Wordless Wednesday – Love the Snow

 

Hosted by Wordless Wednesday

A Winter Walk

We had a break in the snow this afternoon, the sun came out, the sky was blue so we ventured out for a walk across the road into the fields alongside a wood and then down to the river.

In the garden at the start of our walk

 

Field edge path

View across the field

 We climbed over a ladder stile and then went down a narrow path towards the River Tweed

Path above the River Tweed

 and then looked down on the ice flows on the river.

River Tweed

The views were spectacular.

Sun going down on the River Tweed

Then the sky darkened and snow began to fall and so we made our way back home through the woods.

Into the wood

 

Woodland path

 For more photos see Flickr.

 

Reading Challenges

 I’ve been thinking about reading challenges and seen that many bloggers are signing up to lots of interesting-looking challenges. I’m always attracted to them and enjoy thinking about the books I could read to complete the challenges … and then I find they become a chore. I find myself thinking “what have I got to read next for a challenge?”, not looking forward with pleasure at the thought of reading the next book. So this year I’m easing off them.

The challenges I am taking part in this year are:

• Attacking the TBR Tome Challenge. Last year I listed 14 books as my own To-Be-Read Challenge and only read 1 of them, so for 2010 I’ll be taking part in this challenge – the books are shown on my sidebar, in the hope that this will encourage me to read them soon. The idea is to read at least 20 of your tbr books before buying any new books.
• The Agatha Christie Reading Challenge – this fits in well with my reading as I love AC’s books.
• Alphabet in Crime Fiction - this is now up to the letter L (which I haven’t done). The letter M next week.

2009 Books

I’ve already written two posts on the books I read last year, with lists of my favourite books and top ten crime fiction reads. Several bloggers have published their reading statistics and I’ve decided to join in, but I don’t intend to list all 93 of the books I read last year here – they can be found under the tab “Books Read“, nor to analyse them in great detail.

Most of my reading is fiction and about half of it this year has been crime fiction. I only read 11 non fiction books and 6 of those were autobiographies, biographies or memoirs. About half the books were my own and the other half I borrowed from the library or friends. I read about 7 or 8 books a month, sometimes less, rarely more. But in December I finished reading only 1 book – moving house and Christmas severely affected my reading!

I enjoyed reading all the books, with only less than a handful that weren’t as good as the rest and there were just a few that I didn’t finish. I don’t say abandoned because one day I hope to finish Suite Francaise for example. I stopped reading that one months ago, when it became just too much to go on with it.

Of all the books I read last year these are the most memorable (the links are to the posts on the books):

•  Fire in the Blood by Irene Nemirovsky
• A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell
• Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill (I still haven’t written much about this)
• Jane Austen by Claire Tomalin
• After the Victorians by A N Wilson (still no post on this one either)

The Sunday Salon

I have finished reading Drood on this first Sunday of 2010, needless to say I read most of it in December! I feel relief at getting to the end and am looking forward to reading something else. I’ll write about once I’ve had more time to think it over as a whole.

Along with Drood I’ve been reading Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan.  This is about a English priest in a small Scottish parish; as he makes friends with some of the locals and experiences prejudice from others he reflects on his past life. I’m enjoying it. Hilary Mantel writes:

[O'Hagan] is a fine stylist, a penetrating analyst, a knowledgeable guide to high thinking and squalid living. This is a nuanced, intense and complex treatment of a sad and simple story. Read it twice.

My plan to have a box of books not in storage didn’t work out because there was no room in our car for them, so I’ve only had a few books around until Christmas Day when my husband presented me with this pile.

I think I’ll start with Paul Auster’s Invisible.

And for the rest of today I intend to unpack and sort some books and choose which one to read next.

My Best Crime Fiction Reads in 2009

Kerrie is asking for people’s top ten crime fiction reads of this year from which she will collate the books and come up with the best crime fiction reads of 2009.

The rules are

1. it is about crime fiction you’ve read in 2009. Year of publication doesn’t matter.
2. about 10 titles in the format of title, author (no need for description etc).
3. any order will do. If you think one was so much better than the others, you might like to put it in your list twice.
4. You have until Jan 7 to do it.

