Classics Club Spin #39, October 2024

 

The latest Classics Club Spin has been announced. To join in, I choose twenty books from my classics list. On Sunday, October 20, the Classics Club will post a number from 1 through 20. The goal is to read whatever book falls under that number on my Spin List by December 18, 2024.

So, here is my list of 20 books for the spin...

1. Edna Ferber – Show Boat
2. Patricia Highsmith – The Talented Mr.Ripley (1955)
3. Shirley Jackson – We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
4. Madeleine L'Engle – A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
5. William Shakespeare – Much Ado About Nothing (1598)
6. Mary Shelley – Frankenstein (1818)
7. John Steinbeck – Cannery Row (1945)
8. William Thackeray – Vanity Fair (1848)
9. Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
10. Virginia Woolf – Flush (1933)
11. Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart (1958)
12. Roald Dahl – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
13. Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre (1847) 
14. Anne Brontë – Agnes Grey (1847)
15. Albert Camus – The Stranger (1942)
16. Lewis Carroll – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
17. John Meade Falkner – The Nebuly Coat (1903)
18. Muriel Spark – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
19. Graham Greene – Our Man in Havana (1958)
20. Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

This list is almost the same as last month. I replaced my last spin book, which I completed, with The Nebuly Coat. I am currently reading The Wind in the Willows, so I replaced that one with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

I will be happy with any book from the list. The two books I would most like to be selected are A Wrinkle in Time by L'Engle and Cannery Row by Steinbeck. There are some that I expect to be challenging reads, such as Much Ado About Nothing by Shakespeare or Vanity Fair by Thackeray or The Talented Mr.Ripley by Highsmith. 

Short Story Wednesday: Shadow Voices, ed. by John Connolly

 

The subtitle for this volume of short stories is "300 years of Irish Genre Fiction, A History in Stories." The first story is from 1729, "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift. The last story is from 2019, "The Boughs Withered When I Told Them My Dreams" by Maura McHugh.

My husband and I bought this book because we both like short stories and we thought there would be stories that would appeal to both of us in this book. We bought the eBook edition because it is a great price and it is a very large book, at over 1000 pages. Connolly's introduction is very good, very informative. And he has provided lengthy introductions for each author and the story included for that author.

This is a difficult book to describe, so I am going to use the overview at Connolly's web site: 

Lemuel Gulliver, Dracula, Narnia — the history of Irish fiction is a history of genre fiction: horror, romantic fiction, science fiction, crime writing, and more. Irish writers have produced pioneering tales of detection, terrifying ghost stories, and ground-breaking women’s popular literature. In a single volume, John Connolly presents the history of Irish genre writing and uses it to explore how we think about fiction itself.

Deeply researched and passionately argued, SHADOW VOICES takes the lives of more than sixty writers — by turns tragic, amusing, and adventurous, but always extraordinary — and sets them alongside the stories they have written to create a new way of looking at genre and literature, both Irish and beyond. Here are vampires and monsters, murderers and cannibals. Here are female criminal masterminds and dogged detectives, star-crossed lovers and vengeful spouses.

I read three stories from the book. None of those stories were my usual reading, but they were all good stories. 

"The Man in the Bell" (1821) by William Maginn

This is a very brief story and as such I don't want to tell too much about. A young man is a bell ringer for his church. He relates the events when he got trapped in the belfry when his friends start ringing the bell. Well written.

"The Witching Hour" (1884) Margaret Wolfe Hungerford 

Hungerford was a prolific writer of romantic fiction, both novels and short stories. This story is part ghost story, part romance. Three servants have left the employment of the Vernon family. The latest to leave is the cook. The servants have all been scared by an apparition walking around upstairs. Mr. and Mrs. Vernon have a beautiful daughter, Dolores, who is engaged to Frank Harley, who is staying at the Vernon's home. He volunteers to stay up late that night and see if he can view the ghost and solve the problem. 

"Fly Away Tiger, Fly Away Thumb" (1953) Brian Moore 

The introduction to this story was especially interesting because Connolly explored Brian Moore's life, especially in relation to his writing and gave me lots of recommendations for books to look for. Moore was born in Ireland but later emigrated to Canada. Connolly notes that, in this story, Moore drew on his experiences in Naples during World War II.

The story is very strange, and tells of a magician who is abducted by a gang of outlaws, who demand a huge ransom to return him to his band of performers. He does escape of course. The story has some gruesome aspects, but it was entertaining.

I look forward to trying more stories from this book. I will try more of the earlier stories and some of the stories from contemporary authors.

Books Read in August 2024

There is one advantage to looking back on my August reading six weeks later. I was very glad to see that most of the crime fiction I read was from older books, published between 1925 and 1978. 

Here are the books I read in August...

