Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2013

I enjoy reading historical fiction and I read a lot of historical mysteries. So I am joining in on the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge for the second year. It is sponsored by Historical Tapestry ... a very interesting site.

The rules are:

• everyone can participate, even those who don't have a blog
• any kind of historical fiction is accepted (HF fantasy, HF young adult,...)
• The challenge will run from 1 January 2013 to 31 December 2013.  
• Choose one of the different reading levels:

20th century reader - 2 books
Victorian reader - 5 books
Renaissance Reader - 10 books
Medieval - 15 books
Ancient History -25+ books

Go here to review the rules in more detail. And to sign up for the challenge.

This year I am going with this level: Medieval - 15 books.That level is challenging but not out of reach, keeping in mind all the other books I plan to read.

These are some historical novels in my TBR stacks that I can choose from:

The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller
The Alienist by Caleb Carr 
An Impartial Witness by Charles Todd
Murder on the Yellow Brick Road by Stuart Kaminsky
A Night of Long Knives by Rebecca Cantrell 
Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis
Silesian Station by David Downing
The Nightingale Gallery by Paul Doherty

Books read and reviewed for this challenge:
The Smoke by Tony Broadbent
Archie Meets Nero Wolfe by Robert Goldsborough
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
Eye of the Red Tsar by Sam Eastland
Except the Dying by Maureen Jennings
A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley

Book Beginnings: The Monster in the Box

Book Beginnings on Fridays is a meme with this theme: Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

Visit the post at Rose City Reader and view the other links and get a glimpse of books you may not be familiar with.


The first two sentences in the book I am currently reading are:

He had never told anyone. The strange relationship, if it could be called that, had gone on for years, decades, and he had never breathed a word about it.

The book is The Monster in the Box by Ruth Rendell.

This is the 22nd book in the Inspector Wexford series and it is the next to the last in the series (so far). So I am nearly done with this series. And then I am going to start all over again, since I have all the books. (Actually, I have already read the first book in the series, From Doon with Death, for the second time, and am ready to read the second one.)

In this book, Wexford is nearing the end of his career as a policeman, and he is remembering back to a case at the beginning of his career and a man who has haunted him all these years. I am not far into the book but I can already tell that the story will be a compelling one. I hope so.

Kindness Goes Unpunished: Craig Johnson

I had forgotten how much I enjoyed this series. I read the first two books in the Walt Longmire Mystery series just over a year ago. I should not have let so much time lapse before reading this third novel in the series.

Craig Johnson tells an interesting story in a way that keeps me turning the pages. I like the characters and I care about them. That is pretty much what I want in a book.

Walt Longmire is the sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming, which is located next to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Another important character in the series is Walt's lifelong friend Henry Standing Bear, who lives on the reservation. In this story, Bear and Walt visit Philadelphia, where Walt's daughter Cady lives. While there, Bear will be exhibiting some Mennonite photos of the Cheyenne. Thus, this novel does not have the background and atmosphere of Wyoming and the reservation like the previous two novels. However, Indian culture does come into play, as do statues of Indians around the city of Philadelphia.

Soon after Bear and Walt arrive in Philadelphia, Cady is critically injured and it turns out she has become involved in a political conspiracy. Obviously, Walt follows up to find out what led to the incident. I admit to having a few quibbles with the proliferation of coincidences in this book, which I don't want to go into in more detail. But they did not bother me to the extent of lessening my enjoyment of the book.

I would definitely recommend this book (but I would start with the first two in the series). And from what I read, the series keeps getting better and better.

I have forgotten a lot about the first book in this series. At Margot Kinberg's blog, she profiles The Cold Dish.

This post at Open Letters Monthly reviews the seventh novel in the series, Hell is Empty, and has a great description of the main character in the series:

The debut novel in this series, The Cold Dish (2005), introduces the charismatic Longmire, and the Sheriff instantly wins your admiration with his humility, integrity, and humor. He tells us his sleuthing began during his tour in Vietnam. He can recognize Prokofiev’s First Symphony, and he sprinkles his narration with allusions to Aristotle, Shakespeare and Coleridge, among others. He’s a study in contradictions, crazily courageous, deceptively vulnerable, he’s fastidious about the company he keeps but has to check his frying pans for mouse turds.

