Spell the Month in Books: September

 

Reviews From the Stacks

For 2025 I have decided to have a go at Spell the Month in Books which is hosted at Reviews From the Stacks. The link party opens on the first Saturday of the month, but I won't be posting until after that as I already have other things scheduled every Saturday and for the first two Sundays of the month. I will be sharing this post with Sunday Salon hosted at Readerbuzz.

The idea is that you use the titles of books to spell the month name. The theme for September is Something to Savor – longer books (define as you will) OR ones that have been on your TBR for a long time. I am going to do something a bit different from the theme this month. My twist is that I am going to use the concept of long in a few different ways

Let's get started!

S - Song of the Sun God by Shankari Chandran - I chose this one because we are about to visit Sri Lanka. It is a destination that has been on my bucket list for a long time and I am really looking for

E - Emma by Jane Austen - Written so long ago but I still haven't read it

P - Persuasion by Jane Austen - Although I have read both Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice

T - Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich - I have been keeping a spreadsheet of all of the books I have read for the last 21 years which is a long time! This is the first title that is on my list of books read that starts with T (not counting the ones that begin with the word The)

E - The Endless Forest by Sara Donati - This is the final book in the Into the Wilderness series, which are all long books!

M - Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - I listened to this so long ago it was on cassette tapes. Funnily enough I got to the last cassette, and it was damaged, so I ended up having to go to the library to read the last few chapters!

B - Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth - Part historical fiction but also part retelling of Rapunzel fairy tale where she has to let down her long hair

E - The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde - I loved the Jasper Fforde books especially the Thursday Next books, but it has been a long time since I read this author

R - The Red Tent by Anita Diamant - one of the first books I ever reviewed around 20 years ago which is so long ago

October's theme is Trick or Treat – Books that you feel strongly about whether positively or negatively. Should be a bit easier month with the only challenge being two O books that meet the prompt!

Six Degrees of Separation: All Fours to War and Peace

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best. The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links. I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

This month's starting point is All Fours by Miranda July which is nominated for 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Nominated or not, it's a book that I am really not interested in reading based on the things I have heard about it!

My first link is based on the number 4 and takes me to The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde. This is the second book in the Nursery Crimes series, which I seem to have enjoyed a lot when I read it 19 years ago (my review)

My next choice used the word bear as the link and is The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden. This is a book that I started on audio years ago and have never quite finished. One day.

This time, I am using the nightingale as connected to The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. This is a book that I also listened to on audio but the difference is that I did finish it! 

Next, I am using the word nightingale as my connection to The Rose of Sebastopol by Katherine McMahon. How does that work you might wonder? Well, this book tells the story of a young woman who went to the Crimea to work alongside Florence Nightingale. (my review)

This week I have been reading The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn, which is partially set in and around Sebastopol during WWII.

And next, we make a leap to War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. The connection on this one is probably a bit obscure but I chose it because one of the characters in The Diamond Eye carries a copy of War and Peace around with him on the battlefield. This also acted as a reminder that I am a bit behind on my chapter a day readalong!

I am pretty sure that there is no way that I can link All Fours to War and Peace to come full circle! Another time!

Next month, the starting point is 2025 Stella Prize winner, Michelle de Kretser’s , Theory & Practice.

Will you be joining us?

Six Degrees of Separation: Trust to Lords of the White Castle

 

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links.  I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz. 

 

This month the starting point is Trust by Hernan Diaz

My first link is using the surname Diaz. I have chosen the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

From there, my next choice is an Oscar winner, The Lost Thing by Australian author Shaun Tan.

There are many books that we could choose for the word lost. In fact, I once did a whole post just about lost things for Top Ten Tuesday not too long ago.  I have chosen The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde for this post.

My next link is to Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey.

I am once again linking from the surname, this time to Howls Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones

And for my last link I am using the word castle to Lords of the White Castle by Elizabeth Chadwick

Next month the starting point is Passages by Gail Sheehy.

Top Ten Tuesday: By the numbers

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's theme is Books with Numbers in the Title. 

