Thursday, January 9, 2025

What I Read -- By a Spider's Thread

A dear friend, L, with whom I always seem to have hours-long chats often including books, shares my same love for British television and murder mystery shows.  She also reads some murder mystery books, and recommended Laura Lippmann to me for two reasons -- as they go, she said, the writing was decent; and, the main character is a rower.

L happened to have two copies of By a Spider's Thread on her bookshelf, so she gave me one to get me started.  It is the eighth book in the series about this particular detective, but as these things go, there is enough background provided in each book that it really doesn't matter whether you've read the others or not.  They stand on their own just fine.

In case you're interested in the details of this particular mystery, it involves a wife who runs away from her husband, taking their two kids.  The husband hires our main character, Tess, who is working as a private detective, to track down his missing family.

It's not literature.  But it is a book, and sometimes it's nice just to keep turning the pages. And - for what it's worth - much of what she says about working through problems while spending quiet mornings on the water is quite true.

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

What I Read -- My World

I love hotels that have a collection of books left by earlier patrons.  You just never know what you might find.  At our hotel in Agia Napa, the business center had just such a collection, and I picked up two new reads.

One of them was My World, by Jonny Wilkinson.  I'm also counting this one as my January book for the 2025 Reading Challenge - a book you picked up because of its cover.  The edition that was at the hotel was the original hardcover (whose picture is included here), and really, how could I not pick up a book with my first rugby crush's face on it?

The book itself was a mixed bag.  The play-by-play of the various rugby matches that he recounts was candy for me but would be extremely tedious to someone who is not interested in the sport.  It suffers from the same thing that many early-in-life-successes suffers from, causing me to ask, "you're twenty-four, what do you know about life?"  This is tempered somewhat by the last portion of the book which looks forward much more than backward.

It's a quick read full of fantastic pictures of my boy Jonny, including - you guessed it -- the front cover.

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

What I Read -- The Cyprus Collection

For no particular reason other than adventure, S and I ventured to Cyprus over the Christmas and New Year's holidays.  Neither of us knew much about it.  However, the day after we had bought our plane tickets, we were at a used bookstore down in Florida with K and came across Cyprus: The Sweet Land, by Petroclos Stavrou. This one was more of a picture book, but opened with a rather helpful introduction about the lengthy history of Cyprus, which of necessity includes a who's who of conquering powers through the centuries: Mycenaens, Achaens, French (of a sort), Egyptians, Persians, Romans, Italians, Turks, and British, as well as the requisite period under the Byzantine empire and periodic raids by the Arab powers. The island's location in the eastern Mediterranean, at the crossroads of many a culture, has its curses, I suppose.

S picked up a couple of books for me at the library before we left for our trip.  As reading vintage travel books is my current favorite activity, he managed to find one called Cyprus Then and Now, by Gordon Home.  It was published in 1960, just as Cyprus gained its independence from Great Britain.  Though the book made passing reference to the cultural distance between the Cypriots of Greek descent and those of Turkish descent, the hostile Turkish takeover of a third of the island was still a decade and a half in the future at the time of publication.  That action, though, caused the UN to send in troops to maintain the "Green Zone" -- even to this day -- which separates the Greek and Turkish portions of the island.  Turkey is the only nation that recognizes Turkish Cyprus as a country in its own right, and the Turkish aggression and refusal to relent has led to Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, being the last remaining divided capital city in Europe.  We didn't cross to the Turkish side, though it is relatively easy for tourists to do, but walking the Green Zone is a strange enough experience all on its own.

But about the book: the first slightly-more-than-half provides an extensive if somewhat selective history of the island, with the last several chapters being close-ups on a few of the tourist areas.  I skipped a few of those chapters which related to areas now in Turkish Cyprus, since we weren't going there, but poked through everything that was in the southern part of the island.  Always fun. 

His comments and descriptions were observant, often biting, and quite amusing for me as a reader. Here are a few of my favorites:

In describing the "takeover" of Cyprus by the French, under Guy de Lusignan, from the British, under Richard the Lionheart:
"At this juncture, Guy de Lusignan, who had lost his kingdom of Jerusalem, comes into the picture.  ... Contemporary opinion was severe on the handsome Guy, to some extent, no doubt, because of the loss of his kingdom.  In spite of these criticisms on his character it appears that he was possessed of courage if lacking in ability."