The author's website is also a great resource for the series.

European Reading Challenge 2013

I participated in this reading challenge in 2012. It was was one of my favorites. I read nine books from different European countries in 2012, and I hope to read even more this year.

Organized by: Rose City Reader 

From January 1st 2013 to January 31st 2014

Goal: To read books by European authors or books set in European countries. The books can be fiction or non-fiction. However, each book must be by a different author and set in a different country.

There are more details at the sign up post (here), including a list of countries, and resources to find books set in those countries.

I am joining at the Five Star (Deluxe Entourage) level: Read at least five books by different European authors or books set in different European countries.

There were two books on my list to read last year that I did not read:

The Preacher by Camilla Lackberg (Sweden)
Murder In Belleville by Cara Black (France)

In addition, I could read from this list:

Siren Of The Waters by Michael Genelin (Slovakia)
Nemesis by Jo Nesbo (Norway)
A Night of Long Knives by Rebecca Cantrell (Germany)
Death of a Nationalist by Rebecca Pawel (Spain)
Dressed for Death by Donna Leon (Italy)

Books Read, with links to reviews:
The Smoke by Tony Broadbent (United Kingdom)
Eye of the Red Tsar by Sam Eastland (Russia)
A Stone of the Heart by John Brady (Ireland)
Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie (France)
Vendetta by Michael Dibdin (Italy)

The Cape Cod Mystery: Phoebe Atwood Taylor

The Cape Cod Mystery is the first book in the Asey Mayo Mystery series by Phoebe Atwood Taylor. The story begins with a strange situation. In the middle of a sweltering hot summer on Cape Cod, a man's body is discovered in a cottage. A sheriff arrests Bill Porter for murder, based on circumstantial evidence, but has no jail to put him in so first places him in a pillory (also known as the stocks), then moves him to an empty boxcar -- I kid you not -- for a weekend. I was having problems with suspension of belief from the beginning.

Bill asks his friend, Asey Mayo, to find out who really committed the crime. Asey is a man of contradictions. Obviously intelligent and full of common sense, he has worked for Bill's family for three generations. First as a carriage builder, then as auto mechanic and now he is Bill's handyman. His speech is almost unintelligible and I usually don't like dialog written in dialect.
Quoting from the book:

His speech would be impossible for a student of phonetics to record on paper. It resembled no other dialect in the world. Let it suffice to say that he never sound a final g or t. His r was the ah of New England. His a was so flat that as Betsey said, you couldn't get under it with a crowbar.

But it did not take long for me to get used to the vernacular and I began to find the hero, Asey Mayo, a very amusing fellow.  The story is told by a narrator, Prudence Whitsby, who is living in a  cottage on Cape Cod with her niece (Betsey) and a cook. Prudence and Asey work together to try to clear the accused man, Bill Porter, before the weekend is over, at which point he will be officially charged.

I found the story charming. By the time we are close to the end of this story, it appears that there are no suspects (other than the man who is accused) without alibis. Of course, appearances are deceiving. I was fooled and had no clue as to who the culprit was.

I did have some problems with this mystery. It is mostly told in conversations between Prudence and Asey, and that doesn't allow for a lot of depth of characterization. I had the basic characters who lived on Cape Cod down pretty well, but got confused trying to keep track of all the visitors who were also potential suspects.

I recently purchased an e-book, Atomic Renaissance: American Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s and 1950s, by Jeffrey Marks. This contains a section on Taylor and here are some excerpts:

At a time when many mystery authors had turned to the hardboiled genre, Phoebe Atwood Taylor followed her own comedic path. Under three different names, she wrote humorous regional mysteries set in New England. Although she began her career during the first Golden Age when humor was more prevalent, her wacky tales of intrigue allowed her to continue writing long after many cozy writers had fallen away. She gave up her career in 1951 after 33 books, but her works remain in print today.

