Reading Summary for May 2021

 

I had a very good reading month in May. My big project was reading The Mirror & the Light. Although it was 750 plus pages, it was not the length that bothered me. I just found it to be a depressing read, knowing how the story would end, and I could only read short bits at a time. So I interspersed several lighter books throughout, which is not the way I usually read books. 

General Fiction

A Month in the Country (1980) by J.L. Carr

From the cover of the book: "In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church." I enjoyed reading this book immensely; I loved the way it was written and reading about the 1920s in that setting.

Historical Fiction

The Mirror & the Light (2020) by Hilary Mantel

This is the closing book in a trilogy about Henry the VIII and Thomas Cromwell, a subject I knew little about when I first started reading Wolf Hall. It covers Cromwell's later years, following the beheading of Anne Boleyn. As noted above, this is a long book and overall about a depressing subject, so I found it demanding. But definitely worth the effort.

Crime Fiction

Curtain: Poirot's Last Case (1975) by Agatha Christie

This was a darker book than I expected. Both Hastings and Poirot are older, and Poirot has crippling arthritis which limits his ability to get around. Hastings meets Poirot at Styles, the setting of the first mystery in the Poirot series, which is now a guest house. There are several interesting guests: Dr. Franklin, a scientist, and his wife; Hasting's daughter Julia;  Stephen Norton, a bird-watcher; and Sir Carrington, whose home nearby is being renovated.  I liked it, of course, but it was not as much fun as many of the Poirot books. It was much more serious, more like Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile.

Checkmate to Murder (1944) by E.C.R. Lorac

This was an excellent vintage police procedural, set during World War II. Great characters and an interesting plot, and even better, there are several more by this author, easily available. See my review here.

The Man in the Queue (1929) by Josephine Tey

This was a reread, the first mystery novel by Josephine Tey, and the first in the Inspector Alan Grant series. I would like to get back to rereading more of Josephine Tey's mysteries. See my review here.

The Red Box (1937) by Rex Stout

This was another reread. It is an early book in the Nero Wolfe series, #4 following The Rubber Band, which I read in March. A complex story and interesting characters, and I am sure I would not have guessed the culprit except that I had read the books several times before.

So Pretty a Problem (1950) by Francis Duncan

This book is part of the Mordecai Tremaine series. Tremaine is an amateur sleuth, retired from his job as a tobacconist. As this book begins, we find that a controversial artist has been killed by his wife. She says it was an accident, but they were alone so no one can back her up. I enjoyed this  book, I liked the way it was structured. Last year I read Murder for Christmas by the same author and enjoyed it also. I first learned about this series of books from Rick Robinson at Tip the Wink.

READING NEXT?

Currently I am reading The Birdwatcher by William Shaw. I am enjoying it, as I expected, and I hope to finish it tonight. I have no idea how it is going to end.

Next I might read She Came Back by Patricia Wentworth or All Systems Red by Martha Wells or The Small Boat of Great Sorrows by Dan Fesperman. All of these books are on my 20 Books of Summer list.

March 2020 Reading Summary

In March, most of my reads were crime fiction (and spy fiction, which I include under that umbrella).  I also read two books of historical fiction and a classic novel from the 1930s.

As the month wore on and the coronavirus situation got more scary, my reading leaned more to the comfort books. For me, spy fiction is included in comfort reading, so my reading of that genre may increase.

General Fiction 

Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930) by E.M. Delafield

This book is a satirical and humorous look at the life of a married woman with two children (and a cook, a French governess/nanny, and a maid or two), living in an English village, and dealing with money problems and the foibles of others. The diary format took some getting used to, but I liked it, and I am reading The Provincial Lady in London right now.

Historical Fiction

Bring Up the Bodies (2012) by Hilary Mantel

This is the sequel to Mantel's Wolf Hall; it explores the downfall of Anne Boleyn, from the viewpoint of Thomas Cromwell. I liked this book even better than Wolf Hall.

Margaret the First (2016) by Danielle Dutton

This very short novel tells the story of Margaret Cavendish, an unconventional 17th-century Duchess who dared to write and publish all types of literature when it was unthinkable for women to do this. I enjoyed the story very much, and learned more about those times.

Crime Fiction

A Quiet Place (1975) by Seichō Matsumoto

Crime fiction set in Japan, by a Japanese author. This book portrays culture and working life in Japan in the 1970s very well. My review here.

The Expats (2012) by Chris Pavone

A spy fiction thriller set in Luxembourg, although not your standard spy fiction story. I loved it. My review here.

Rest in Pieces (1992) by Rita Mae Brown

This is part of a mystery series that features a cat (Mrs. Murphy) and a dog (Tucker) as characters (in addition to humans). Not my usual type of mystery, but I enjoyed it. My review here.

