The library books are starting to stack up now.  I guess I had better consider reading some of them before bring home yet more.  Books I check out from the library where I work rarely have a line of people waiting for them, so I know I'll be able to renew those and possibly even have them over the holidays.  Public library books are a different story.  And interlibrary loan is becoming a small addiction--I now have two ILL books, but I've decided not to request anymore until at least one goes back (that would be the collection of short stories I mentioned yesterday by Mollie Panter-Downes, which I have a feeling I will finish all too soon.

This week's choices:

There is a new English professor where I work who will be teaching rhetoric.  She's been ordering books to support the classes she will be teaching and she's going to be teaching a class called The Rhetoric of Food, which sounds like fun actually.  So I've been ordering all sorts of interesting-sounding books and films on the topic.  M.F.K. Fisher's The Gastronomical Me is one that caught my eye (one of many actually, but as I said I better pace myself).  I have another book by Fisher that has long sat on my shelves, but this one is made up of very short essays/writings on her life in France before the war.  Not sure if you can see it, but there is the sweetest little cat sitting next to her on the table, too.

I find all sorts of little gems up in the stacks.  My library has some great older novels that have likely not been outside the building in years and years and I hope to liberate a few of them (if only temporarily!).  Last week it was Ann Bridge's Illyrian Spring (the library book I finally settled on to start reading now), and this week it's Elizabeth Jenkins's Honey.  I really enjoyed The Tortoise and the Hare, so was happy to find a book close by that I didn't have to request via ILL (though I'll be looking for her autobiography soon I think).  I'm not entirely sure what it's about, but I'm willing to give it a try.

A book I did ILL is Maxim Chattam's Cairo Diary.  When I was looking for a book that was really gripping, a good thriller, I came across a list in a newspaper of just this sort of book.  Chattam's novel was listed, and it sounded like it might be what I was in the mood for.  It's set in British occupied Cairo of 1928 and also in contemporary Mont-Saint-Michel (the author is French by the way).  Per the jacket "the two stories intertwine and culminate in an absolutely baffling climax in this cinematic bestseller from France."  

Sallie Day's The Palace of Strange Girls was on the public library's new book list.  The title caught my eye, and when I read it was set in the seaside resort of Blackpool in the summer of 1959 I knew I would at least have to check it out.  It sounds like a good post-WWII family drama.

When Cath posted on Chris Priestley's Tales of Terror from the Black Ship I knew I had to find a copy myself.  This is a YA novel (with a great cover and inside illustrations) two young children who are ill and are waiting for their father to find a doctor.  They don't remain alone long...a sailor comes knocking on their door.  Ghost stories to follow.  The big catch is their house sits atop a windy cliff, dangling over a stormy sea!

Rosemary Aitken's A Cornish Maid is a historical romance/novel set in Cornwall in 1909.  It's about a house maid and the daughter of the family living in a great house who become unlikely friends.  The story takes the two through the war years.

And last but not least is Gratitude by Joseph Kertes, which is a rather hefty book, but it sounds so good!  Yet another war story set in Budapest.  "Gratitude is a remarkable, lovingly conjured portrait of that rich, flourishing society at the moment of its dismantling."

I seem to be reading a lot of war books lately--or books set between the wars.  I'll have to look for something a little different next time around.

My Persephone Biannually and the most recent catalog have arrived.  I've not yet had a chance to have a proper look through them, but I can't wait to finally settle down for a good browse.  There's a short story by Dorothy Whipple in the Biannually, which I'm looking forward to reading.  I've yet to read any of her books, but I think I need to pick one up very soon.  I'm also contemplating a holiday splurge of three new Persephones.  The trick is to just buy the three and then get right back to my no book buying mode.  It's funny--no matter how many times I look through that catalog I keep finding new books I want to read.  And all the new ones are included to make choosing even harder.  Oh, to have the whole set.  The fantasy of a book lover...

