2021 Week Two

Having finished my first book in the Goodreads Reading the Classics Challenge, I’ve started the second. The Prince by Machiavelli is also very short, so I’m not expecting it to take me too long. So far, there’s nothing terribly outrageous in it. Machiavelli is sharing a lifetime of political expertise with the person he hopes will give him a job, so he gives examples from what were at the time current political events, explaining why the person concerned made the right or wrong decision. He was spoilt for choice, as both the king of France and the (uncrowned) Holy Roman Emperor had their eyes on Italy at the time. He talks about those a ruler can afford to upset and those he can’t and why when he takes over a new territory. It’s cold-blooded, but it’s rational.

Last week I mentioned that I am, according to Goodreads, currently reading almost 50 books. It’s true that I have started and not finished them, but I’m not currently, as in actively, reading them all. Some of them are reference books that I started and realised partway through I wasn’t ready for. Three or four are French novels and I couldn’t get into them at all. I will get through them, but they’re not a priority at the moment. Two are in German and one novel is just too hard for me in it’s vocabulary and the other has too many cultural references for me to understand. I’ll read the first one day, but I’m not sure about the second. I’m reading a couple of books about running that can stand being read in chunks and four books on writing that can’t. I’ll have to start them again. There are a few books on handcrafts that have lovely pictures accompanied by indifferent text. They’ll take a while to get through. I’m sticking to my plan to finish as many of them as possible this year, though.

This week, although I finished a book in this category, I made things worse by starting two new books. One is a recently published book on weight loss maintenance by a friend of mine, so I couldn’t not buy it and start reading it straightaway, and the other is The Prince. I’ve removed The Gunpowder Plot by Antonia Fraser from the list. I was rereading it after I came across it during a clear out of my bookshelves last year. I was about halfway through when I lost interest in it and I’ve decided that I’m not going to continue with it.

The year is off to a good start.

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2019 Week Forty-Seven

Last week I complained about nothing happening in Angel Pavement by J.B. Priestley. It was a premature complaint and the final hundred or so pages were full of incident. I have finished the novel and it has left me, I think, disappointed. It’s full of period detail, which is interesting. Priestley admitted, though, that he got almost everything wrong about the business of Twigg and Dersingham, the company for whom the main characters work.  The office life he described, however, was still recognisable to someone who started work in an office 50 years after the period in which the novel was set.

Finishing Angel Pavement has given me more time to read Antonia Fraser’s Gunpowder Plot, which I left before I’d reached the halfway point. It’s the summer of 1605 and the plotters are putting their plans, such as they were, into action. I say ‘such as they were’ since Fraser insists that they didn’t really have any plans beyond blowing up parliament and making James I’s daughter the puppet ruler. They didn’t even seem to have any idea about whose puppet she would be.

I’ve finally read a story by Eudora Welty that I enjoyed. It’s Moon Lake, a story about two girls and the Boy Scout lifeguard at a girls’ summer camp. Strictly speaking, I suppose it’s a coming of age story, of which I’m not normally fond, but I was predisposed to enjoy it by the appearance of the lifeguard, who features as a sickly boy in an earlier story in the collection. It was reassuring to know that he grew out of his illness. This single story doesn’t redeem the whole collection in my eyes, but it does make the prospect of the remaining 300 pages a little less terrifying.

We’re almost into December, which means it’s time to start thinking about books for next year’s Reading the Classics Challenge. I have some ideas, but I’ve misplaced one of the books I was intending to include. That’s what comes of having too many books.

Books read in challenge: 10
Books read in year: 44

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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2019 Week Forty

Having finished one of the books in the Goodreads Reading the Classics Challenge, I’m treating myself to the last (so far) Shardlake novel – Tombland. It’s a very long book, so it will probably take me longer than usual to read it. So far, I’ve read a lot of backstory and scene-setting. The murder that Shardlake is to investigate has taken place, but he’s a long way from the scene of the murder. He’s now working for the Lady Elizabeth, second in line to the throne. Shardlake sets off on his mission with a surprisingly light heart, given how badly his recent entanglements with the Tudors have turned out. I’m sure things will start to go wrong soon.

In La Nuit Des Temps things have started to get exciting. A sphere the size of a ten-story house made of gold has been discovered far below the surface of the ice in Antartica and three men have died trying to get into it. The novel was written in the 1960s and I’ve just read a description of how the whole world is able to watch the scientists attempt to enter the sphere by means of television signals and satellites. This was relatively new and exciting technology in the 60s, but seems outdated now.

I’m still reading Antonia Fraser’s account of the Gunpowder Plot.  So far it’s quite hard to get to grips with why the plotters thought that assassinating the king, most of the royal family, the lords and the bishops would bring about a Catholic utopia in England. Perhaps that will become clear later.

Books read in challenge: 8
Books read in year: 39

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon

2019 Week Thirty-Nine

I have finished The Bostonians. Contrary to early indications, I enjoyed it very much.  It was the eighth book in this year’s Goodreads Reading the Classics Challenge, which means I’m a book behind. I still have three long books to read and one very short book. I’ll probably read the short book next, as that will give me the opportunity to catch up and finish reading The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. These are proving to be rather depressing and it’s an effort to go back to them.

In other reading, I’ve started Antonia Fraser’s The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605. The Gunpowder Plot isn’t an event that interested me very much in the past, although I was obviously interested enough at some point to buy the book, but I follow the Earl of Southampton’s Cat blog, which relates events from the end of Elizabeth I’s reign from a cat’s point of view. The blog has just reached November 1605, but we were discussing the plot some time ago, when the BBC showed a drama that was very sympathetic to the Catholic point of view. Since Lady Antonia is a Catholic, I’m expecting hers to be a sympathetic treatment.

Books read in challenge: 8
Books read in year: 38

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon