Tag: 20 Books of Summer

20 Books of Summer Reading Challenge 2018: Final Update #20booksofsummer

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20 Books of Summer Reading Challenge

This annual challenge is run by my namesake Cathy at 746 Books.

The rules are simple…and accommodating.  Pick your own 10, 15 or 20 books you’d like to read between 1st June and 3rd September.  Want to swap a book?  Go for it.  Fancy changing your list half way through?  No problem.  Decide to drop your goal from 20 to 15.  Cathy’s fine with that.

In putting together my original list, I decided to concentrate on four categories:

  • My Classics Club list which has been rather starved of attention lately
  • My other reading challenges all of which could do with a little help
  • My pile of review copies sent to me by lovely authors who, in addition to their writing talents, also possess seemingly limitless patience waiting for my reviews
  • Blog tour commitments I had in the next month or so

Over-confidence – what a thing that is, eh? After much soul searching (as it did seem a bit like cheating), I allowed myself to take advantage of the flexibility offered to change my list part way through, as you can see below.  I’ll be honest, if I hadn’t done that I’d have been nowhere near completing the challenge and, as it is, I only managed to complete 18 of my 20.  However, the challenge has allowed me tick off a few books from my Classics Club list and to make a couple of authors happy by reading and reviewing their books.

Clicking on the title will take you to my review of the book, or the book description on Goodreads if I’ve either not yet written my review or haven’t finished reading the book.

1 – The Half-Hearted by John Buchan          Read and reviewed

2 – The Watcher by the Threshold by John Buchan    Read and reviewed

3 – The Dark Tide by Vera Brittain         Read, not yet reviewed

The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
4 – Replaced with Huntingtower by John Buchan      Read and reviewed

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
5 – Replaced with Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala    Read and reviewed

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
6 – Replaced with The Promise by Michelle Vernal    Read and reviewed 

The Assassin of Verona (William Shakespeare Thriller #2) by Benet Brandreth
7 – Replaced with Old Baggage by Lissa Evans     Read and reviewed 

8 – Diamond Cut Diamond by Jane Jakeman (What’s In A Name Reading Challenge)   Read and reviewed

Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee (TBR Pile Challenge)
9 – Replaced with The Mistress of Pennington’s by Rachel Brimble   Read and reviewed

10 – Six Stories by Matt Wesolowski (When Are You Reading? Challenge)  Read, not yet reviewed

11 – Spirit of Lost Angels (The Bone Angel #1) by Liza Perrat    Read and reviewed

12 – The King’s Daughter by Stephanie Churchill    Read and reviewed

A Queen’s Spy (The Tudor Mystery Trials #1) by Samantha Burnell
13 – Replaced with The Secrets of Primrose Square by Claudia Carroll   Read and reviewed 

14 – Choose to Rise: The Victory Within by M. N. Mekaelian    Currently reading

15 – Money Power Love by Joss Sheldon    Currently reading

16 – A Woman’s Lot (Meonbridge Chronicles #2) by Carolyn Hughes  Read and reviewed

17 – Forsaking All Others by Catherine Meyrick   Read and reviewed

18 – Summer of Love by Caro Fraser  Read and reviewed

19 – Call of the Curlew by Elizabeth Brooks    Read and reviewed

20 – The Emperor of Shoes by Spencer Wise     Read and reviewed

If you participated in the 20 Books of Summer Reading Challenge, do leave a comment or link to your list to let me know how you got on…

 

 

 

Buchan of the Month/Book Review: The Watcher by the Threshold by John Buchan

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Buchan of the Month

The Watcher by the ThresholdAbout the Book

The Watcher by the Threshold is a collection of five stories from John Buchan, author of ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’. The pagan themes and classic adventures are set in the Scottish countryside.

Format: Paperback (224 pp.)    Publisher: Aegypan
Published: 1st December 2006 [1900]        Genre: Short Stories, Ghost Stories

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Watcher by the Threshold on Goodreads

My Review

The Watcher by the Threshold is the seventh book in my Buchan of the Month reading project.  You can find out more about the project plus my reading list for 2018 here.  You can also read a spoiler-free introduction to the book here.  My copy of The Watcher by the Threshold is part of a hardback compendium entitled Four Tales, published by Blackwood in 1944 (first edition February 1936) which also contains The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Power-House and The Moon Endureth (another short story collection).

The collection is made up of five stories, all set in the Scottish Highlands and with an element of the supernatural.

In ‘No Man’s Land’, superstition turns to reality in a frightening encounter with a legacy of the past.
In ‘The Far Islands’, a small boy, the last in a family that goes back generations, is transfixed by visions of an island beyond the horizon always just out of reach.  Only in the final pages of the story does he attain his dream, but at what costs?
In ‘The Watcher of the Threshold’, a man’s friend becomes convinced that a devilish presence is constantly at his side, plunging him into melancholy and driving him to ultimately desperate acts.
In ‘The Outgoing of the Tide’, a battle between good and evil, love and hate, is played out at a place and on a night of the year when evil forces abound.
Finally, in Fountainblue’, a return to the place of his boyhood brings about a moral and emotional crisis as a man realises that success in the modern world is not enough for true fulfilment.

In the stories that make up The Watcher by the Threshold, Buchan explores many of the themes that he would revisit in later books: self-sacrifice, the virtues of the outdoor life and physical activity and, most notably, the thin line between civilisation and chaos.  For example, in an oft-quoted line from ‘Fountainblue’, the narrator Maitland remarks, ‘There is a very narrow line between the warm room and the savage out-of-doors’, describing the division as ‘a line, a thread, a sheet of glass’.

The stories in The Watcher by the Threshold have an eerie feel reminiscent of the ghost stories of M. R. James but played out in the wilds of Scotland where the physical perils of bog and mountainside await alongside more metaphysical dangers.   The Watcher by the Threshold is one of my 20 Books of Summer and my book for July’s theme of the BookBum Club on Goodreads – That Is So Last Year.

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In three words: Eerie, unsettling, supernatural

Try something similar…Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James

John BuchanAbout the Author

John Buchan (1875 – 1940) was an author, poet, lawyer, publisher, journalist, war correspondent, Member of Parliament, University Chancellor, keen angler and family man.  He was ennobled and, as Lord Tweedsmuir, became Governor-General of Canada.  In this role, he signed Canada’s entry into the Second World War.   Nowadays he is probably best known – maybe only known – as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps.  However, in his lifetime he published over 100 books: fiction, poetry, short stories, biographies, memoirs and history.

You can find out more about John Buchan, his life and literary output by visiting The John Buchan Society website.