Abcinthia

I watched Sweeny Todd last night.

I got given The Weaker Vessel by Antonia Fraser today for my birthday. I can't wait to start reading it.

A chocolate biscuit.

I've heard a lot of good things about it and have been looking forward to reading it for ages. I hope it enjoy it as much as you did

I gave up reading The Book Of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric and am putting Jude The Obscure on hold until after the New Year. In the mean time I am going to read The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale and whatever Antonia Fraser history book my boyfriend has bought me for my birthday.

The Book Of Human Skin - Michelle Lovric I couldn't get into this book at all. I thought the characters were unlikable and the plot was really quite boring. I managed to make it half-way though then just gave up. I just could not bear to spend my birthday and christmas reading this book. 1/5 I am still reading Jude The Obscure as well but I might put it on hold until the new year and read something more modern over the Christmas period.

From what I understand (and I am not that knowledgeable, this is just what I've put together from various news stories) Pakistan was part of India. The partition happened sometime after WWII. I am not sure if India was still under British rule at the time or if Pakistan came into existence around the time they gained their independence. They were seperated because of the different religions (though I am assuming there must be more to it than just religions? but I don't know, I've only ever heard about the partition in conjunction with religion) though it led to violence as Muslims fled to Pakistain out of India (though India still has a large Muslim community) and Hindus fled from Pakistan into India. There is still strife between the two countries and disputes over an area of land (I think it's Kashmir? But I am not sure) and civil unrest in both countries though I think things are getting better in recent years. Hopefully someone with more knowledge will be able to help you more and correct anything I've gotten wrong.

Heathers. One of my favourite films of all time

I finished Deeper Than The Dead by Tami Hoag. It was a really good read. It is a crime novel set in 1985. Due to when it was set the police have to solve the murders and catch the serial killer using techniques available then. No DNA testing (first DNA evidence presenting in a US case wasn't until 1987). No computer on every desk. Not everyone owning a mobile phone (apart from the few people willing to carry one around in a suitcase!) . Fingerprints matched by eye. Criminal profiling was really quite new and distrusted by police forces who viewed it as "hockus pockus". The plot focuses on a criminal profiler who goes to a small California town to help catch a killer. The killer preys on women and kills the in a very unusual way (glues their eyes and mouths shut and destroys their eardrums). The latest murder victim was discovered by children and what is more chilling was the first chapter focuses on her murder whilst inserting quotes from a child talking about what a great man their father is. The first chapter ends (don't worry I'm not giving anything away) with the murderer talking about picking their child up from school. From then on it's a rollercoaster of a ride. The lack of forensics means that only good old fashioned detective work and the fairly new profiling can find the killer. Sadly though, I worked out the killers idenity towards the middle but despite that, it was a great read. I might have worked it out but the police didn't and I kept willing them to check this or to look there. The book was well written and I guess the author really captured what it was like to be a police officer in 1985 (I can't say for sure how true to reality it is. I wasn't born till nearly 5 years after the book was set and my knowledge of 1980s policing is from tv programmes). 4/5

I finished Dead In The Family by Charlaine Harris. I had enjoyed the other nine books in the Sookie Stackhouse Series but Dead In The Family was a real disapointment. I felt the plot was weak, especially with the ending. I felt like Sam and Bill were just there for the sake of being there. They really brought hardly anything to the book and I kept expecting their subplots to actually go somewhere. 2/5

