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

The views were spectacular.

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

 For more photos see Flickr.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!