I haven't done a TTT for a few months as I have been too busy at work to do the thinking and composing that is required for one of these posts, but this week I have time off so it seems like a good time to make the effort. When I started thinking about this topic, I was sure that I had already done a post with this theme but it turns out I might have only done this in my head. Recently I nearly did a Six Degrees of Separation post using numbers but decided against it for the same reason.

I am still going to go with my original idea which is a play on numbers rather than specifically in the title. Let's see how this go

Battle Royale by Lucy Parker - my first book by this author, but not the last. Also the first book in the Palace Insiders series.

Second Place by Rachel Cusk - I listened to Rachel Cusk's session at Melbourne Writers Festival. I am not sure that she is an author that I would read but it was interesting listening to her talk.

The Cartographer's Secret by Tea Cooper - the third book that I gave a rating of 5/5 this year.

The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde - For obvious reasons.

The Life She Imagines by Maggie Christensen - The fifth book in the Granite Springs series.

The Time of Singing by Elizabeth Chadwick - the sixth book I read by Elizabeth Chadwich. She has a new book out which is why I had her on my mind. I also need to get back and read her as I am now a few books behind.

The Seven Sisters by Lucida Riley - Another obvious choice.

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff -  I know....cheating! but it starts with an 8 right?

Snowy Mountains Daughter by Alissa Callen - The ninth book I read this year. The next book in this series has recently been announced and I can't wait to read it!

The Sundial by Shirley Jackson - the tenth book on my kindle to read right now. This is the upcoming group read for RIP XVI. 

Top Ten Tuesday: From draft to published

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's theme is Spring Cleaning Freebie (for example, books you’re planning to get rid of for whatever reason, book’s you’d like to clean off your TBR by either reading them or deciding you’re not interested, books that feel fresh and clean to you after winter is over, etc.).

My choice is to clean out a draft blog post from a few weeks ago. The theme on February 23 was books which made you laugh and I had created a list of potential choices but I was too busy with work to put any words in place or pictures or anything else and so it was still sitting in draft unpublished.

Pratchett, Pratchett, Pratchett  - doesn't really matter which book really..

Jasper Fforde - I was a big fan of the Thursday Next books.

Beach Read by Emily Henry - My romance reading has completely changed over the years. Once upon a time I read mainly historicals, with some paranormal and the occasional contemporary romance. Now I read a lot of contemporary romance, with some historical and no paranormal at all. This was a fun, read in one sitting contemporary

Jenny Colgan is great at the funny story with a lot of depth. I have really enjoyed a couple of her series!

Marian Keyes -another author that makes me laugh, especially her early books. The later ones not so much!

The Amelia Peabody mysteries by Elizabeth Peters  - an eccentric archeologist family gallivanting around Egypt, stumbling onto mystery after mystery! So much fun.

The Prenup by Lauren Layne - a recent fun contemporary read

Chocolate Cake for Breakfast by Danielle Hawkins - So many contemporary women's fictions novels have the balance  between romance, issues and humour just right! This author gives us a great Kiwi spin on the genre!

The early books in the Stephanie Plum series were makes you cry you are laughing so hard. The later ones make me roll my eyes in exasperation, but I had to include her because of those early books.

I mentioned contemporary romance novels earlier in this post, so it's only right that I includes a historical novelist as well. Tessa Dare makes me laugh every time I read one of her books!

Six Degrees of Separation: Rodham to Light Between Oceans

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links.  I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

The starting point this month is Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld. I can't imagine that I will ever read this book as I don't think it is my kind of book. It is an alternate telling of the life of Hilary Rodham Clinton, asking the question of what her life would have been like had she not married Bill Clinton.

For my first link in the chain, I have gone down the alternate history route, but kind of an extreme alternate. In the world that that Jasper Fforde has created for the Thursday Next series,  which starts with The Eyre Affair, dodos are the pet of choice, you can travel from one side of the world to the other in a tube, and the Crimean War still rages on even though it is 1985.

