Short Story Wednesday: The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke

I bought this small hardback book consisting of one short story because it was pretty, very appealing, and with lovely illustrations. And apparently a Christmas story. For its size, it was expensive, not exorbitant, but an indulgence.  I bought it at our lovely independent book store (at a 50th anniversary sale, so I got 20% off).

Previous to reading this story, I had read nothing by Susanna Clarke and I had no idea what to expect. 

I loved the story. It is a fantasy story about a young woman, Merowdis, who loves animals and nature. She has many dogs and many cats, and a pig, plus other assorted animals. She prefers to spend her time in the woods alone, and she has a sister, Ysolde, who understands her and aids and abets her in her escapes to the woods. The rest of her family wants her to marry and be normal.

As the story begins, Ysolde takes Merowdis out to the woods in the chaise, dropping her at the gates to the wood, leaving her to walk alone in the woods with two of the dogs and the pig, named Apple. 

The story begins a few days before Christmas and there are mentions of the Christmas season, but I hardly noticed the connection to Christmas the first time I read it. 

I loved the Afterward too, where the author talks about her inspiration and sources for the story. It was as good as the story, and I found both the story and the afterword moving.

The story takes up 42 pages of the book but there are a lot of illustrations, so it is really about 30 pages long. The illustrations by Victoria Sawdon are gorgeous and the writing is magical.

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books of 2024

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. You can check out other Top Tuesday blog posts here. 

I have listed twelve books here because it was impossible to cut my list down more. As it was, there were still many other books that I read in 2024 that were strongly considered for the list.

This time I put the book in order by date published. Here is the list...

My Antonia (1918) by Willa Cather

The story, which is narrated by Jim Burden, focuses primarily on Ántonia Shimerda, the daughter of Bohemian immigrant parents who have settled on a farm on the Nebraska prairies. Jim and Ántonia were both children when they arrived in Nebraska, on the same train. The story begins in the 1890s, at a period when immigrant families were settling on homesteads on the prairies.

The Lady in the Lake (1943) by Raymond Chandler

Philip Marlowe is hired to find a missing wife, but soon he discovers that the case involves two missing wives. The dead body of one of them is found in a private lake in the mountains near San Bernardino, California. This book was written after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. There are mentions of US involvement in World War II throughout the book. This book also seemed to have more humor than other books in the series.

The Quiet American (1955) by Graham Greene

This book was published in 1955 and the events in this book took place in the early 1950s. The story is set in Saigon, Vietnam and surrounding areas when the French Army and the Viet Minh guerrillas are fighting each other. It has elements of spy fiction and political intrigue, but the picture of Vietnam and the combat that was going on there was more interesting for me. The story is pretty dark.

Birdcage (1978) by Victor Canning

This is the fifth book in a very loose espionage series about the Birdcage group, a covert British intelligence agency. I love this series, even though the books are often very dark. I enjoy the glimpses of nature, and especially birds, running through all the stories. The sense of place is very prominent. This story is set in Portugal and the UK.

A Darker Domain (2008) by Val McDermid

This is the second book in the Karen Pirie series. Detective Inspector Karen Pirie is in charge of the Cold Case department in Fife, Scotland. First, a woman reports that her father has been missing for over 20 years, from the time of the Miner’s Strike of 1984.  Shortly after that, new information shows up in Italy related to a kidnapping that also took place in 1984 in Fife, and that case is added to Karen's workload.

Elegy for April (2010) by Benjamin Black

This is the third book in the Quirke series; I read the second book, The Silver Swan, earlier this year. The series is set in Ireland in the 1950s; Quirke is a pathologist in a hospital and gets involves with crimes or possible crimes often. I like the slow pace of the writing and the emphasis on the characters as much or more than the crime investigation. 

My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) by Elizabeth Strout 

While Lucy Barton is in a hospital in New York City for many weeks due to complications following an appendectomy, her mother visits her and they have some strained conversations about the past. The story is set in the 1980s, and Lucy narrates it, years after it happened. This is first book in the Amgash series.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) by Gabrielle Zevin

This book is about two young people who create video games. The story starts when Sam Mazur and Sadie Green are about 12 years old and covers the next 30 years in their lives. It does focus on video gaming and the process of creating them, but it is about many other things: relationships, families, judgement and misunderstandings, and ambition. I liked the writing, and I was caught up in the story. 

Winter Work (2022) by Dan Fesperman

This is the last book in a spy fiction trilogy. The series features Claire Saylor, an agent for the CIA. Safe Houses was the first book in the series, set in 1979 (Berlin)and 2014 (US), and it was fantastic. The second book, The Cover Wife, is set in 1999. This book goes back to 1990; it is set in Berlin after the fall of Berlin Wall. The trilogy features strong female characters and intelligent plots.