Nonfiction / Letters

The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (2007) by Charlotte Mosley  (Editor)

I enjoyed reading this very much, even though it was 800 plus pages long and took me over a year to finish. In some ways it was like a social history of the UK, covering the effects that different times had on the Mitford sisters. Most of the letters seem to have been between Deborah, Diana, and Nancy, but Deborah also kept in touch with Jessica, who moved to the US, became a US citizen, and lived a very different life from her sisters. Although each letter was clearly identified as to who was writing and who was the recipient, plus date written and location of the letter writer, they were not an easy read because the sisters always used nicknames when writing to and referring to the others. I would only recommend this to those who are very interested in the Mitford family; the letters allow the reader to see a different side of them that doesn't come through in the biographies. 

Science Fiction / Time Travel

A Symphony of Echoes (2013) by Jodi Taylor

This is the second book in a time-travel series. The main protagonists are historians or technical people who provide support for the historians. They all work for St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research. This book was a very fast-paced adventure. It strains one's ability to suspend disbelief at times, but it moves so fast that you hardly notice. The characters are engaging but there are a lot of them to keep track of. The story is a combination of hopping around in history, and the adventures that come along with that, and a good bit of humor and some romance. 

Crime Fiction

Birdcage (1978) by Victor Canning

This is the fifth book in a very loose series about the Birdcage group, a covert British intelligence agency. I love this series, even though the books are often very dark. See my review.

The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (1925) by Maurice Dekobra

This is a fun and sometimes entertaining espionage story from 1925, but it did not work well for me. It seemed much more like an adventure story with some political intrigue. See my review.

A Great Reckoning (2016) by Louise Penny

This book is the 12th in the Armand Gamache series by Louise Penny. I enjoyed it immensely. See my review. 

The Lady in the Lake (1943) by Raymond Chandler

This is the 4th book in the Philip Marlowe series. My favorite thing about reading Chandler's books is his beautiful prose. See my review.

Curtains for Three (1950) by Rex Stout

This book in the Nero Wolfe series consists of three novellas: "Disguise for Murder", "Bullet for One", and "The Gun with Wings". See posts on these here and here.

The Case of the Late Pig (1937) by Margery Allingham

This is the 8th book in the Albert Campion series. It is unusual for this series because it is told in 1st person narration by Campion. It is very short at 148 pages and I got confused with all the characters at times, but I enjoyed it still. Allingham is one of my favorite Golden Age authors; I put her at the same level as Agatha Christie although their writing style is entirely different. 

Currently reading

I am now reading Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton, published in 2013. This is the first book in the Joe Wilderness series. I think others in the series are set in the 1960s, but so far this book has focused on Berlin and other parts of Germany at the time World War II ended.

The three photos at the top and bottom of this post are from years ago (2011 and 2012) when we visited the Santa Barbara Zoo, the grounds of the Natural History Museum, and Rocky Nook Park. Click on the images for best viewing quality.

The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars: Maurice Dekobra

Summary from the back of the Melville House edition:

One of the biggest bestsellers of all time, and one of the first and most influential spy novels of the twentieth century, this delightful romp is now back in print after fifty years.

Taking place after the Russian Revolution shook Europe to its core, it tells the story of Lady Diana Wynham, who relishes trampling on the sensibilities of British Society, and her secretary, Prince Gerard Séliman, the perfect gentleman, equally at home in an Istanbul bazaar or a London charity matinée.

Faced with the prospect of financial ruin, Lady Diana launches a plan to regain control of her inheritance, a field of oil wells seized by the Soviets. She dispatches Gerard on the Orient Express to take care of the matter.

This was one of the books from my 20 Books of Summer list; it was the second book I read in August, just over two months ago.

I want to start out by saying that this is not a bad book; it is fun and entertaining at times, and at only 250 pages it was a fast read. However, it did not live up to my expectations at all.

My thoughts:

• The novel is billed as a spy novel but seems much more like an adventure story to me. There is a good bit of political intrigue, and the part that was set in Russia was interesting, but I have no idea how accurate it was. 
• It was less realistic than the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming (which have a lot of variation within the series so that a few are realistic and several are more on the fluffy side). The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars was published in 1925, was very successful at that time, and was exploring issues such as women's roles in society. I would have been more impressed with that if everyone in the book had not been rich or had a title. 
• Just the fact that a woman is in charge and directing her male secretary to make the dangerous trip into Soviet Russia makes this an unusual novel for the time it was written. And the main villain among the Soviets is a beautiful female spy, Irina Mouravieff.
• A minor point: the title was misleading. The implication is that there is much traveling on trains; if so, I missed it, and Lady Diana stays behind in any case.
• I did not have any problem finishing the book, it is very readable, but I did not care for any of the characters. Most were rich and entitled.

I have two copies of this book: the Dell Mapback edition, a reprint from 1948, and the Melville House edition, published in 2012. The latter has an interesting afterword by René Steinke.

