Tag: downtheTBRhole

This meme was originally created by Lia at Lost in a Story as a way to tackle the gargantuan To-Read shelves a lot of us have on Goodreads.

The rules are simple:

1. Go to your Goodreads To-Read shelf.
2. Order on ascending date added.
3. Take the first 5 (or 10 if you’re feeling adventurous) books
4. Read the synopses of the books
5. Decide: keep it or should it go?
6. Repeat until the entire list has been filtered

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I’m taking a slightly different approach to this exercise today because I’m going right back to the oldest books on my To-Read shelf to consider if I still want to read them. They survived the cull last time… but will they this time? (All of the books are ones I own either in physical form or as ebooks on my Kindle.)

When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman (added 4th May 2013)

AD 1135. As church bells tolled for the death of England’s King Henry I, his barons faced the unwelcome prospect of being ruled by a woman: Henry’s beautiful daughter Maude, Countess of Anjou.

But before Maude could claim her throne, her cousin Stephen seized it. In their long and bitter struggle, all of England bled and burned.

Verdict: Dump – The good news is I don’t have to make a decision on this one because it turns out I don’t own a copy after all. 

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson (added 11th September 2013)

Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn’t married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but here she was, stuck in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patricia aged five, greedy cross-patch Gillian who refused to be ignored, and Ruby…

Ruby tells the story of The Family, from the day at the end of the nineteenth century when a travelling French photographer catches frail beautiful Alice and her children, like flowers in amber, to the startling, witty, and memorable events of Ruby’s own life.

Verdict: Keep – I’m still interested to read this one, if only because it was the author’s first novel and she has gone on to great things. 

Case Histories (Jackson Brodie #1) by Kate Atkinson (added 11th September 2013)

Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet – Lost on the left, Found on the right – and the two never seem to balance.

Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, his own life haunted by a family tragedy, Jackson attempts to unravel three disparate case histories and begins to realise that in spite of apparent diversity, everything is connected…

Verdict: Keep – A later book in the series came up in a recent iteration of this exercise and there was a bit of an outcry from Jackson Brodie fans when I dumped it so this one stays. Maybe I’ll even read it before the 10th anniversary of its acquisition arrives…

Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey (added 8th June 2014)

Meet Maud. Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn’t remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is unrecognisable – or her daughter Helen seems a total stranger.

But there’s one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to the bottom of it.

Because somewhere in Maud’s damaged mind lies the answer to an unsolved seventy-year-old mystery. One everyone has forgotten about.

Everyone, except Maud . . .

Verdict: Keep – This was the author’s debut novel and although the plot now doesn’t seem quite as original as it would have done back in 2014 (which the author can’t really be blamed for), I’m still intrigued to read it. 

The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessey (Harold Fry #2) by Rachel Joyce (added 4th October 2014)

When Queenie Hennessy discovers that Harold Fry is walking the length of England to save her, and all she has to do is wait, she is shocked. Her note to him had explained she was dying from cancer. How can she wait?

A new volunteer at the hospice suggests that Queenie should write again; only this time she must tell Harold the truth. Composing this new message, the volunteer promises, will ensure Queenie hangs on. It will also atone for the secrets of the past. As the volunteer points out, ‘It isn’t Harold who is saving you. It is you, saving Harold Fry.’

This is that letter. A letter that was never sent.

Verdict: Dump – I can imagine why I might have wanted to read this companion novel to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry at the time but I no longer have that enthusiasm.

Trigger Mortis by Anthony Horowitz (added 2nd September 2015) 

It’s 1957 and James Bond (agent 007) has only just survived his showdown with Auric Goldfinger at Fort Knox. By his side is Pussy Galore, who was with him at the end. Unknown to either of them, the USSR and the West are in a deadly struggle for technological superiority. And SMERSH is back.

The Soviet counter-intelligence agency plans to sabotage a Grand Prix race at the most dangerous track in Europe. But it’s Bond who finds himself in the driving seat and events take an unexpected turn when he observes a suspicious meeting between SMERSH’s driver and a sinister Korean millionaire, Jai Seong Sin.

Soon Bond is pitched into an entirely different race uncovering a plan that could bring the West to its knees.

Verdict: Keep – Anthony Horowitz can do very little wrong in my eyes and this still sounds like a lot of fun. 

Nor Will He Sleep (Inpector McLevy #4) by David Ashton (added 29th November 2015)

1887. The streets of Edinburgh seethe with youthful anarchy as two rival gangs of students, Scarlet Runners and White Devils, try to outdo each other in wild exploits. After a pitched battle between them, an old woman is found savagely battered to death in Leith Harbour.

Enter Inspector James McLevy, a little more grizzled, but unchanging in his fierce desire to mete out justice. As the inspector delves further he meets up with one Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Jekyll and Hyde, in the city to bury his recently deceased father.

Verdict: Dump – I’ve read the first and second in this series but this was back in 2017. I enjoyed them but I don’t think I’m enthused to go back to the series given also that I haven’t read the third book. 

The Mirror & The Light (Thomas Cromwell #3) by Hilary Mantel (added 3rd January 2016)

England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, before Jane dies giving birth to the male heir he most craves.

Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?

Verdict: Keep – I think this is the book I’m most embarrassed still not to have read. If I’m honest, it is its size that has deterred me. However, I do also have an audiobook version so perhaps that might be the way to tackle it…

Any Human Heart by William Boyd (added 4th January 2016)

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary but Logan Mountstuart’s contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and betrayed in the war and an art-dealer in ’60s New York, Logan mixes with the movers and shakers of his times. But as a son, friend, lover and husband, he makes the same mistakes we all do in our search for happiness. Here, then, is the story of a life lived to the full – and a journey deep into a very human heart.

Verdict: Keep – Another book that is over 500 pages. I do really want to read it, I just need to carve out the time to do it.  

The Ashes of London (Marwood and Lovett #1) by Andrew Taylor (added 4th April 2016)

A CITY IN FLAMES. London, 1666. As the Great Fire consumes everything in its path, the body of a man is found in the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral – stabbed in the neck, thumbs tied behind his back.

A WOMAN ON THE RUN. The son of a traitor, James Marwood is forced to hunt the killer through the city’s devastated streets. There he encounters a determined young woman, who will stop at nothing to secure her freedom.

A KILLER SEEKING REVENGE. When a second murder victim is discovered in the Fleet Ditch, Marwood is drawn into the political and religious intrigue of Westminster – and across the path of a killer with nothing to lose …

Verdict: Keep – I’m aware Andrew Taylor’s books are very popular and I think I’m in the mood for a new historical mystery series. The good news is, if I enjoy it, there are a further six books to devour. 

The Result – 7 kept, 3 dumped. Would you have made different choices? 

This meme was originally created by Lia at Lost in a Story as a way to tackle the gargantuan To-Read shelves a lot of us have on Goodreads.

The rules are simple:

1. Go to your Goodreads To-Read shelf.
2. Order on ascending date added.
3. Take the first 5 (or 10 if you’re feeling adventurous) books
4. Read the synopses of the books
5. Decide: keep it or should it go?
6. Repeat until the entire list has been filtered

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The number of books on my To-Read shelf on Goodreads has remained stubbornly around the 250 mark so I want to keep going with this weeding out exercise. Apart from anything else, it could result in additional non-virtual bookshelf space. All the books I’m looking at here are books I own, either in physical or digital form. I have a separate ‘Wishlist’ shelf with 192 books on it.

The Convalescent Corpse by Nicola Slade (added 16th November 2019)

Life in 1918 has brought loss and grief and hardship to the three Fyttleton sisters.

Helped only by their grandmother (a failed society belle and expert poacher) and hindered by a difficult suffragette mother, as well as an unruly chicken-stealing dog and a house full of paying guests, they now have to deal with the worrying news that their late – and unlamented – father may not be dead after all.

And on top of that, there’s a body in the ha-ha.

Verdict: Dump – This sounds quite fun but I no longer have real enthusiasm for reading it. 

The Foundling by Stacey Halls (added 5th January 2020)

London, 1754. Six years after leaving her newborn, Clara, at London’s Foundling Hospital, young Bess Bright returns to reclaim the illegitimate daughter she has never really known. Dreading the worst–that Clara has died in care–the last thing she expects to hear is that her daughter has already been reclaimed. Her life is turned upside down as she tries to find out who has taken her little girl, and why.

Less than a mile from Bess’s lodgings in a quiet town house, a wealthy widow barely ventures outside. When her close friend, an ambitious doctor at the Foundling Hospital, persuades her to hire a nursemaid for her young daughter, she is hesitant to welcome someone new into her home and her life. But her past is threatening to catch up with her and will soon tear her carefully constructed world apart.

Verdict: Keep – I really enjoyed The Familiars and also the author’s latest book, The Household.

To Calais, In Ordinary Time by James Meek (added 22nd February 2020)

Three journeys. One road.

England, 1348. A gentlewoman is fleeing an odious arranged marriage, a Scottish proctor is returning home to Avignon and a handsome young ploughman in search of adventure is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais.

Coming in their direction from across the Channel is the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe. As the journey unfolds, overshadowed by the archers’ past misdeeds and clerical warnings of the imminent end of the world, the wayfarers must confront the nature of their loves and desires.

Verdict: Keep – This book was on a previous 20 Books of Summer list and is on this year’s list as well. Although it has quite a low average rating (3.66) on Goodreads, it was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2020.

Tidelands by Philippa Gregory (added 25th February 2020)

England 1648. A dangerous time for a woman to be different

Midsummer’s Eve, 1648, and England is in the grip of civil war between renegade King and rebellious Parliament. The struggle reaches every corner of the kingdom, even to the remote Tidelands – the marshy landscape of the south coast.

Alinor, a descendant of wise women, crushed by poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard under the full moon for a ghost who will declare her free from her abusive husband. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run, and shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marsh, not knowing that she is leading disaster into the heart of her life.