On the Cypriot attempt to repel the Egyptian invasion in 1426:
"Difficulties suggesting hurry and bad organization began at once.  Trumpets had been forgotten, with resultant difficulty in conveying orders, and there was a great shortage of wine that led to a mutinous uproar and rioting around the tower where the king was lodged and the wine stored."  Really, who can be bothered with the Egyptians under such circumstances?

On the capital city of Nicosia:
"Approximately in the centre of the Plain of Messaoria stands Nicosia, the capital, girt with its massive circle of fortifications about 1,500 yards in diameter and 2-2/3 miles in circumference.  The little city fills this space closely with a compact network of streets that have a tendency to lead nowhere in particular and subtly to bring the stranger out towards the ramparts when he is endeavoring to reach the centre. ... Altogether twelve breaches [of the city wall] have been [intentionally] made in recent times, each provided with a broad earthen embankment to carry the road across the ditch, that averages about 350 feet in width.  Some of these openings being quite unnecessary, the recklessness that authorized them was deplorable, for the Renaissance character that Nicosia bore externally until comparatively recent years has been sadly weakened."

Finally, there was the stabby fiction: A Sudden Death in Cyprus, by Michael Grant.  I don't consider myself to be a frequent reader of what is commonly referred to as "genre fiction," but (1) I am enjoying more murder mysteries lately, and (2) Cyprus is a small place and there aren't many books about it.  So when this one puts it right there in the title, how could I not? And I have to give credit where it's due: Mr. Grant does have a way of noting the details of a place and making sure that they end up in the prose.  A better writer would make it less contrived and provide some more natural scene-setting, but I had to forgive that in favor of pure observation.  It was fun to have noticed this or that myself as we were touring, then a day or two later come across that same thing in the book.  The protagonist, such as he is, is an almost-reformed ex-con who managed to escape punishment for the worst of his thieving, and now is living under an assumed name in Paphos.  When he witnesses a murder in broad daylight on the beach, he gets blackmailed into helping get to the bottom of it.  Incredibly improbably shenanigans ensue.

Monday, January 6, 2025

2025 Reading Challenge

K and I are again embarking on an annual reading challenge.  This year's selections are:

January: a book you first picked up because of the cover
My World, by Jonny Wilkinson

February: a book about mental health
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain

March: a short story collection
In the Gloaming, by Alice Elliott Dark

April: a book published in the year you were born
The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy

May: a sequel
March, by Geraldine Brooks

June: something funny
Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas, by Adam Kay

July: a beach read
Murder on the Oceanic, by Edward Marston

August: a re-read
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande

September: a book with "secret" in the title
The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B., by Sandra Gulland

October: a book involving magic, witches, vampires, sorcery, or the like
Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth, by J.R.R. Tolkien

November: something containing recipes
On Rue Tatin: Living and Cooking in a French Town, by Susan Herman Loomis

December: something told from the point of view of the villain or bad guy
The Meaning of Night, by Michael Cox

Some of these may require some additional explanation, and I will try to provide that as I write about each individual book.

Usual rules apply (to the extent possible):
1. It has to be a book I already own;
2. It has to be a book I have not read yet (or at least haven't finished yet);
3. Though I can go out of order, some of the months are clearly themed (e.g., July, October), so I will try to read those books at least close to the month they are selected for; and
4. If I want to include a book I've already listed but didn't read, that's okay.

How will I do this year?

Sunday, January 5, 2025

Christmas Recap

My holidays were a little bit non-traditional this year, but I managed to squeeze in a good bit of celebration regardless.

We started out down in Florida with K, where, shortly after Thanksgiving, we undertook the annual favorite task of decorating for Christmas.  What's not to love about this? It happens early, it sets the scene, and there's still so much anticipation about all the fun to come!  Plus, the trouble of putting all this stuff away again is a problem for your future self -- or in this particular case, your future sister.  And, true to form, she put away all but one forgotten decoration: the ornaments that I had hung from the dining room light fixture!

Both while we were doing that and also sprinkled throughout our lengthy stay in Florida we watched several Hallmark-type, holiday-themed rom-coms whose names were generic enough to be forgotten before the movie was over.  I caught Love Actually on our flight to Cyprus, and one of our hotels seemed to have movies primarily in German, so we watched portions of The Santa Clause and The Santa Clause 2 and practiced our deutsch. Plus we found some more Hallmark-style movies both in English and other languages. 