Miss Silver Deals with Death (1944) by Patricia Wentworth

Miss Silver #6. As I noted in my review, this book has one of my favorite  settings for a mystery... London during World War II. And the mystery story is well done too.

October Men (1973) by Anthony Price

This is the fourth book in the David Audley series, a cold war espionage series set in the UK (and sometimes other countries) and usually featuring some historical element. In this case, Audley is in Italy. Although Audley is the central character throughout the series, each book is different and may place the focus on other characters. My review here.

Snow Angels (2009) by James Thompson

This is the first novel in the Inspector Vaara series. A very interesting setting: Finnish Lapland, a hundred miles into the Arctic Circle. There was too much violence, described graphically, for me. My review here.

The Second Confession (1949) and
In the Best Families (1950) by Rex Stout

When I embarked on comfort reading this month, Rex Stout was one of the first authors to come to mind. These two books are books 2 and 3 in the Zeck Trilogy; And Be a Villain is book 1 in the trilogy. Arnold Zeck is Nero Wolfe's archenemy, and in these two books Wolfe encounters Zeck once again.  

Dark Provenance (1994) by Michael David Anthony

Second book in the Canterbury Cathedral series. The protagonist, Richard Harrison, is an ex-Intelligence Officer who has taken on the position of Secretary of the Diocesan Dilapidations Board for Canterbury. By coincidence, a man he worked with in Germany at the end of the war is found dead nearby, and that man's daughter refuses to believe it is suicide. I enjoy these books more for the picture of life at Canterbury Cathedral than the mystery; this book was a good read.

Coffin in Malta (1964) by Gwendoline Butler

I read my first John Coffin novel earlier this year and enjoyed it very much. This book takes Coffin to Malta to investigate a crime and, like the earlier book I read, it features Coffin only later in the book.

Tiger in the Smoke (1952) by Margery Allingham

Albert Campion #14. Set in London a few years after the end of World War II, this is more of a thriller than the typical detective novel that Campion is involved with. My review here.

Wolf Hall: Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall follows Thomas Cromwell from his youth to his role as an important adviser to King Henry VIII. The main emphasis is on the period when the king wanted to marry Anne Boleyn and annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, a solution that the Catholic Church would not agree to.

Hilary Mantel presents an alternative to other characterizations of Thomas Cromwell in fiction. This quote is from the review at the Historical Novels.info site:

King Henry VIII's adviser Thomas Cromwell has long been one of history's villains. Wolf Hall reconsiders the verdict. This densely packed, long and witty novel, portrays him as a man of intellect, daring, practicality, ambition, humor and – here's the surprise – kindness and affection. It works. The portrait is psychologically rich and well supported with historical detail.

I cannot describe the book overall any better than that.


MY THOUGHTS

Wolf Hall was the first book I read in 2020. First I must say that I liked this book very, very much and will soon be reading the second book in the trilogy, because some of my comments here may not sound that way.

How this novel is experienced probably depends on how much you know about the life of Thomas Cromwell and historical events centered around Henry VIII and his six wives. I have read books set at this time and watched movies on the subject over the years, but still I don't remember that much about this period in history and Thomas Cromwell specifically. I am well aware of Anne Boleyn's story, but I was hazy on the order of the wives of Henry VIII, their fates, and was not really quite sure how Cromwell fit into this. For my enjoyment of the book, this was mostly a good thing. I could read most of the story without the feeling that I knew the outcome.

There is a huge cast of characters which was necessary but can be quite confusing. There is a list of the "Cast of Characters" and family trees for the Tudors and the Yorkist Claimants, which helped a bit, but having to refer back and forth was distracting. On the other hand, I now have a much better picture of the court at this time and the way people lived, at various levels in society.

This book was not an easy read for me and there were elements of the author's writing style that I did not like. The story is written from Thomas Cromwell's point of view but in third person present tense. Throughout the book, whenever a scene included multiple males, I had problems with understanding who "he" was referring to, and whether it was referring to Thomas Cromwell. I  read multiple reviews commenting on this problem. I thought it was just me. But the author must have been doing something right, because I was pulled into the story from the beginning. A good bit of the writing was beautiful, just breathtaking.

Moira at Clothes in Books has done multiple posts on Wolf Hall and the second book in the trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies. See two of them here and here.

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Publisher:   Picador, 2010 (orig. publ. 2009)
Length:       604 pages
Format:      Trade paperback
Series:       Thomas Cromwell Trilogy #1
Setting:      England
Genre:       Historical Fiction
Source:      On my TBR pile for five years.