Suspected of possessing dark secrets in superstitious times, Alinor’s ambition and determination mark her out from her neighbours. This is the time of witch-mania, and Alinor, a woman without a husband, skilled with herbs, suddenly enriched, arouses envy in her rivals and fear among the villagers, who are ready to take lethal action into their own hands.

Verdict: Keep – I’ve read and enjoyed lots of Philippa Gregory’s books. Although the plot now sounds quite similar to other books I’ve read in the meantime, I’ll keep it not least because it’s on my 20 Books of Summer 2024 list.  

This Is Happiness by Niall Williams (added 9th March 2020)

Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish that hasn’t changed in a thousand years.

For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now – just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity – the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can’t explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.

As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy’s past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.

Verdict: Keep – This was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize in 2020, a fact that often influences my decisions, and it’s on my 20 Books of Summer 2024 list. 

Hammer To Fall by John Lawton (added 24th March 2020) 

It’s London, the swinging sixties, and by rights MI6 spy Joe Wilderness should be having as good a time as James Bond. But alas, in the wake of an embarrassing disaster for MI6, Wilderness has been posted to remote northern Finland in a cultural exchange program to promote Britain abroad.

Bored by his work, with nothing to spy on, Wilderness finds another way to make money: smuggling vodka across the border into the USSR. He strikes a deal with old KGB pal Kostya, who explains to him there is a vodka shortage in the Soviet Union – but there is something fishy about Kostya’s sudden appearance in Finland and intelligence from London points to a connection to cobalt mining in the region, a critical component in the casing of the atomic bomb.

Wilderness’s posting is getting more interesting by the minute, but more dangerous too.

Verdict: Keep – This is the third book in the author’s ‘Joe Wilderness’ series. I enjoyed the first two booksand I have a copy of the fourth, Moscow Exile, which I don’t want to read until I’ve read this one!

Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres (added 27th March 2020)

Set against the backdrop of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, Birds Without Wings traces the fortunes of one small community in south-west Anatolia – a town in which Christian and Muslim lives and traditions have co-existed peacefully for centuries.

When war is declared and the outside world intrudes, the twin scourges of religion and nationalism lead to forced marches and massacres, and the peaceful fabric of life is destroyed. Birds Without Wings is a novel about the personal and political costs of war, and about love: between men and women; between friends; between those who are driven to be enemies; and between Philothei, a Christian girl of legendary beauty, and Ibrahim the Goatherd, who has courted her since infancy. 

Verdict: Keep – This has been on my wishlist for years but I only recently acquired a copy after I heard the author interviewed at Falmouth Books Festival last year. 

The Bridled Tongue by Catherine Meyrick (added 26th May 2020)

England 1586. Alyce Bradley has few choices when her father decides it is time she marry as many refuse to see her as other than the girl she once was—unruly, outspoken and close to her grandmother, a woman suspected of witchcraft.

Thomas Granville, an ambitious privateer, inspires fierce loyalty in those close to him and hatred in those he has crossed. Beyond a large dowry, he is seeking a virtuous and dutiful wife. Neither he nor Alyce expect more from marriage than mutual courtesy and respect.

As the King of Spain launches his great armada and England braces for invasion, Alyce must confront closer dangers from both her own and Thomas’s past, threats that could not only destroy her hopes of love and happiness but her life. And Thomas is powerless to help.

Verdict: Dump – These are the ones I find difficult. The book was sent to me by the author so I really do owe her a review but… we’re three years on so I suspect she’s given up waiting and it does sound similar to other books I’ve read in the meantime. 

Saving Lucia by Anna Vaught (added 4th June 2020)

How would it be if four lunatics went on a tremendous adventure, reshaping their pasts and futures as they went, including killing Mussolini?

What if one of those people were a fascinating, forgotten aristocratic assassin and the others a fellow life co-patient, James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, another the first psychoanalysis patient, known to history simply as ‘Anna O,’ and finally 19th Century Paris’s Queen of the Hysterics, Blanche Wittmann?

That would be extraordinary, wouldn’t it? How would it all be possible? Because, as the assassin Lady Violet Gibson would tell you, those who are confined have the very best imaginations.

Verdict: Keep – If you’ll pardon the pun, I was in two minds about this one but I’ve been swayed by positive reviews of it by book bloggers whose opinions I respect. 

The Moss House by Clara Barley (added 4th June 2020)

Two hundred years ago, neighbouring Yorkshire landowners Miss Lister and Miss Walker find their lives become entwined in a passionate, forbidden relationship and retreat to the Moss House, their private sanctuary away from an unaccepting world. Their tranquillity does not last long as they are drawn into the turmoil of a changing society and a divided family, testing their love for each other, eventually driving them from their home.

The world was not yet ready for the likes of Miss Lister. Landowner, scholar, traveller, mountaineer and non-conformist but in The Moss House we discover her lifelong battle to be her true self as she finds Ann Walker and together they try to live life on their own terms.

Verdict: Dump – Miss Lister is Ann Lister of the TV series, Gentleman Jack, which I have not watched.  I was put off by some of the reviews so gave it the first chapter test. I don’t think it’s for me.

The Result – 7 kept, 3 dumped. Would you have made different choices?