This week....

I'm reading...

This week my middle of the night read was The Secrets of Saffron Hall by Clare Marchant. I love a good dual timeline book, especially one where there is an old building filled with secrets, so this book ticks all my boxes. What I had forgotten between the time when I requested this book and when I started reading it was that this is a novel that is set in Tudor times. Back in the day I used to read a lot of Tudor books until I got to the point where I was all Tudored out and it has become much rarer for me to choose to read a book set in this era. This isn't set in the court of Henry VIII but rather in a wealthy Catholic merchant's home, so I assume we are going to be learning more about the dissolution of the monasteries. So far I am enjoying it. I will confess that ones of the reasons I wanted to read this book is because of the cover!

I finished my last audiobook, so I thought that I would listen to the new audio short story that has been released by Dervla McTiernan. It is called The Roommate, and it features a very young garda Cormac Reilly as he investigates a young woman's murder. There is another of these short audio stories available on Audible called The Sisters which I read a while ago now. It's a good way to get a taste of Dervla  McTiernan's writing and to put yourself back in Cormac Reilly's world for just a couple of hours. 

I guess I need to line up my next audiobook given that this one is only just over 2 hours long.

I'm watching...

I mentioned last week that we had started watching a South African series called Trackers. Originally we were just going to watch each new episode weekly as they were released,but we were looking for something else and found the whole series on yet another streaming service. We therefore watched the whole series, and I have to say it was really good. The first episode was a bit slow while they introduced all the characters but after that the series moved at a good pace. The end of the series is definitely set up for a second season, which I guess is par for course these days. I would definitely watch a second series though. I had read one of the books that this series is loosely based on but I would like to read more.

After finishing that we were looking for another series to watch, and we ended up on deciding to start watching series 2 of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and ended up watching three episodes. We did particularly enjoy watching the first two episodes which were partially set in Paris. Felt a bit like an extension to Paris In July.

This week....

The bad news this week was that we have had to cancel our trip to Uluru in mid September. We booked this weekend away months ago because it is a place that neither of us have ever been to before and it is on our must do list.  We will rebook when we can but for now we don't really have any idea of when we are going to be able to leave our state again as a lot of the state borders are closed to Victorians right now. Luckily the hotel was super quick in refunding. I still have to contact the airline as I think they will only offer vouchers but we will see what happens.

Despite not being able to leave home due to being in Lockdown2.0 we did still have a good weekend. I attended a number of Melbourne Writers Festival sessions and I have a few more to attend this week. I also tried something new this week. I made macarons. I've never done that before so it was a bit nerve wracking, but overall I am happy with how they turned out, even if they do look a little bit like minions!

The other thing that happened this week is that I reached my Goodreads Reading Challenge total! This has surprised me because I haven't reached this number of books for years. I have now revised my target to 75, which is still a long way from my reading hey day of around 250 books in a year, but you know what, I am happy with that. My life is a lot more balanced than it previously was.

Don't forget you can now follow my blog on Facebook here.

Posts from the last week

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Colour in the Title
Bookish Quotes: Real Art
Weekend Cooking: P is for Pizza
Review: Tiny White Lies
Sunday Salon: MWF Digital Week 1

I've linked this post to It's Monday, what are you reading? as hosted by Book Date

RIP XIII

Whilst I am not reading anywhere near as many books as I used to, things are much better than they have been over the last few years when it comes to reading. I think last year I read 12 books in total for the year. 12!! A few years ago, reading 12 books in a month would have been a bad month! At the moment, I am on track to read about 50 books for this year, which I am pretty happy with.

When I was on Instagram the other day I saw about RIPXIII - the Readers Imbibing Peril challenge that is hosted at Readers Imbibing Peril. This is a challenge that I used to look forward to every year, and that I participated in regularly. It is something of a shock to realise that I haven't participated in it for 5 years. When I was thinking about my previous participation in this challenge it has lead me to think about so many people who blogged but have now disappeared, including Carl who originally hosted this challenge. It pleased me to see that the challenge is still recognisable as the RIP reading challenge of old, but still moving forward as well.

When I looked at what I want to read over the next few weeks though, I realised that quite a few of the books I want to read fit the challenge criteria which is to read and enjoy books that are

Mystery.

Suspense.

Thriller.

Dark Fantasy.

Gothic.

Horror.

Supernatural

The books that I have in mind to read before the end of October include The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan, The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton and Lethal White by Robert Galbraith.  I am thinking that I am going to try and stretch myself to read one more and therefore meet the Peril the IVth level of participation. I have no idea if I will actually review any other books, but there's still fun to be had on Litsy, Instagram, Twitter etc even if that doesn't actually happen.

I actually finished listening to The Ruin yesterday and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. The audiobook was narrated by Aoife McMahon and she did a great job in telling the story. I wasn't always 100% convinced by her Irish-Australian accent, but I think that every Irish-Australian out there probably have different inflections in their accent anyway. I also swear that at one point the wrong name (Ella) was used for a character  (Emma) but I didn't end up trying to find it again to see if it really happened of it was just my hearing!

The story itself was interesting. It starts with a young police man being sent to a house where there has been a report of domestic violence but when he gets there he finds two kids who have been obviously neglected and abused, and their dead mother who has apparently died of a heroin overdose.

Fast forward 20 years and Cormac Reilly has just returned to Galway having lived in Dublin for many years and worked his way up into specialist units in the Garda. He has returned to Galway for personal reasons and finds himself ostracised from his colleagues, not knowing if he can trust some people he called friends, suspicious of some of the events that are happening within the station and only being allocated cold cases.

One of the cold cases he is allocated to reinvestigate is the death of the mother, and he is taken back in time to the case that he has thought of many times over the years. But when the young boy, now grown, is found dead in a suspected suicide, things get complicated.

I enjoyed the narrative a lot, and I like that this is the first in a series. I particularly like that there are still threads of the story that I suspect will flow into the next book. I think we got to know just enough about Cormac in this book to keep me reading, without having his whole backstory overwhelm the storyline of the book.

Dervla McTiernan is an Irish born author who moved to Australia a few years ago. It's a long standing Aussie tradition to claim anyone with this kind of background as an Aussie, and I am therefore counting this towards the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

I never really wrote a post declaring that I was participating in the challenge this year, but I would say at least half of the books I am reading at the moment are by Australian women writers, so my participation in this challenge over the last five or six years has definitely left a lasting impact on my reading choices.

Rating 4.5/5