For my next link, I am focusing on the Crimean War and choosing The Rose of Sebastopol by Katharine McMahon. The Rose of Sebastopol is about a young woman who goes off to the Crimean War to be a nurse alongside Florence Nightingale.

I am following the war time nurse thread for my next link which is to Daughter of Mars by Thomas Keneally. This book is about a young woman who heads off from country Australia to the front in World War I.

Normally I try to use books I have read for these posts, but this time I am using a book I am going to read as my next link. The Wreck is by Meg Keneally, who is Thomas Keneally's daughter. They have written a historical mystery series together which I also have on my shelves, but this book is due to be released this month.

From here I kind of got stuck on the lighthouse motif, choosing Lighthouse Bay by Kimberly Freeman, because lighthouses are supposed to try and prevent wrecks, and because it is a really good book!

For my final link I chose Light Between Oceans by M L Stedman, once again because of the lighthouse, although I was trying to make a pun about preventing physical wrecks but not necessarily preventing emotional wrecks! It's a stretch though.

For this month I have travelled from an alternate world where dodos and mammoths roam to the Crimea, to the Mediterranean of WWI and then to the Australian coast. Where have your links taken you?

Next month's starting point is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

TSS: Footnotes

Have I mentioned lately that I am reading War and Peace at the moment? I may have done once or twice mainly because I am pretty pleased with myself for giving this a go!  I am not surprised that I am enjoying it, because I know that I liked Anna Karenina, but it still took a while to get to the point of wanting to read the next Tolstoy novel.

One of the things that I have been thinking about whilst reading it is the use of notes related to the text. Just recently I was also reading Mort by Terry Pratchett, who is a contemporary author who loves to use footnotes in his Discworld novels, as does another favourite novelist of mine, Jasper Fforde. Now to put Tolstoy, Pratchett and Fforde in the same post may seem like a bit of a stretch, but I am going to do it anyway.

In classics the use of notes, whether they be footnotes, or notes that are at the back of the book (what are they called when they are at the back of the book anyway?), is very prevalent. A lot of the time they are there to explain contextual points that the original audience would have already been familiar with and would have understood but that for the modern reader have been lost in the sands of time.

Today's post really is a question about how people read footnotes/annotations. I tend to put the bookmark at the page where the relevant notes for this section are so that I can easily flick back and forward and I read the note as soon as I see it mentioned the number annotating that there is a note in the text. Is this what other readers do as well, or do you read to the end of the paragraph and then go back and read the notes?

Do you prefer your notes to be at the back of the book or to be at the bottom of the page? For the translation I am reading of War and Peace there wasn't really an option to put the notes at the bottom of the page, because there is quite a lot of the text that was originally written in French, and a little bit of German, and it has been left as French and German in the translation, and therefore at the bottom of the page there is the English translation.

So how do Pratchett and Fforde fit into this discussion? Both of the authors like to have what I think of as almost asides in the footnotes. Some times in Pratchett's case they could be notes that go off on a tangent or just a funny comment.

I have often wondered how audiobooks deal with the footnotes. Is it different for the contemporary novelist than it is for the classics?

So, on this cool wintery Sunday (for me at least), let's talk footnotes.

Warning - Jasper Fforde Ffangirl behaviour!

I noticed when I was on Amazon UK tonight that the new Thursday Next cover and blurb is now up for the UK version. This is the version that we will most likely get! Can I just say.....I cannot wait to get this!!! It doesn't come out until July though.

Fourteen years after Thursday Next pegged out at Superhoop '88, her Jurisfiction job has been downgraded due to a potential conflict of interest, since her previous adventures are now themselves in print. Thursday's time is spent worrying about her teenage son Friday and tutoring new recruits. This being fiction, however, jeopardy is never far away. Sherlock Holmes is killed at the Rheinbach falls and his series is stopped in its tracks. Before this can be righted, Miss Marple dies in a narratively inexplicable car accident, bringing her series also to a close. Thursday, receiving a death-threat clearly intended for her written self, realises what is going on - there is a serial killer is loose in the Bookworld. Meanwhile, Goliath have perfected a 22-seater Prose Portal Luxury Coach, and plan on taking literary tourists on a holiday to the works of Jane Austen. Thursday alone realises the true intent of Goliath's unwanted incursions into fiction, but she can't fight all these battles on her own. She must team up with the one person she really can't get along with - the written Thursday Next, currently starring in The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco. But it's no time to be picky...