The Mayors of New York (2023) by S.J. Rozan

This is the latest book in the Lydia Chin and Bill Smith series. Lydia is an American-born Chinese private investigator in her late twenties who lives in New York’s Chinatown; Bill is a white private investigator in his forties who lives in Manhattan. The narrator of the books alternates between Lydia and Bill. The first book was narrated by Lydia; the second book was narrated by Bill; and so on. I love the New York setting. In this book, the mayor's son is missing and her assistant has asked Bill to find him.

Tom Lake (2023) by Ann Patchett

This was a very good book and an enjoyable read. Basically it is the story of a woman telling her daughters about a summer love affair she had with a famous actor before she married their father. I like books about families and relationships. From beginning to end I was absorbed in this story.

Orbital (2023) by Samantha Harvey

This novel depicts one day in the life of six astronauts on the space station, watching the sunrises and sunsets and monitoring a typhoon threatening inhabited islands. The reader is privy to their thoughts, and watches their activities and their regimen. It is short, about 200 pages, and very meditative. It inspired me to read more about the space station, and I wish it had been longer.

My Books from the 2024 Book Sale

Every year we look forward to the Planned Parenthood Book Sale. This was the 50th year of the sale and the dates were September 12 – 22, 2024. Unfortunately we missed most of the sale because my husband and I both had Covid when the sale began. However, I did get there for a couple of the last days of the sale, and still bought a humongous number of books. On the last day of the sale, almost all of the books are half price.

So, three months after the event, I am listing six of the books that I purchased at the sale. 

A Bird in the House (1970) by Margaret Laurence

(Fiction, Short stories) This is the fourth book in the Manawaka Sequence, five books set in the fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba, in Canada. I have read the first book in the series, The Stone Angel. A Bird in the House is the fourth book, consisting of eight interconnected short stories, each narrated by Vanessa MacLeod, starting when she is age ten up until she is twenty. I felt lucky to find any book in the series, and I was happy to find out that this one was made up of short stories.

The Accidental Tourist (1985) by Anne Tyler

(Fiction) I bought this one because I want to read more by Anne Tyler. I purchased quite a few of her books at the 2023 book sale but they were later books, published after 2000. This is one of her earlier books.

The description from the back of my copy:

Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts when he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who up-ends Macon’s insular world and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life.

Lent (2019) by Jo Walton

(Historical Fantasy / Time Loop novel) I have read several books by this author and I like her writing. I wasn't sure about this story, but when I found a copy at the book sale, it seemed a good idea to give it a try. I don't really know how to describe it briefly. It is set in the late 1400s in the city of Florence and the main character is the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola.

A Wind in the Door (1973) by Madeleine L'Engle

(Fantasy / Science Fiction / Time Travel) It was probably silly of me to buy the 2nd and 3rd books in the Time Quintet by L'Engle when I had not read the 1st book, A Wrinkle in Time. But the covers were so nice I could not resist. And the size of the text is much superior to the mass market paperback I have of the 1st book.

A Death in Summer (2011) by Benjamin Black 

(Historical Mystery) I have enjoyed the last few mysteries I read by Benjamin Black / John Banville, so I am glad I picked up a few more at the book sale this year. I read Elegy for April, the 3rd book in the Quirke series, earlier this month, and I look forward to reading the 4th book, A Death in Summer in 2025. Quirke is a pathologist in Dublin, Ireland in the 1950s.

The Charm School (1988) by Nelson DeMille

(Espionage novel) I have been wanting to try a novel by Nelson DeMille for a while, but I had been aiming at a shorter one to begin with. This one is 750 pages in trade paper format. It sounds like it will be a very good Cold War thriller.

Mom Meets Her Maker: James Yaffe

 

I read My Mother, the Detective, a collection of the Dave and Mom stories by James Yaffe in 2019. The stories were first published in the 1950s and 60s in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In each story, Dave, a detective in the New York Homicide Squad, and his wife Shirley visit his mother and they discuss one of his cases over dinner. Mom asks some pertinent questions and solves the case; Dave is afraid that his coworkers are going to find out that his success rate with cases is due to his mother's help. 

Between 1988 and 1992, Yaffe wrote four mystery novels about Dave and his Mom. Mom Meets Her Maker is the 2nd of the four novels. The book is set at Christmas, and it was the perfect read for me at this time of year. 

Dave is now a widower, and he has moved to the small town of Mesa Grande, Colorado. Dave is no longer a police office; he is now an investigator for the Public Defender's office. The current case that he is working on relates to a serious dispute between neighbors. An older Jewish couple, the Meyers, have retired to Mesa Grande. Their son, Roger, has a dispute with the next door neighbor, Reverend Chuck Candy, who has put up a massive display of Christmas decorations, including lights and music which stay on until 2:00 a.m. in the morning. When he and the Reverend are tussling over a gun that the Reverend pulls out, the gun is fired, and Roger ends up charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Of course, as the case is investigated, the situation escalates and there is a death, which is also blamed on Roger.