Cyrpus has a few towns known for their Christmas markets, and S planned our travels specifically so we would be in or near Agros and Kyperounta in the run-up to Christmas, so we made the most we could out of the markets in those towns.  The best part -- the Christmas train pulled through the town center of Agros by a tractor!  (Last year in Ireland, we stumbled onto a 600-odd tractor run on Christmas day.  Are we developing a Christmas tradition of tractors, however odd that may be?!)  We also happened upon similar markets in Pano Lefkara (traditional) and Larnaca (the big city version).

For our Christmas feast, not quite knowing what would be available to tourists, we opted to attend the ultra-fancy Christmas Eve dinner at our ultra-fancy hotel in Paphos.  We had a grand time!  The spread was out of this world (probably the most extensive I have seen), there was live music during cocktail hour beforehand and in the ballroom as dinner trailed off, Christmas crackers -- silly though they may be -- topped each table, and the hotel was decorated top to bottom in Christmas decor.


A delightful little treat at our Christmas morning breakfast

Speaking of which, pretty much everything in Cyprus was decorated for the holiday.  Pubs, restaurants, shops -- everywhere you looked! The hotels especially, probably knowing they're catering to a bunch of people who don't get to put up their own decorations at home, were dressed to the nines.

We rented a car for our journey about Cyprus -- a surprisingly reliable little Kia Rio, which can go farther than one might think with the gas light on (and that goodness for that!) -- and S indulged me in my Christmas playlist all I wanted as we cruised around.

And, now that we've returned home, we will collect our packages and have our own little delayed Christmas morning on this very snowy day here at home!

Saturday, January 4, 2025

Thursday, January 2, 2025

2024 Reading Challenge Recap

Last year started out strong for my reading challenge, but ended poorly.  Here's the lowdown on how I did:

January: a book with a one-word title
Andorra, by Peter Cameron
READ

February: a book based on a real event
Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Storm in History, by Erik Larson
READ

March: a book that will stretch you
Love Her Wild, by Atticus
READ

April: a book recommended by a friend
Faster, by Neal Bascomb
IN PROGRESS

May: a book your mom loves
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller
DID NOT BEGIN

June: a book about hiking/road tripping
The Ultimate Journey: Canada to Mexico Down the Continental Divide, by Eric and Tim Ryback
READ

July: a book about books
The Library Book, by Susan Orlean
DID NOT BEGIN

August: a book that has a cover you love
Greyfriars Bobby, by Eleanore Atkinson
IN PROGRESS

September: a book set in an intriguing city
Tangerine, by Christine Mangan
DID NOT BEGIN

October: a used book
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
DID NOT BEGIN

November: a book with an ugly cover
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
READ (but earlier in the year, out of order)

December: a book with a number in the title
Three Day Road, by Joseph Boyden
DID NOT BEGIN

All in all, that's a success rate of 50%, if I could both of the partially-read books as half credit.  Not one of my better years.  But, it is what it is.  My Goodreads page will reflect that I read several books which weren't part of my reading challenge, so if I were to give myself credit for those as well, I would be up to 17 books for the year, or a success rate of 142%.  So, that's something, right?

Wednesday, January 1, 2025

Monday, December 30, 2024

The Ultimate Journey -- Take 2

I took a break in the middle of The Ultimate Journey: Canada to Mexico Down the Continental Divide to travel and work on a few other books, but I was eager to get back to it.

On the whole, I didn't enjoy it as much as The High Adventure of Eric Ryback, his first book.  Some of that might be because I wasn't surprised by it this time.  When you read a book that's written by the father of an old friend, you don't expect much from it.  When it turns out to be an eminently readable outdoor adventure (albeit a controversial one), it's a bit disarming. 

The second time around, I knew what to expect.  There was the added fun of having his little brother along for the adventure, but generally it was more of the same.  Which is not to say I didn't enjoy it, just that I expected it.

This book, unlike many of the others I've read this year, was part of my 2024 Reading Challenge, so it also has that going for it too.

Thursday, December 19, 2024

Enduring Passion -- Take 2

I finished Enduring Passion, but I have to say that the first half of the book was certainly more entertaining.  The remainder still had some fun bits and I didn't not enjoy it, but it wasn't as amusing as the early chapters.

If you've got some time to kill, poke through the first hundred pages or so. I won't spoil her advice.

I do want to give credit to her occasionally incisive social commentary of the day: "The opinions of crudely material and base-minded men would not matter in the least if it were not that they have for so long been voluble and noisy and expressive in print and thus tended to create a degraded social outlook." Those bits of the book are quite sharp and funny.