It was a good year for me, even if it was a bad one for Rome.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

The author uses diaries, library records, and other papers as well as elocution guides to reconstruct who was reading what in the 18th century and how. Reading was much more of a shared activity with people reading aloud to each other from newspapers, periodicals, non fiction, joke books, and religious works, and a good reading voice was essential.

Immediately after the end of WWII, the patriarch of a rich Japanese family dies leaving a will designed to set his three grandsons and their mothers at odds with each other. The bodies of members of the family start piling up. Can Kosuke Kindaichi solve the case while there are still some heirs left?

⬇

#sunshinewellness

#WhereAreYouMonday

18th century Britain

#teaandabook

I read the first chapter and realised I'm going to have to read it again and construct a family tree while reading it.

Tatsuyada, whose mother died when he was 7 and who was brought up by his stepfather, discovers that he is a member of a rich family. Now he's been called to claim his rightful position as the heir.

Secret passages, a hidden treasure, and a family curse all have a part to play in this intriguing mystery. I don't know if the change in tone is because of the change to 1st person POV, differences in the Japanese style, or the different translator.

Kosuke comes to Gokumon Island immediately after WWII with the news of the death of Chimato on board a vessel repatriating Japanese soldiers. The village is then rocked by the murders of Chimato's sisters.

The background of immediate post War Japan was interesting but although the how and the who was ingeniously worked out by Kosuke I found out the motivation too implausible. I wonder if it struck the original Japanese readers that way.

#coffeeandabook

Seventeen miles south of Kasaoka, falling right on the border between Okayama, Hiroshima and Kagawa Prefectures, in the middle of the Seto Inland Sea, there‘s a tiny island.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

#teaandabook

@puddlejumper
#queerbc

This anthology had Neon Yang's novelette “A Stick of Clay, in the Hands of God, is Infinite Potential“. I find stories with a 2nd person POV hard going so I DNF-ed it about 1/4 of the way through.

##coffeeandabook

While visiting her sister in hospital in 1987 Sadie meets Sam, who is recovering from a car accident. They bond over computer games and we follow the ebbs and flows of their friendship over the next quarter of a century.

Enjoyable even for someone like me who knows almost nothing about computer gaming. I recognised some of the names of the earlier games but that was about as far as I could go.

16 year-old Reggie drops out of school after her mother's death but is still studying for her A levels with tutoring from a retired teacher while she's working as a part-time mother's help (aka nanny) for a doctor. But then her employer disappears. Meanwhile, a train crashes on the line just behind her tutor's house, leaving an injured Jackson Brodie with amnesia. ⬇

#coffeeandabook

@ShyBookOwl
#FirstLineFridays

She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a blind pigeon to stick back together again.

'Pliny the Younger,‘ Ms MacDonald always emphasized as if it was of crucial importance that you got your Plinys right, when in fact there was probably hardly anyone left on earth who gave a monkey‘s about which was the elder and which was the younger. Who gave a monkey‘s about them, period.

---

O tempora! O mores!

#lunchandabook

#MayReadingPlans

#coffeeandabook

Jackson Brodie steps in to help defuse a road-rage incident in Edinburgh. He, the rager and the ragee, and another witness bounce off each other over the next few days as various storylines come together.

Funny in places and a few too many flashbacks to characters' early lives, but still good to see how it all fitted together. Martin was the character I identified with most strongly and I wish his story hadn't concluded quite the way it did.

#coffeeandabook

After a pre-Christmas trip to London, staying with her sister, and Christmas itself, Sophronia and friends return to the school for the New Year Tea only to find that it has been infiltrated by Picklemen.

A satisfactory wrap-up to the series with quite a few surprises on the way.

Siddheag receives distressing news about her pack and Sophronia and the other girls put their training into practice to help her and incidentally foil the latest plot of the Picklemen.

It's been 3 years or more since I read the previous installments so I was a bit hazy on the details of what had happened. Fortunately there is fan wiki to remind me who was who. Great fun.

If anyone saw Monique, a well-dressed woman of quality, dangling from the doorway, they apparently assumed everyone had difficulties in life and moved on.

"Funambulist,” said Sophronia Temminnick, quite suddenly.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

Staying with an old friend in Oxford, Mrs Malory finds that her godson is more upset than his family realises about having found a body, crushed under falling bookshelves, because he believes it was no accident. She decides to investigate.

I would have loved the setting and characters in this cozy when it first came out around 1990 but now I found it rather meh, especially in its characterisation of gay men.

The author admits in the first chapter that fascism is difficult to define and that different characteristics will be emphasised depending on what definition one chooses. The characteristics he chooses to highlight have some uncomfortable resonances this year (2025) considering this book dates from 2014. ⬇

#coffeeandabook

A monastery seems to have been deserted by its monks during the evening meal, with no sign of why they did so. Sister Fidelma and Brother Eadulf, driven ashore in South Wales on their way to Canterbury are asked to investigate while the local Brother Meurig investigates the nearby rape and murder of a young woman.

Again, I fingered an accomplice as the murderer quite early on, but I had no idea how all the different events were tied together.

#coffeeandabook

When the transport organizer for Domitian's Triumph falls to his death down the Tarpeian Rock, a witness comes forward and claims somebody was with him at the time he fell. The case is passed to Flavia Albia to investigate.

I had forgotten just how funny Albia's internal monologue can be.

Domitian was back.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBbookOwl

##coffeeandabook

When the Domesday Commissioners arrive in Canterbury they find that a charitable young woman has been found dead, apparently from a snake bite. A monk who ministers to lepers insists she was strangled first and then bitten afterwords. Then the monk himself is found poisoned.

I was nearly right. My choice of murderer turned out to be the murderer's chief henchman. The book was rather slow at first but the last third was very exciting.

#coffeeandabook

every boy should stop reading a book as soon as he finds that he does not like it, just as you are not expected to eat more mutton than you want to eat.

@dabbe #hailthebail in 1906

Dr. Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist, is asked by the police to identify some bones uncovered in the marsh near her home. They turn out to be those of an Iron Age girl but the police nevertheless consult her on ritual elments that seem to be part of a present-day crime.

I enjoyed this very atmospheric story with a very exciting climax that I had to put down several times just to remember to breathe.

Percy Jackson finds the Garden of the Hesperides in San Francisco.

He's not very bright, our Perce, is he?

From his mid/late 30s Young looks back on his relationships as a young-ish gay man in Seoul.

Rather rambling narrative that frequently left me waiting for something to happen but even when it did, it didn't make much impact and was referred to so obliquely that it took me a while to realise what he meant.

No idea why it was longlisted for the International Booker.

#koreanbook #koreanfood (bulgogi dosirak)

#coffeeandabook

"I took the elevator to the third floor of the hotel and went into the Emerald Hall."

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

The weapon shops are the only recourse against the tyranny of the Isher empire although the weapons they sell can only work as self-defence for their owner.

I was a great fan of the author as a teenager - especially the Null-A books - so I must have read this before, but I had no memory of the story. I expect I enjoyed it then, mainly because I was unaware of certain controversies it seems to be playing into. Now, not so much.

Brief sketches of Western writers who have set books in Asia. Each has a quick bio, a summary of their main works and the setting and whether a literary pilgrimage is still possible.

It wasn't horrible but disappointingly few books to add to my wishlist. The book was poorly edited with what appeared to be lines missing and sentences that should have been simple but had to be read several times to be understood.

S0-So verging on a Pan.

#coffeeandabook

#ClassicLSFBC
@RamsFan1963