I am enjoying a Persephone title right now by the way.  I've been reading a short story every night from Mollie Panter-Downes's short story collection, Minnie's Room, which is made up of ten "peacetime" stories.  Although the stories are set in peacetime, MPD writes about the effects the war had on English society.  As always the stories are very illuminating.  I'll write about the collection of the whole later.  

Despite complaining about meandering from book to book last month I managed to finish a nice, small stack.  Granted most were either more than half read already or they needed to be read by a certain date for book clubs, I found once I had a rhythm going I just finished one after the other (there is a lot to be said really for  working on just one or two books at a time).  At the moment I'm mostly concentrating on Thad Carhart's Across the Endless River, which is a historical novel set in 1820s America and Europe.  The descriptions are quite lush in many ways and it sometimes feels like an overload to my senses comparing a wild, untamed America to an elegant, old world Europe.  I like it though. 

I'm trying to decide which library book to read (I have even more to share, but will save them until tomorrow).  I've got quite a selection at the moment, so it's not an easy decision.  I had thought to read Rebecca Stott's The Coral Thief, but as it is also set in Paris in the early 1800s, I wondered if it would be too similar to the Carhart novel (though the stories are very different it seems).  I don't mind taking my time deciding as sometimes that's half the fun. 

I've been taking Fred Vargas to the gym and dipping into Elizabeth Gaskell as often as I can.  I only feel a little bad I didn't finish Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry before the end of October.  I'll be a little late, but I will still have read the four books I set out to for Carl's RIP Challenge.  Audrey was temporarily bumped as I read the last one hundred pages of Across the Endless River.  If a book really grabs my attention I usually can't set the book aside for those last hundred pages!  

I have pulled a new book out, however.  Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety is Cornflower's next book group read.  I'll probably finish it about three weeks after everyone else has, but that's okay.  I've heard many good things about Wallace Stegner and have wanted to read him for eons.  Why do I never hesitate to pick up a "want to read this soon" book for a book club at a moment's notice, but I will otherwise just look at it longingly for ages and ages.  It's not as though I have any scruples when it comes to reading too many books at once, but I guess there really does have to be some sort of limit.  Any kind of excuse to read a book I've wanted to read for so long is always welcome, however.  

In The Great Western Beach Emma Smith writes in a child's voice so convincingly that I was almost taken aback at first.  This is a memoir she penned for her grandchildren according to the foreword.  It's made up of a series of vignettes from her early childhood up until about age twelve when her family moved away from the Cornish coast inland.  She notes that it's impossible to be wholly truthful and that as lives are filled with secrets best left unshared her autobiography will be fragmentary, "made up of selected glimpses, bits and pieces" of her life that perhaps no one will be interested in reading.  Although the style the book is written in makes it easy to pick up and set down, I found it absorbing reading, and read the second half of the book in one big gulp. 

Written from the perspective of the snug insular life of a child this is very much the story of one family in a small Cornish village.  Although the years she covers are from 1923 through 1935, there's really very little about the social or political milieu of England during those interwar years.  Smith captures the voice well, but you can also tell she's writing from the vantage point of a life lived and understood.  There's a sense of wonder but there's also something more that you don't necessarily expect from a child.  In a way it's sort of unusual combination, but maybe not so much.  Children often understand far more than you'd expect.  In any case the style works very well, and as Emma grows older, so too does her understanding of family dynamics. 

Emma Smith (Elspeth) was born in Newquay, Cornwall in 1923 and lived there for the first twelve years of her life.  Two elder siblings, twins, figure prominently in her memoir and later there's an addition of a baby brother.  During the years of WWII she worked a secretarial job for one of the war departments and later worked on the Grand Union Canal, a job which consisted of carrying steel and coal cargoes between London, Birmingham and Coventry on narrow boats.  She wrote about this in The Maidens' Trip (can you guess which book I know am dying to get my hands on---grr for promising myself not to buy any new books in the near future).  She later worked with a documentary film company in India, which she fictionalized in The Far Cry, which Persephone Books reissued (and one that I own already--such welcome foresight on my part!).  Apparently she also wrote several successful children's books as well as another novel.  Now I see where that child's voice comes from.

