream Popular Authors that I Still Have Not Read
This theme asks us to look at and reflect on those super-popular - possibly over-hyped? - novels that we have not yet read. In fact I have just begun reading Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi which I have heard so much good about and would otherwise have been on this list. And where better to look for 'mainstream popular authors' than that bastion of populism, booktok? So these are popular booktok books that I have not yet read... but books that do actually appeal to me...
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Top Ten Tuesday: Book Titles That Would Make Great Newspaper Headlines
This is a fun little topic! There are some parallels between headlines and book titles I suppose: they both summarise a longer text, intending to grab the attention of the reader in a crowded market, neither can reveal too much or give spoilers... But there is a great tradition - certainly in the more lurid redtops in the UK - of inventive and over-the-top sensationalist headlines.
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Top Ten Tuesday: Hallowe’en Freebie
It is in fact Hallowe'en today! And I do love Hallowe'en! There is something delicious about giving into the spookier elements of life, reminding ourselves that there are more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies (to misquote Shakespeare). A time when it is ok to acknowledge and to revel in some of our primal and atavistic fears - whether that be werewolves, witches or vampires. And alongside the date, as the clocks fell back an hour last weekend, and the nights are drawing in, the weather turning unsettled and stormy and the river beside which our house sits swells and threatens to break its banks again, we are really in autumn - that season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. This week's TTT theme is a Hallowe'en Freebie and I have certainly been casting my net around for chilling books to read - it seems a long time since I read a really chilling ghost story so I am genuinely looking forward to perusing your recommendations.
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Top Ten Tuesday: Atmospheric Books
This week's TTT theme is a list of atmospheric books - and Jana gives us the following explanations of what we might understand by that term. The Novelry explains this concept as: “A novel feels atmospheric when the setting and the narrative are deeply involved with one another; when characters and plot are physically embedded in their surroundings, and a near-tangible mood lifts from the pages and wraps itself around the reader.” Study.com explains that, “The atmosphere is how a writer constructs their piece to convey feelings, emotions, and mood to the reader. The atmosphere in literature might be tense, fast-paced, mysterious, spooky, whimsical, or joyful and can be found in poetry, stories, novels, and series.” Okay, yes I get those definitions... for me, a book is atmospheric when our feelings as a reader are brought to the fore - often by a genuine investment in setting and sense of place, where the setting is used to contribute to and enhance the experience. But it can also come across from characterisation, language and any other tool in the writer's toolkit. And the very real difficulty for me is narrowing this down to just ten... atmosphere is possibly
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Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Weather Events in the Title/on the Cover
As the weather starts to close in, it is perhaps telling that this week's theme focuses on weather events in the titles of books - and my choices below seem to be distinctly autumnal and wintry with a preponderance of snow, storm and wind!
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Top Ten Tuesday: Reading Goals I Still Want to Accomplish Before the End of the Year
This is a little bit of a milestone: my first TTT as a fifty-year old... half a century. Realising that I pre-date the internet, Space Invaders, the Rubik's cube, Jaws and Concord was an eye-opnener. And realising that those people who I've always seen as 'old' were actually much younger than I am now is mind-boggling. And as my Dad is in the final stages of terminal cancer and is only 26 years older than I am now ... that's a humbling thought! Will my taste in reading suddenly change? Suddenly my TBR fill up with books about slippers and geraniums..? I doubt it! Anyway, this week's theme is to consider what goals I might want to achieve by the end of the year - those remaining three months.
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Top Ten Tuesday: Secondary/Minor Characters Who Deserve Their Own Book
I am not entirely sold on this topic: there have been too many cheap re-hashes of existing novels, claiming to be original by being from a different point of view. I might sigh dramatically in despair as I point out Suzanne Collins' A Ballad of Songbird and Snakes, or E. L. James... or for that matter Disney's Cruella and Maleficent... That said, when done well, when the right character is chosen, we get gems like Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. And the propulsion of a minor character into their own novel is the identifying quirk of the Dublin Murder Squad series by Tana French. So, who might I put forward?
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Top Ten Tuesday: Books on My Fall 2023 To-Read List
I do enjoy these seasonal to-be-read lists, even if I consider myself in no way bound by them. Which is just as well really: looking back at the Summer To-Read list, I managed to read just one, a single solitary one, of them! Do I feel any shame? Hell no - no one should ever feel shame for what they read, how they read, how much they read or how often they read! As my mood shifted and changed over the Summer - and it was a little hectic! - so to did the things I fancied reading. I read what served a purpose at the time and that was great! So with that in mind, what vague notional TBR do I have for the coming season as the nights draw in, the mornings grow darker, the temperatures drop and leaves turn...?
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Top Ten Tuesday: Books Awaiting Reviews
This week's TTT is one that I would want to devote more time and thought to than I realistically think I have available right now, so instead, as I am falling behind in my reviews, these are the books that I have read most recently and which still need to be reviewed. Perhaps this will generate some accountability for me as well! Therefore, this week, nothing connects these novels except for the fact that something about them had piqued my interest...
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Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Defied My Expectations
The new school year has now begun and summer is over: my daughter has had her first day at her new school, a slew of paperwork has been thrown at me at work, another heatwave has (somewhat gently) gripped the UK. And the backlog of reviews on my blog is continuing to grow: finishing two books last night was both satisfying and a little overwhelming! This week's theme is also one that deserves a little thought: books that defied my expectations, Submitted by Sia @ everybookadoorway.com, which is glossed as books you thought you would didn’t like that you loved, books you thought you’d love but didn’t, books that were not the genres they seemed to be, or in any other way subverted your expectations! Sometimes, it's great to get a book that does exactly what you expect: a favourite author, a favourite genre, a title like The Kaiju Preservation Society or The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires which really do give you a heads up about the content. But this post celebrates those that unsettled and defied my expectations.
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Rome 2023 (Part Two)
I am so incredibly proud of our daughter: for all the anxiety and nerves prior to the flight, she seemed to feel completely at home in Italy almost from the first day, certainly the second. Nowhere where we ate questioned her wish for plain pasta - even if I wish we could have got some more protein into her! I was recording 15,000 - 25,000 steps a day here, so her little legs have kept up so well and she has been incredibly good company. Yes, once or twice, we had minor meltdowns; yes, our days were shorter than otherwise; yes, there were some things like the Vatican that we thought would be too overwhelming. But she has been interested and engaged and happy throughout... and now is slightly annoyed at my telling her how proud I am of her.
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Top Ten Tuesday: Bookshops in Rome I Am Excited For
Benvenuti a The Book Lovers' Sanctuary, questa settimana aggiorno il blog da Roma! Well, technically I am not in Rome yet: I fly out tomorrow and am scheduling this to post on Tuesday! I am currently experiencing that Christmas Eve feeling: I think everything is ready, I am looking forward to tomorrow, I am anticipating that something will have been forgotten! Tickets printed? Check. Currency? Check. New clothes? Check, and it will be a change to wear clothes that fit - apparently I am a 28 inch waist now, who knew? - and oh my god my first pair of loafers! So Italian. So freaking comfortable! So these are the ten bookshops I might be most interested in seeing... such a shame that we only have 6 days there! And whilst I may have taught myself some Italian - enough to have a good go at a GCSE exam and sort of get the gist of an Italian newspaper - I have no real concept of Geography or where these might be in relation to each other!
The Book Lovers' Sanctuary 
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