Six Degrees of Separation: Intermezzo to The Kamogawa Food Detectives

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 Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I have read one Sally Rooney book but I am not sure if I will give this one a go or not. If I do, it will be on audio so that the lack of punctuation doesn't bother me.

Rather than go with another Sally Rooney book, I decided to take a different route.  Intermezzo is a musical term. I am therefore choosing A Good American by Alex George because of the musical notes on the cover.

In my review of that book I mentioned jazz, which is music I associate with New Orleans. How to Mend a Broken Heart by Rachael Johns is set in New Orleans.

When I did a post about this book, I shared some photos of our time in New Orleans. We visited a couple of houses that author Sara Donati visited as part of her research into her book Queen of Swords.

Another place that I have visited after reading about it is St Malo which I read about in Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See.

From there we go from something we cannot see to something we apparently can see in Seeing a Large Cat by Elizabeth Peters. 

And for the last link, a cat features on the cover of Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai.

Where did your chain take you this month?

Next month, the starting point is Sandwich by Catherine Newman. 

Six Degrees of Separation: Long Island to Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles.

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 for this month is Long Island by Colm Toibin. 

I wasn't really sure which direction I wanted to go this month. There are always options, but in the end I decided to spin off of the word island and chose  Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak.

Elif Shafak has recently released a new book called There are Rivers in the Sky so this is my next choice.

From there I am taking the word sky and choose He Shall Thunder in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters, which is part of the Amelia Peabody series set in Egypt.

I could have gone in several directions, but I have chosen to use the first name of the author, Elizabeth and I picked To Defy a King by Elizabeth Chadwick

Using the word King, I have chosen Lady Macbeth by Susan Frazer King. When we were in Scotland we heard a bit about Macbeth, about how he was a real king although some of the other history was incorrect, and along with how historically incorrect the move Braveheart was.

Another historical figure we heard a lot about was Mary Queen of Scots so I have chosen the book by Margaret George about her, Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. I would say that almost brings me to back full circle to our starting point!

Next month, the starting point is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. Whereas I normally think of a starting book pretty much straight away, I am coming up blank so far. Good job I have a month to think of something.

Top Ten Tuesday: Fancy fonts

 

 

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This 

week the theme is

Typographic Book Covers (Book covers with a design that is all or mostly all words. You can also choose to do books with nice typography if that’s easier!) (Submitted by Mareli @ Elza Reads)


It is interesting when you look at trends in covers. If we look at historical romance as an example. Not too long ago most covers were clinch covers with women in gorgeous dresses but these days it isn't as standard. Now, there are font covers or cartoonny in amongst the big dresses.


I haven't focussed on just one genre, but here is my Top Ten Tuesday post featuring typographic book covers.

One for the Money by Janet Evanovich - The reality is that you could have picked any one of the Stephanie Plum books as they are pretty much all typographic covers!

Love Stories by Trent Dalton - Given that this is a selection of very short stories, this cover makes sense as there isn't one single story to tell

Someone I Used to Know by Paige Toon - Plenty of rom-coms have wordy covers!

The Year the Maps Changed by Danielle Binks - This cover is very eye catching.

The Great Passage by Shion Miura - This book is all about the words, inside and out!



The People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry - All of Emily Henry's covers have been wordy so far.

Red White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston - Such a fun cover and book!

Normal People by Sally Rooney - Quite a few of the covers for this book have bold typography on the cover.

Don't You Forget About Me - Another author who has a lot of these style of covers.

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes - This cover does not convey the emotional nature of this book at all!

Do you like typographic covers?

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with no words

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week the topic is Books Too Good to Review Properly (I have no words!) (Submitted by Dedra @ A Book Wanderer). I have decided instead to do a twist on this and do Books with No Words. Now it's not that the books don't have words, it's just that I listened to them and so I didn't actually do the reading.


So, here are the last ten books I listened to on audio.

Taste: My Life in Food by Stanley Tucci- read by Tucci himself. Very enjoyable.

Before the Coffee Goes Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (translated by Geoffrey Trousselot) - Right now I am all about short, engaging audiobooks and this one fits the bill. I think that the follow up book to this will be my next audiobook.

The Hogfather by Terry Pratchett - Listened to this just before Christmas. Thinking I might do that again too.

The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley  - One of my all time favourite books

The Sun Sister by Lucinda Riley - Part of the Seven Sisters series. I have listened to them all on audio.

The Roommate by Dervla McTiernan - Connected to the Cormac O'Reilly mystery series.

Normal People by Sally Rooney - You don't notice things like missing speach quotation marks when you are listening to a book instead of reading it.

The Switch by Beth O'Leary - One of the narrators of this book was Daisy Edgar-Jones who starred in the TV adapttion of Normal People.

The Good Turn by Dervla McTiernan - This is another of the books in the Cormac O'Reilly series. I think I have listened to them all on audio too.