It's hard to summarize The Great Western Beach since it touches on so many varied memories.  Although very nostalgic, and therefore consisting of many happy remembrances, it's not without tinges of sadness as well.  The memoir is divided into three sections moving from one home to the next as the family's fortunes improved.  As might be expected Elspeth and her family spent many hours at the seaside which was so close to her home.  While her brother went to a regular school and later went away to boarding school, Elspeth and her sister were educated privately.  Elspeth was much more the child eager to please, or as the reader later learns eager to avoid her father's wrath, but her older sister had no fears and no qualms to disagree or speak her own mind.        

Probably not the best match, Elspeth's parents struggled to find happiness that was always out of reach.  Her father, a decorated war hero (of which he never failed to remind people) had set out to be a painter and find fame and fortune.  Instead he married an older woman and never quite seemed to find the success he yearned for.  Elspeth's mother was three times a would-be bride and three times her fiancés died before they could wed.  She served as a nurse in the Great War and drove ambulances and seemed to enjoy a certain notoriety in their small community that her husband found annoying.  A strict disciplinarian, he was especially hard on the twins, and although he favored Elspeth the most she feared his outbursts greatly.

The relationships of the family members struck me the  most, and reading about them will probably stay with me the longest, but the most enjoyable aspects of the books were just the ordinary, average things that Emma Smith writes about so fondly.

"On my birthday Mummy escorted us three children to the much grander Ice-Cream Parlour that has just been opened on the slope leading down to Towan Beach, and when we were sitting at a table she ordered Knickerbocker Glories from the waitress.  Knickerbocker Glories are ice-creams which the Americans have invented, and they are served in a tall glass vase, and are so big it took us ages to eat them.  This was a treat that wouldn't and couldn't have happened before our mother got the inheritance from her dear dead Uncle Stuart.  We were far too poor then (although we weren't supposed to say so) for delicious daily Quoit Dairy ice-cream cornets, and certainly too poor for Knickerbocker Glories on my birthday." 

That's just one small taste of a book filled with many such happy reminiscences.  I was a little sad to leave this long gone world, but glad to have visited even if only for a little while.  My only complaint is to not find out what happened to Elspeth's siblings and get a little insight into some of the scenes from childhood she herself didn't understand and have full knowledge of when she was little.  But as Emma Smith, some things must remain private.  This is a really charming read and I only wish I could remember my own childhood so vividly.

Yesterday I mentioned that I hadn't yet met the sleuth, or in this case the detective, in Fred Vargas's Have Mercy on Us All.  Well, today I have.  In a comment on a recent post another reader called Fred Vargas's mysteries 'quirky' (but very readable) and the more I read, the more I think I have to agree with that description.  There's something weird going on in the story and I think it's going to get weirder. 

Joss Le Guern is a modern-day town crier.  I had heard of such a thing, but didn't realize they might still exist.  For a small fee Joss will read out notices that people leave him.  Three times a day, every day, he returns to the same spot close to the Gare Montparnasse and reads out announcements of things for sale, love letters, general annoyances, whatever someone wants to share with the neighborhood.  Joss takes these requests and separates them into two piles--the "can dos" and the "better nots".  Some messages are fine for general consumption and others are better left unread.  But there have been some odd messages turning up as well--not really fit for either pile, but they get read anyway.  Messages referring to the Black Death. 