I’ve read a lot more crime fiction this year than in previous years (for example I read 16 in 2008 compared to 47 this year) so it’s really difficult to decide which to list as my top ten. Here they are in alphabetical order of title (tomorrow I could just as easily come up with another ten titles).

• Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear
• The Black Book by Ian Rankin
• The Brading Collection by Patricia Wentworth
• The Cipher Garden by Martin Edwards
• Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell
• The Falls by Ian Rankin
• Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie
• A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell
• The Riddle of the River by Catherine Shaw
• Strange Affair by Peter Robinson

If you want to contribute your own list pop over to Kerrie’s blog.

 

Booking Through Thursday – 2009 in Review

It’s the last day of the year, and you know what that means … nostalgia and looking back.

What were your favorite books of the year? (Books that were new to you in 2009, if not necessarily published this year.)

This year I’ve read more crime fiction than ever before in one year and I’ll be writing a post on “My Top Ten Crime Fiction Reads 2009″ very soon. As usual it’s hard deciding which are my favourite books and I could easily list more than ten. These are what I have settled on – not in any order of preference.

•  Fire in the Blood by Irene Nemirovsky
• The Falls by Ian Rankin
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• The Rebecca Notebook and other stories by Daphne Du Maurier
• Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill
• The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
• Star Gazing by Linda Gillard
• A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
• Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
• Good Evening Mrs Craven by Molly Panter-Downs

Miscellaneous

Christmas has been and gone whilst I’ve been away from the blogworld. For days I didn’t even switch on the computer, what with getting ready for Christmas, which this year included moving loads of boxes we haven’t unpacked so that our son and his family had room to sleep at the weekend, and I had a cold, which didn’t help at all. Anyway we had a good time.

I had some books (my favourite presents) for Christmas, all of which I now can’t wait to read. No doubt I’ll be writing about them later – they include Agatha Christie’s autobiography, and her Secret Notebooks and a book on the Eleven Missing Days, all of which I’ve dipped into.

Meanwhile I’m still ploughing through Drood. I have very mixed feelings about this. Ann wrote the other day on her blog Table Talk that she has a problem with books centred on people who really existed and I think that is part of my problem with Drood.

Drood himself, of course, is a fictional character, but most of the book is about Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, both of whom don’t come across as  people I would want to meet. But I want to know more about them, if only to find out what they were really like, and to read more of their books. I’m glad I’ve already read Collins’s The Moonstone, because the plot of this is detailed in Drood.

The other stumbling block I have with Drood is that there is far too much detail and emphasis for my liking on horrific opium induced nightmares. On the other hand I want to know how it ends, so it is keeping me turning the pages, although I am tempted just to skip to the last few pages.

The snow is still here, thawing just a little bit today, but we ventured out yesterday to the next town, over the border in Scotland and joined the library. I restricted myself to borrowing just three books – two on the history of the Borders and The Music Room by William Fiennes. I have The Snow Geese by him, which I’d really like to read soon – but it’s still in a box somewhere.

Winter Wonderland

It’s been snowing here, but not as much as in the south of England and I do find it odd that we’ved moved north where it’s supposed to be colder and it isn’t!  This snow is the best kind – crisp and even. The roads have been gritted and are clear so we’re still able to get out and about. We haven’t had time to do anything but shop so far, except for two visits to our family in Scotland, now much nearer than before. We’re off there today for a school carol service with the two older grandchildren. They have had more snow than us, so I hope we’ll get there and back ok.

We’re still emptying boxes and trying to find the best places to put things. I can’t imagine how I fitted everything into the wall unit for example, but what came out should go back in, shouldn’t it? And will we have the bedrooms ready for the family to stay on Sunday – I hope so?!

The computer is in a room overlooking the back garden – this is the view from the window.

View from my desk

Amazingly, there is an apple tree out there that still has its apples. The birds love it!

Close up of apple tree

 The garden has a small stream runing through it going into a small coppice.

Stream at the back

Here is a view of the front garden as seen through the lounge window 

Christmas tree in the front garden

Still not much time for reading. Drood is proving to be a test. It started off really well with the train accident that Dickens was in at Staplehurst, great descriptions of London and so on. But Simmons’s inclusion of great tracts of background research is slowing down the story interminably. It reminds me a bit of Les Miserables!