I will point you to a more favorable review at A Work in Progress.

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Publisher:   Melville House, 2012 (orig. pub. 1925)
Translator:  Neal Wainwright
Length:       320 pages
Format:       Trade Paper
Setting:       London, Soviet Russia
Genre:        Thriller
Source:       Purchased in 2013.

Short Story Wednesday: Ladies' Lunch by Lore Segal

 

This book of short stories was published by Lore Segal in 2023 on her 95th birthday. It consists of 16 stories; 10 of them are about the "Ladies' Lunch" group. This group of older women, now in their 90s, have been meeting for lunch for thirty years or more, usually at the home of one of the group. There are five ladies named as the main group (Ruth, Bridget, Farah, Lotte, and Bessie) but others are mentioned in later stories. Obviously over time their health and abilities have been affected by age, and at this point they often think of "how they will shuffle off this mortal coil."

Some of the stories are sad but not all of them. Most of them had a humorous element also.

My favorite stories were...

• "Ladies' Lunch" is focused on Lotte, as several stories are. This one is about Lotte's move to a care home, Green Trees, because she requires care and she cannot get along with any of her live-in caregivers.
• "Making Good" is not a Ladies' Lunch story. A group of people, half Jewish Holocaust survivors and half people from Vienna who were Nazi supporters during the war, or their descendants, take part in a Bridge Building Workshop to reconcile their differences. This was one of the longer stories in the book at 23 pages.
• "Pneumonia Chronicles" is an autobiographical story based on the time when the author was in the hospital for two weeks during the Covid pandemic. She had pneumonia, not Covid, but her children could not visit her when she was hospitalized.

I enjoy collections with stories that are linked and create an overall story when read together. As with any collection, there are some outstanding stories and some that did not do that much for me. I know I will reread this book and find more to enjoy in the stories.

I finished reading this book on Monday, October 7, and later in the day I learned that Lore Segal had died on that day, at age 96.

The stories in Lore Segal's Ladies' Lunch were recommended by Jeff Meyerson who comments on Short Story Wednesday posts at Patricia Abbott's blog. I thank Jeff for this recommendation and many others that I followed up on.

Birdcage: Victor Canning

Birdcage is about the machinations of a British intelligence agency, referred to as "Birdcage" because its offices are in Birdcage Walk in London. There is very little oversight of this covert security group and the agents are generally amoral, although they believe that their mission is important to the welfare of the country. In reality, the higher ups are just trying to protect the government in question which they serve blindly.

This story is set in Portugal, Gloucester, and London. A young nun leaves her Portuguese monastery, feeling that she has betrayed her vows. She attempts to drown herself in the sea but by some miracle is rescued at the last minute. The man who rescues her is a regular guy, easygoing and not ambitious. 

We soon find out that the nun's real name is Sarah Branton, daughter of Lady Jean Branton, a former agent for the Birdcage group. Lady Jean is dead, but the Birdcage agents are keeping an eye on Sarah to make sure that she doesn't have damaging information about their group.

This is the fifth book in a very loose series about the Birdcage group. Especially in the first few books in the series, it is hard to see any connections between the books; there are no repeating characters for example. The tone is the same, and the department is unnamed in the early books. But as the series continues some of the agents feature in multiple books. However, my point here is that though I may be reading them as a series, they easily can be read as standalone books. 

It only recently occurred to me that this series often has a psychological / romantic suspense plot running through it. In fitting with the espionage aspects of the story, the outcome of these romantic plots are entirely unpredictable; sometimes there is a happy, optimistic ending ... sometimes not. This one is even more obviously of that type, since Sarah Branton and the man who rescues her quickly develop a bond and a growing attraction to each other.

I enjoy the glimpses of nature, and especially birds, running through all the stories. The sense of place is very prominent. I think this might be distracting to some readers, but it is one of the elements that keeps me coming back for more. The stories in this series can be very dark.

Victor Canning is one of my favorite authors. He wrote a lot of books starting in the 1930s and through the 1980s, some general fiction, some children's fiction and some spy fiction. I have stuck with his spy fiction or mystery novels so far, but I want to try some of his general fiction too. 

Today I was reading about Canning's life, and discovered that he was friends with Eric Ambler, another espionage author whose books I enjoy. This information was in a book by John Higgins, A Birdcage Companion. Per Higgins' website:

In 1940 he enlisted in the Army, and was sent for training with the Royal Artillery in Llandrindod Wells in mid-Wales, where he trained alongside his friend Eric Ambler. Both were commissioned as second lieutenants in 1941. We get a glimpse of Canning in those years from Eric Ambler's autobiography, Here Lies Eric Ambler.

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Publisher:   Heinemann, 1978
Length:       233 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Series:       Birdcage books #3
Setting:      Portugal and the UK
Genre:       Espionage fiction
Source:      Purchased in December, 2023.