So that's a bit of the backstory.  Still no crime has been committed, though a resident of a local neighborhood is frightened to see a strange symbol painted on all the doors in the complex where she lives.  They are the number "4", written backwards and notches through the outer leg of the cross.  At the moment there is no connection between these odd messages and the black painted numbers, but it's been brought to the attention of the Brigade Criminelle, which is where we find Detective Commissaire Adamsberg.  Sorry, a bit of a build up to my teaser, but it seemed like it needed a little explanation.  A picture is forming in my mind:

"In his early youth, just when he'd left the Pyrennees, he'd discovered that there really were people who lived on paper, and he'd quickly come to regard them with considerable awe, a degree of pity and boundless gratitude.  Adamsberg mostly liked to walk, muse and act, and he knew that his tastes inspired little awe and much pity in many of his colleagues."  

His partner Danglard notes he's solved "a score and more mysteries through his walking, dreaming, straggly-thinking method" getting "surprising results of his impenetrable mental meanderings."  And how about some visuals from the woman who found the odd "4" painted on her door:

"The man was short and dark, and he looked like a pig's breakfast.  His hair was all tousled and he'd rolled his jacket sleeves halfway up his unshirted forearm. Looked like a guy with troubles to tell, just like she had."

Now I'm intrigued.  I'm guessing he looked like a "pig's breakfast" means he's not an especially fastidious man.  But he can obviously solve crimes, so I'll be following events closely.  I usually like to start reading msyteries with the first book rather than jumping in somewhere in the middle, but things have been pretty clear so far.  One review on the back cover called this "eccentric", but eccentric is good sometimes!

I've come to the conclusion after reading the first 60 or so pages of Murder on the Cliffs by Joanna Challis, that I'm the wrong reader for this particular mystery.  I heard about it in my online reading group a while ago and was instantly intrigued--a new mystery series featuring a young Daphne du Maurier as the sleuth.  I'm often hesitant about reading a novel that has an actual person as a main character, but I really enjoyed Nicola Upson's An Expert in Murder (with a fictionalized Josephine Tey), so I decided to keep it in the back of my mind and watch for it.  I finally came across the book whilst browsing online and was completely taken with the cover, which I think is gorgeous and so fitting for the story.  It's not actually due out until later this month, but having no patience when I come across a book I really want to read I asked the publisher if they would be willing to send out a review copy and they kindly did.

In Murder on the Cliffs, Daphne has convinced her parents to let her travel to Cornwall to do some research in a local abbey.  Of course in the back of her mind is the idea of a little freedom, as the last thing she wants is to think of looking for a husband, and perhaps she'll find a little inspiration for her writing as well.  She's twenty or so and and has her own ideas of how she wants to live her life.  Soon after her arrival as she's walking along the beach she comes across the body of a woman, very obviously murdered, and finds herself engulfed in a murder investigation. 

I think the reason the Upson book worked so well for me when the Challis hasn't is that I knew very little about Josephine Tey or her work, whereas I'm a great fan of Daphne du Maurier.  I've read a handful of her novels and short stories as well as a biography by Margaret Forster, so I have this idea in mind of what she was like.  I think of her as being a very formidable and complex woman.  It was hard to reconcile this younger, fictional Daphne in my mind with what I've read and imagined about her.  I just couldn't picture her in this setting, doing these things.  Someone in my book group mentioned having listened to an interview with P.D. James once where James said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that she wished that reviewers would review the book she wrote rather than the book they wished she had written.  As I was reading I couldn't help but feel that was the case with me.  My expectations were too high and whatever story Challis had written about Daphne was unlikely to meet was what already in my mind.

Had the main character in this book simply been a fictional young woman getting wrapped up in discovering who committed murder, I think I could have clicked with the story.  The setting is perfect--Cornwall, along the coast.  Challis is good at mood--I could hear the waves pounding the shore and feel the tenseness of coming upon such a hideous scene.  There is a great house involved and a prominent family.  The elements are right, but it just didn't mesh for me.  As I didn't finish the book, I can't really write a proper review, but I did want to mention the book as I think it might appeal to readers who like cozy mysteries and who don't mind a famous person in the starring role.