The Bookshop on the Shore by Jenny Colgan - I enjoy Jenny Colgan's books and this is another author who I tend to read on audio instead of reading the book.

Have you listened to any of these?

Bookish Quotes: Real Art

I have both listened to Normal People and watched the TV adaptation over the last few months. 

One of the things about listening to a book is that if you hear something that think would make a good quote, it's really difficult to get the quote to share. It's also a bit difficult to skip to the end of the book I probably shouldn't mention that.

When I was listening to the book there were a couple of lines in this quote that really caught my attention, so I straight away requested the ebook from the library. It has taken months for the book to come in and then I nearly missed it because you don't get a notification when the books comes in on the app. Luckily, I checked just in time.

This was also the only book that I borrowed from the library this week too, so this post is doubling up as my Library Loot post as well.

But here's the quote:

This is what it's like in Dublin. All Connell's classmates have identical accents and carry the same size MacBook under their arms. In seminars they express their opinions passionately and conduct impromptu debates. Unable to form such straightforward views or express them with any force, Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students, as if he had upgraded himself to an intellectual level far above his own, where he had to strain to make sense of the most basic premises. He did gradually start to wonder why all their classroom discussions were so abstract and lacking in textual detail, and eventually he realised that most people were not actually doing the reading. They were coming into college every day to have heated debates about books they had not read. He understands now that his classmates are not like him. It's easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don't worry about appearing ignorant or conceited. They are not stupid people, but they're not so much smarter than him either. They just move through the world in a different way, and he'll probably never really understand them, and he knows they will never understand him, or even try.


He only has a few classes every week anyway, so he fills the rest of the time by reading. In the evenings he stays late in the library, reading assigned texts, novels, works of literary criticism. Not having friends to eat with, he reads over lunch. At the weekends when there's football on, he checks the team news and then goes back to reading instead of watching the build-up. One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma when it  seems like Mr Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a strange state of emotional agitation.  He's amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it "the pleasure of being touched by real art." In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr Knightley kisses Emma's hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is indirect. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries

Reading Reflections: June 2020

Here we are...half way through the year already! How did that happen?

June was not a bad reading month for me. A bit of historical fiction, a bit of contemporary fiction, some Australian authors, some not.

Here's what I read:

The Palace of Tears by Julian Leatherdale - 4.5/5

This is the first book I read by Julian Leatherdale, who was an Australian author. The book was inspired by a hotel in the Blue Mountains just outside Sydney. I thoroughly enjoyed this one and am definitely intending to read the other two books that were published before he unfortunately passed away earlier this year.

Normal People by Sally Rooney - 4/5

I had so many thoughts about this book, and then the TV series which I also watched this month, and yet I haven't written any of them down yet. I actually listened to this one on audio which I think helped because I didn't have to notice that the speech marks were missing. A brief summary of my thoughts - what makes this literature instead of young adult fiction?

The Silk House by Katye Nunn - 4/5

This is the first book I have read by Katye Nunn but it won't be the last. I did a joint review of this one with Bree from All the Books I Can Read. You can read our thoughts here.

Aria's Travelling Bookshop by Rebecca Raisin - 3.5/5

Books, food and France. What more can you want?

Henrietta's War by Joyce Dennys 4.5/5

If I had to pick a best book of the month it would be this one. The irony is that this book has been on my bookshelf for more than 10 years, and in the end I only picked it up because I featured it as part of a Top Ten list. This book is a series of letters that were published during WWII and were then put together in a collection. The writer is writing to her childhood friend who is off fighting the war and she shares a series of anecdotes about life in her small village.

The House on Boundary Street by Tea Cooper 3.5/5

Part of the reason I mentioned the hotel when I talked about the Julian Leatherdale's book is because the same hotel is mentioned in this book. I do have a review half written on this book. Just need to finish it. I did enjoy some of the information about Sydney in the 1920s.

The New Beginnings Coffee Club by SamanthaTonge 4.5/5

This was my middle of the night read last week. It was also my first book by this British author. My library doesn't seem to have any more but I will be keeping my out for her books going forward.

I am linking my post up to the Monthly Wrap up which is hosted at Feed Your Fiction Addiction

Six Degrees of Separation: Normal People to The Ship of Brides

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.

I haven't always read the books that we start off with but I did just finish listen to Normal People this week which is the starting book for this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation. I think I got it either as a freebie or cheap daily deal from Audible a while ago. When I finished my last audiobook I looked at the books I had available in my account. There was one that was more than 32 hours, and a couple of others that were more than 25 hours, and I just wasn't ready to commit to an audiobook that long. At just under 8 hours, Normal People was an ideal choice. and the narration by Aiofe McMahon was really good.

The reason I specifically mentioned Aiofe McMahon as the narrator is that she was also the narrator for The Good Turn by Dervla McTiernan, which was the audiobook that I finished before Normal People. The Good Turn is a very different book to Normal People so it was a bit of a shock to hear the same narrator but you get used to it pretty quickly. I have had that happen to me before too! The Good Turn was an excellent entry in the Cormac Reilly series, and I can't wait to read more.