Taylor was born on May 18, 1909 in Boston, surprisingly far from the peninsula she would call home for most of her life. Taylor later recalled that she was the first member of her family to be born off Cape Cod in over 300 years. Like many established New England clans, family mattered to the Taylors. She was an avid genealogist and knew her family's history back to the settlement of the Cape.

And later in the same chapter...

It was no surprise to anyone who knew her that Taylor's mystery took place on Cape Cod, a place she knew intimately and loved. Taylor prided herself on her knowledge of the Cape and its environs, details that she included in her novels.

Thus Taylor knew Cape Cod quite well, and her depiction of it in this book is humorous and entertaining. Generally I don't lean towards humorous mysteries, but this one was just right for me. There are 24 novels in the series, and I will try a few more. I have read that later ones are different from the earlier ones. Prudence only narrates the first two.

The author is profiled at Peggy Ann's Post.

Here are two reviews with more detail about the story than I have provided.
At Classic Mysteries, posted just yesterday!
At In Reference to Murder.

TBR Pile Challenge 2013

The TBR Pile Challenge, hosted at Roof Beam Reader, is the fourth challenge I am joining for 2013. This is a second challenge for reading books in my To Be Read piles, but this one takes a different approach.

The differences? First, you have to plan ahead and list the twelve books from your TBR list that you plan to read (with two alternates). Second, the books have to have been on your bookshelf or “To Be Read” list for AT LEAST one full year. This means the book cannot have a publication date of 1/1/2012 or later.

There is more explanation of the rules and procedures at the sign-up post at the blog.

This is my list for this TBR challenge. Where appropriate, I will comment on how long it has been waiting to be read.

(1) Murder In Belleville by Cara Black (posted Dec. 15, 2013)

Set in France. Purchased in 2009, published in 2000. I planned to read this book in 2012 for the European Reading Challenge, but that did not happen. 

(2) Forty Words for Sorrow by Giles Blunt (posted Mar. 10, 2013)

Purchased in 2006 at my favorite annual book sale, published in 2001. Will read this for the Canadian Reading Challenge 6.

(3) The Smoke by Tony Broadbent (read Jan. 28, 2013)

Purchased in October 2011 (just made it under the wire). Published in 2002. Historical mystery, set in 1947 London, postwar, my favorite time period to read about.

(4) A Night of Long Knives by Rebecca Cantrell (posted Dec. 9, 2013)

Published in 2010. This is my husband's book and it has been on my list to borrow and read since it was published. Another historical mystery, this time in Germany between World War I and World War II.

(5) Raven Black by Ann Cleeves (posted Oct. 20, 2013)

Set in the Shetland Islands, Scotland. Purchased in 2009, published in 2007.
 

(6) Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis (posted Dec. 8, 2013)

A historical novel set in Rome, A.D. 70. A time period I have not read about. Published in 1989, this edition purchased in 2007.

(7) The Ransom Game by Howard Engel (posted Apr. 10, 2013)

Purchased in 2006, published in 1981. Second book in a mystery series. Will read this for the Canadian Reading Challenge 6.

(8) Dark Star by Alan Furst (posted Oct. 26, 2013)

Purchased in 2009, published in 1991. Spy fiction, another favorite genre.

(9) Bones and Silence by Reginald Hill (posted Nov. 4, 2013)

Published in 1990. Purchased... a long time ago. I have all of the books in this series. This is #11 of 23. Reading my way through the series.

(10) Hard Currency  by Stuart M. Kaminsky

Same story as the Reginald Hill series. This book was published in 1995. Purchased... a long time ago. I have all of the books in this series. This is #9 of 16. Reading my way through the series.

(11) Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley (posted Feb. 13, 2013)

Published in 1990; my edition published in 1995, the same year the movie came out. Purchased... a long time ago.

(12) A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny (posted May 12, 2013)

Published 2007, purchased 2009. Second in a mystery series. Another one to read for the Canadian Reading Challenge 6.

Alternates:

(1) Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Another historical mystery, set in the Soviet Union at the end of the Stalin era. Published in 2008. This is my husband's book and it has been on my list to borrow and read since it was published.

(2) The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer (posted Feb. 17, 2013)

CIA thriller. Published and purchased in 2009, because I loved the author's first series.