Reading that blurb makes me want it NOW! Good thing it is already on request at the library and I am no. 1 in the queue!

Fforde ffans?

I just found out today that the next Thursday Next book that is due to be released in July has undergone a title change. Instead of War of the Words it is going to be called First Amongst Sequels.

I cannot wait for it to come out....whatever it is called!!

The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde

The Gingerbreadman - psychopath, sadist, genius, convicted murderer and biscuit - is loose in the streets of Reading.

It isn't Jack Spratt's case. Despite the success of the Humpty Dumpty investigation, the well publicised failure to prevent Red Riding Hood and her Gran being eaten once again plunges the Nursery Crime Division into controversy.

Enforced non-involvement with the Gingerbreadman hunt looks to be frustrating until a chance encounter at the oddly familiar Deja-vu Club leads them onto the hunt for missing journalist Henrietta 'Goldy' Hatchett, star reporter for The Daily Toad.

The last witnesses to see her alive were The Three Bears, comfortably living out a life of rural solitude in Anderson's wood. But all is not what it seems. Are the unexplained explosions around the globe somehow related to missing nuclear scientist Angus McGuffin? Is cucumber growing really that dangerous? Why are National Security involved?

But most important of all: how could the bears' porridge be at such disparate temperatures when they were poured at the same time?

It is probably fair to say that I am a bit of a Jasper Fforde fangirl. I started reading the Thursday Next series of books a couple of years ago, and then had to wait patiently for his next book (The Big Over Easy) to come out, and then more patiently for this one! I do have to say though that I was actually a bit disappointed by The Big Over Easy, maybe just because it wasn't a Thursday Next book! Thankfully, Fforde has another winner on his hands with this book, and now I have to wait even more impatiently for the next two books - one to be published next year called War of the Words is another Thursday Next book, and the next Nursery Crime book after that!

I actually finished this a couple of weeks ago, so please forgive me if the details are a bit thin on the ground. Actually, they may have been that way anyway given that there was so much going on in this novel - Jack and his wife having issues because she doesn't seem to be aware that he is a Nursery Rhyme character, exploding cucumbers, a psychopathic killer Gingerbreadman on the loose (is he a cake or a biscuit?), a missing investigative reporter by the name of Goldie, Jack getting suspended from work, porridge as a restricted foodstuff and an out of this world experience for one of the characters amongst other things! Fforde manages to include these and many other ideas that range from just plain silly to laugh out loud funny, and yet the story still works as a mystery, with red herrings a plenty, clashes with authority and a terrific finale.

The characters of Jack and Mary Mary are much better defined in this novel, as are many of the other characters including the other members of the Nursery Crime Division, especially Ashley. The scene where Mary Mary meets his parents is very, very funny.

A fair indication of Fforde's humour can be gauged from the opening paragraph in the book:

The little village of Obscurity is remarkable only for its unremarkableness. Passed over for inclusion in almost every publication from the Domesday Book to Thirty Places Not Worth Visiting in Berkshire, the small hamlet is also a cartographic omission, an honour it shares with the neighbouring village of Hiding and Cognito. Indeed, the status of Obscurity was once thought so tenuous that some of the more philosophically inclined residents considered the possibility that since the village didn't exit then they might not exist either, and hurriedly placed 'existential question of being' on the parish council agenda, where it still resides, after much unresolved discussion, between 'church roof fund' and 'any other business'.

I just wish that Fforde could get all his crazy ideas on paper and have those new books out a bit quicker!! In the meantime there are always lots of fun things on his websites (www.nurserycrimes.co.uk for the Nursery Crime books and www.jasperfforde.com for lots of things related to both series!)

Rating 4.5/5