Another Irish really good crime series is Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad.  I read the early books in this series years ago (before it was even really considered a series. I do have a couple of books left to read at some point too. The first book of this series is In the Woods.

Woods play an important role in many books, and particularly in fairy tales and fantasy. For my next book I have chosen Stardust by Neil Gaiman. I love this book but it is one of the few examples where the movie is better than the book - marginally - mainly thanks to Robert De Niro as Captain Shakespeare!

I can't really remember if the movie of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green was better than the book but it was enjoyable. Good job then that isn't the link that I am using. Rather it is the word star that is the link. I did a conversational review about this book and the first question I asked was Did you cry?  to which my answer was yet.

However, it wasn't ugly, sobbing crying which is what I have felt all three times I have read Me Before You by Jojo Moyes which is my next choice. This book ripped my heart out, stomped on it a couple of times and then stuffed it back in upside down. There are two other books in this series which are good but didn't get me in the same way. As an aside, if you are a fan of the Lou Clark trilogy which this is the first book for, check out the COVID-10/Isolation short story which you can read here.

I have loved several of Jojo Moyes' books so I thought that I would make the last choice for this month the first book I read by her, The Ship of Brides. The book is about four Australian war brides who board a ship to England to meet up with their husbands heading into a life full of unknowns. I can't believe I read this book more than 13 years ago (way before the current historical fiction fascination for WWII kicked in) and I still think about it some times. Our four brides were normal people who uprooted their whole lives in the name of love.

The starting point for next month is What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt which I haven't heard of before let alone read. 

This week...

I'm reading....

I mentioned last week that I was just starting Palace of Tears by Julian Leatherdale. It is a big book so I haven't finished it yet, but I am making good progress. This is a dual timeline novel - you know I am a sucker for those books! I did find myself contemplating how many male authors there are out there in historical fiction land writing dual timeline books? Do you know of any others?

I also started reading The Silk House by Australian author Katye Nunn which is another multiple timeline book. I really meant to read her last book but I never got around to it even though it sounded great. I already know that I will be going back to read her previous books even based on the small part of this book I have read.

I finished listening to The Good Turn by Dervla McTiernan this week. When it came time to pick my next audiobook I had multiple options but the ones that I was thinking about choosing were all really long. I therefore decided to look at the books that I have had in my Audible library and realised that Normal People by Sally Rooney was there. It only goes for just over 7 hours, and it is also the starting point for this month's Six Degrees of Separation meme so I decided to go with that as my choice.

What did surprise me was that it has the same narrator who read (or should I say performed?) The Good Turn. These are very different style of books so that was a bit of a surprise and took a little while to get used to. The other thing that I was reminded of is that I find it much more confronting listening to sex scenes than I reading them. I can read very explicit books no problems, but I get a bit a bit flustered listening to them. Weird, I know.

I was super excited to hear that later in the year there is going to be a new Virgin River book from Robyn Carr. I loved the Virgin River series and have read them a couple of times, but her other books haven't done it as much for me. And I enjoyed the Virgin River series on Netflix as well. It's probably smart to built on the success of the series with a new book now.

I'm watching...

We didn't really watch anything new this week that I haven't mentioned in previous posts.

In life...

It's the first day of winter! Do you know what that means? Time to break out a new toothbrush. The first day of a new season is always my prompt to change toothbrushes. Am I the only one who does this?

With our restrictions slowly being relaxed, this weekend we decided to get out of the house. On Saturday we were and had lunch with a couple of friends. They are the people who we caught up with most during social isolation so it was really good to catch up with them face to face. I did have to laugh. We took two jigsaws to her and she unexpectedly gave me four books in return. That's how it's supposed to work isn't it?

It is a bit strange to be seeing people face to face again. We have been inside for so long that I found the idea of going out to socialise a bit daunting, and I could almost have talked myself out of going, but it was fine once I got there. The other thing was that was the first time I put earrings and makeup on in weeks!

We do love the panorama setting on our phone camera

On Sunday we decided to head down the coast about an hour or so ago and we invited one of my husband's work friend to meet us there. It wasn't too cold and the sun was out so it was nice to get down to the beach, get some fresh air. We also got to eat some delicious fish and chips. We had something called charcoal prawns. I have no idea how they cooked them but they were delicious.

Other than that, this is the weekend before we do our bathroom renovation so we've been spending a serious amount of money at the hardware store. Now we just have to hope that the choices of accent tiles and things like that all come together. There is a small issue in that a couple of the bigger items we need had to be ordered in so they might not be here in time for next weekend but we will do what we can.

Posts from the last week

Top Ten Tuesday: Opening Lines
Book Review: The Railway Girls by Maisie Thomas
Alphabet 2020: I is for Me! Me! Me!
Weeking Cooking: May Bakes
Reading Reflections: May 2020

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