France

I've never thought a new year means much, for me the big changeover date when I expected things might change/improve is my birthday which is in June. Being 11 or 30 or considerably older has much more significance than a different year.

It's been raining all day so I've spent a lot of time with the miniature library kit I was given for Christmas. Most of the furniture is done, now I have to get going on making the books.

Substitute France for Scotland and I'm doing exactly the same!

Me too.

I did a bit of Kobo diving recently and randomly selected one of the books I'd bought on a special offer and hadn't got around to reading yet. I landed on Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin , the story of Violette, a cemetery keeper who leads a contented solitary life looking after graves and growing plants. Then Gabriel turns up to fulfill his mother's last wish that her ashes but should be spread not on the grave of her husband but on the grave of someone Gabriel has never heard of. This was a runaway best seller in France, unusual as it's a long book and the French don't usually go for hundreds and hundreds of pages, but I can see why it appealed to so many. There's huge charm in the book, Violette, though a bit wet in places, is immensely appealing, the love story between Gabriel's mother and her lover is very moving and there are a couple of other plot lines which I won't mention for risk of spoilers. However it's far too long for my taste, and half way through the author began to head hop between Violette, the husband who abandoned her years ago and other characters which didn't add a lot. It's worth trying though, the translation is excellent (apart from French children calling their mothers Mommy), much of the story is lovely and I won't forget it in a hurry.

Thank you, we were really afraid he'd end up in a wheelchair but amazingly enough he has made a full recovery.

Amanda had her DNA tested to see if she was her father's daughter. I don't care about Connie Willis's anomalies either or about Hilary Mantel's use of modern speech in the Wolf Hall, but was driven crazy by Philippa Gregory putting 21st Century thinking into the head of a 16th century girl in the other Boleyn Girl.

I had heard so much about Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, that it was a breath of fresh air, delightful, etc etc. I'm afraid it left me a bit underwhelmed, it was readable, some parts of it were good but it didn't have that vital can't-put-it-down factor. Partially it was because some of it was just too much, Elizabeth was too good at everything apart from making a success of her personal life, her child was way too clever, the same could be said for the dog though it was so quirky I forgave it a lot but the emphasis on what a hard time intelligent women had to be recognised in their own right in masculine-dominated areas in the 50s and early 60s was very heavy handed and there were glaring anachronisms. I didn't pick on some of them like Sweden not having universal child care till the 70s but DNA testing in 1961? I the book has absorbed me enough I can overlook those, not here though. Business As Usual by Jane Oliver really is a breath of fresh air. Written in 1933 it's an epistolary novel about Hilary Fane who come to London for a year to earn her own living while her fiancé finishes his medical studies in Edinburgh. She eventually gets a job in a thinly disguised Selfridges, ending up in their lending library. She's a great character, forthright, full of humour, bossy gets on the wrong side of her co-workers sometimes and is delightfully human. Not a long or heavy read, it hasn't dated at all and I really enjoyed it.

I suspect that's why I gave up on her. There are authors like Sharon Bolton who have plot lines which are completely unbelievable when you think about them later but she's so good at keeping the pace going that you don't really mind. For me Elly Griffiths isn't one of them.

Can I suggest then then that maybe your reading isn't that wide!!!😀 Unfortunately there are far too many so called thrillers with that sort of lazy plotting, spies who pick up a dark enticing woman and don't notice she has a Russian accent, people who just "find" someone who can provide a fake passport, looking identical to another person (not just similar), looking identical and they also have the same taste in suitcases so you pick up the wrong one, being in a train accident and declared dead when you walked away unrecognisable and then become your own children's nanny (East Lynne)...

And if you have an Audible subscription just about all her short stories including Christmas Past are free on Audible Plus

I picked up the Three Body Problem at a book fair a few months ago and it's been languishing in the bookcase, now I really want to read it. Hope you get better soon. Last time I had a serious neck problem I ended up with a baby! (Long story, but being in too much pain to remember pills had a lot to do with it).

I used to love Donna Leon's books then read an article in a writing magazine where she said she hadn't bothered to find out anything about how the Italian police system works. Talk about letting daylight in on the magic! She may have been joking, I hope so, but it still put me off reading any more of her books.

I agree this was a great book, I loved it.