In this novel, Dave does a lot of the legwork, following up on clues and interviewing witnesses. His mother functions more as an armchair detective, as she asks him to find out the answers to questions she has, and helps solve the crime. 

My thoughts:

• So, how did I like Dave and Mom in a full length novel? I found the novel very entertaining, and the characters a lot of fun. Some of the characters (good and bad and in-between) are over the top, but they worked for me.
• Like the short stories, Dave narrates most of the novel. I enjoy the way he tells the story, with subtle humor.
• Many mystery novels that are set at Christmas are only tangentially involved with Christmas. This one is immersed in Christmas. 
• The mystery puzzle is good and there are surprises at the end. I also enjoyed a chapter at the end, "After Christmas," where Dave tells us what happened after the crime is solved and where various characters ended up.

A post at the blog, Beneath the Stains of Time, reminded me of this book. The post is also worth a read because it recommends other good Christmas mysteries. Also see TomCat's review of the book. He says: "A better Ellery Queen-style Christmas mystery than Ellery Queen's The Finishing Stroke (1958)."  (I haven't read that one yet, but I do have a copy.) And I just ordered copies of the other three Dave and Mom mysteries. 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Shirley Jackson

 

This is the first paragraph of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It establishes the narrator and tells us a good bit about her. 

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”

I think this type of book is best experienced when you know little about it, and I enjoyed going into it that way. Although I might have read it sooner if I had read more reviews. Thus my description and comments will be brief. 

As this short novel starts, Mary Katherine (also known as Merricat) lives with her older sister, Constance, and her Uncle Julian in a very large but run down house. The reader learns shortly that everyone else in the family died from poisoning when eating a meal. For several years after the poisoning, Merricat was the only one who left the house. She would walk to the nearby village twice a week to do the shopping and get books from the library. Constance never left the house, and Uncle Julian was confined to a wheel chair.

 

My goal in reading this book was to read a Gothic novel, since I don't go for that genre much, and to read more by Shirley Jackson. Up to now I have only read a few of her short stories.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. This story was not nearly as scary or tense as I expected it to be. There was a sense of foreboding and waiting for something horrible to happen. 

I liked Merricat's narration, and the depiction of their lives before and after the rest of the family died. I liked the way the ending was handled. The beauty of the story was in the way Jackson very slowly reveals small bits of the plot.

 -----------------------------

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2006 (orig. pub. 1962).
Length:    146 pages
Format:    Trade Paperback
Setting:    Vermont, US
Genre:     Gothic, Classic
Source:    I purchased this book in 2017.

Short Story Wednesday: Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King

Lily King is a new author for me. She has written several novels, but she came to my attention when I read about her short story book, Five Tuesdays in Winter, at Patricia Abbott's blog in 2022.

This week I read four stories (of ten) from that book. All of them were very good. Each story focuses on a specific incident or series of events, but as the story is told, much more is revealed about the characters. The stories have so much depth.

"Creature"

This story was forty pages long and it overwhelmed me (in a good way). A woman describes her experiences when she took a job as a teenager (14 years old). She was a live-in babysitter for a well-to-do family for a few weeks. The kids were young, both under six. The kids' uncle is visiting; he is married but arrived alone. And he is young enough to be attractive to the babysitter. That is the setup for the story, but I can't say much more about it. The writing is beautiful, the events and feelings are described well and feel real. 

“Five Tuesdays in Winter”

This one is easy to describe, and it was just as good as the first one. It is a love story, plain and simple, and it is a lovely one. The characters are a reticent bookstore owner, his twelve-year-old daughter, and a woman who has recently been hired to work at the store. 

This quote from the story reveals a bit of his character:

"Mitchell's daughter, who was twelve, accused him of loving his books but hating his customers. He didn't hate them. He just didn't like having to chat with them or lead them to very clearly marked sections – if they couldn't read signs, why were they buying books? – while they complained that nothing was arranged by title. He would have liked to have a bouncer at the door, a man with a rippled neck who would turn people away or quietly remove them when they revealed too much ignorance."

"North Sea"

This story is about grief and the relationship between a mother and her daughter. Oda's husband died unexpectedly, leaving her and her young daughter with very little money. Since his death, their relationship has been strained. Oda plans a vacation in hopes of mending their relationship. I liked the story but it was bleaker than the others.

“When in the Dordogne”

The first three stories I read featured young girls, either preteens or early teens. I read a fourth story to see if each story in the book was going to follow this pattern. But in “When in the Dordogne,” the main character and narrator is a fourteen-year-old boy. His parents go on an extended summer vacation because his father has had a breakdown and needs relaxation. 

The first paragraph:

"The summer of 1986, the summer I was fourteen, my parents went to the Dordogne for eight weeks. My father had been unwell, and it was thought that France, where he had studied as a young man, would enable his recovery. Through the university’s employment office, my mother hired two sophomores to house-sit for the time they would be out of the country. As I came with the house, these two college boys were obliged to take care of me, too."

Right there I knew it was going to be a great story and I was right.