Mrs Harris Goes to Paris - Paul Gallico This is a book I would have loved when I was a lot younger but now, though it's very readable, it feels both dated and saccharinely sweet. It's about to be made into a film and will probably work. There's a lot of Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead , I read it on my Kobo so can't say exactly how long it was, about 600 pages plus I reckon so if you're going to read it be prepared! There are two parallel stories, that of film star Hadley who is going to play Marion Greaves, one of the pioneering women pilots and becomes increasingly fascinated by her and Marian's story which isn't exactly what her modern day biographer thinks. Probably 3/4 of the book is Marian and it's by far the most interesting though Hadley's is by no means boring. This was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Women's Prize for Fiction and it's beautifully written, I thoroughly enjoyed it though it did require a certain amount of stamina! The Angels of Venice by Phillip Wynne Jones is marketed as a thriller and a thriller this story is not. I worked out who the baddies were almost from the first entry on the page and it has one of those plots where you start muttering 'Oh come on, surely ______ wouldn't be that stupid. However the sense of place is absolutely fantastic, you feel you can feel and smell Venice (the author lives there and obviously loves it, even though he doesn't have his rose tinted specs on) and for that alone, and the pleasant main characters this was well worth reading. I'll be looking out for other books in the series though I don't think I'd be prepared to pay full price for them.

Oh my, I've just looked at the latest Richard and Judy list and what a load of dross (to put it politely)! The only completely new to me title on the Goodreads list that looks interesting is the book about Josephine Baker.

They're all excellent writers and really spill a good yarn, however all three authors can be (for me) horribly violent and descriptive about it too. I can't stomach that much gore any longer.

No, not just you Willoyd. I've got to the point where I can barely be bothered to look through the list as it's so likely to have nothing I'm interested in that I haven't already noted. I have much the same reaction to Richard and Judy's book club.

Those are incredible.

If I really love a book I have on the Kobo I'll look out for the real life version! It doesn't help with the sheer number of books in the house.

I can't make up my mind whether Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr is brilliant or thoroughly overblown. It follows 5 storylines, Konstance, a young girl on a spaceship leaving a ruined earth in an attempt to colonise an earth-like planet, Omeir a young peasant who is conscripted into the sultan's army heading for Constantinople in 1452, Maria, an orphan living in the city who rather improbably learns to read Greek, and in the present day Zino who learned Greek from a fellow POW in the Korean war and has returned to his small home town and has made a play out of a Greek story for some grade school children, and Seymour, a troubled misfit, passionate about nature and owls. The book undoubtedly could do with some pruning and the start is very slow indeed,but once it got going it became totally absorbing. I'm still not sure if it wasn't too clever for it's own good and would be interested to know what others thought. This Charming Man by CK McDonnell is such fun. It's the second in a series set in the Stranger Times, a newspaper in Manchester that investigates the weird and wonderful, (and there's quite a lot that's weird in their offices too). This time it's vampires, which don't exist of course, so there must be some other reason for the pointy teeth and strange deaths... Funny, original, highly recommended. Shamed by Linda Costillo is about 13th in her series about chief of police Kate Burkholder and the series shows no signs of flagging. I do wonder sometimes just how many murders you can have among the Amish community, they are peaceful folk after all, but this one is an absolute cracker.

Funnily enough your post reminded me that I read O Caledonia earlier this year and forgot to include it in my reading list, which shows what an impact it had on me! Yes it was beautifully written but I couldn't warm to anything within the story, nor get particularly involved, which is probably why it slipped my memory so easily. That said, now I think about it I can recall everything which says a lot about the quality of the writing, it's just that I remain utterly unengaged.

If you like Anne Tyler then you'll probably love French Braid about various members of a Baltimore family, one character's take on events at a time. If you find her inconsequential and short on plot lines you really won't enjoy this one. I'm firmly in the first camp, I don't know what it is about her writing but she grabs my attention with the descriptions of the minutiae of family life just as keenly as any thriller writer. I particularly enjoyed this one because of all the shifting perspectives showing different sides to a story, all equally vaild. The Last One to Disappear by Jo Spain is the literary equivalent of mass produced vanilla ice cream, OK at the time but completely unmemorable.

Mmm, I wouldn't agree about the film being more entertaining than the book, I love both but in different ways and see them almost as separate entities which share a lot in common.

I learned to read with Black Beauty - my mother was reading it to me and answered the phone and I got so frustrated at the wait that I picked it up and discovered I could make out all the words. I must have read it about 20 times between the ages of 6 -10. I spent yesterday visiting my first grandchild, aged 5 days. I'm every bit as besotted as your stereotypical grandmother.