Books bought in 2012: 1. If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History Of The Home - Lucy Worsley 2. The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards 3. Mansfield Park - Jane Austen 4. I Know This Much Is True - Wally Lamb 5. The Gunslinger - Stephen King 6. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald 7. Call The Midwife - Jennifer Worth 8. Anglo-Saxon England - Frank M. Stenton 9. The Duchess - Amanda Foreman 10. Mary Anne - Daphne Du Maurier 11. The Picture of Dorian gray - Oscar Wilde 12. Lady Chatterkey's Lover - D. H. Lawrence 13. Innocent Traitor - Alison Weir 14. Full Dark, No Stars - Stephen King 15. Desperation - Stephen King 16. Prey - Michael Crichton 17. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 18. A Kiss Before Dying - Ira Levin 19. The Stepford Wives - Ira Levin 20. Rosemary's Baby - Ira Levin 21. Shakespeare's Champion - Charlaine Harris 22. Shakespeare's Landlord - Charlaine Harris 23. Shakespeare's Counselor - Charlaine Harris 24. Shakespeare's Trophy - Charlaine Harris 25. Shakespeare's Christmas - Charlaine Harris 26. Bodily Secrets - William Trevor 27. The Women Who Got Away - John Updike 28. Eros Unbound - Anais Nin 29. Magnetism - F.Scott Fitzgerald 30. The Seducer's Diary - Soren Kierkegaard 31. Cures for Love - Stendhal 32. Forbidden Fruit - From the Letters of Abelard & Heloise 33. A Mere Interlude - Thomas Hardy 34. Mary - Vladmir Nabokov 35. Deviant Love - Sigmund Freud 36. Doomed Love - Virgil 37. First Love - Ivan Turgenev 38. The Virgin and the Gypsy - D.H. Lawrence 39. The Kreutzer Sonata - Leo Tolstoy 40. Of Mistresses, Tigresses & Other Conquests - Giacomo 41. Bonjour Tristesse - Francoise Sagan 42. The Eaten Heart - Unlikely Tales of Love - Giovanni Boccaccio 43. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin 44. A Russian Affair - Anton Chekhov 45. Something Childish but Very Natural - Katherine Mansfield 46. The Last Day Of A Condemned Man - Victor Hugo 47. Peter Schlemihl - Adelbert Von Chamisso 48. The Haunted House - Charles Dickens 49. Notes From The Undergound - Fyodor Dostoevsky 50. The Good Soldier - Ford Maddox Ford 51. The Devil's Elixirs - E.T.A Hoffmann 52. A Strange Manuscript Found In A Copper Cylinder - James De Mille 53. The Sorrows Of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 54.The Monk And The Hangman's Daughter - Ambrose Bierce 55. The Black Spider - Jeremias Gotthelf Books won in 2012: 1. The Paris Wife - Paula McLain 2. Lucky Break - Esther Freud

2010 books (from Goodreads),2011 books I am setting myself the challenge to read 80 books in 2012. Books read: 1. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut 2. Wedlock: How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match - Wendy Moore 3. The Talisman - Stephen King and Peter Straub 4. The Time Machine - H. G. Wells 5. First Love And Other Novellas - Samuel Beckett 6. The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian 7. The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells 8. Kill Me Once - Jon Osborne 9. A Closed Book - Gilbert Adair 10. Popcorn - Ben Elton 11. The Identity Man - Andrew Klavan 12. The Hidden Child - Camilla Läckberg 13. If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History Of The Home - Lucy Worsley 14. Jude The Obscure - Thomas Hardy 15. The Boys From Brazil - Ira Levin 16. Exposed - Liza Marklund 17. 9th Judgement - James Patterson with Maxine Paetro 18. Courtiers: The Secret History Of The Georgian Court - Lucy Worsley 19. The Gunslinger - Stephen King 20. High Windows - Philip Larkin 21. State Of Fear - Michael Crichton 22. A Vist From The Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan 23. Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions - Lucy Hughes-Hallett 24. The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot In The Seventeenth-Century England - Antonia Fraser 25. The Darkest Room - Johan Theorin 26. The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards 27. Rules Of Civility - Amor Towles 28. The Paris Wife - Paula McLain 29. The Sisters Brothers - Patrick DeWitt 30. The Princes In The Tower - Alison Weir 31. The Executioner - Chris Carter 32. Hungry Hill - Daphne Du Maurier 33. Call The Midwife - Jennifer Worth 34. The Somnambulist - Essie Fox 35. When God Was A Rabbit - Sarah Winman 36. Started Early, Took My Dog - Kate Atkinson 37. The Confessions of Katherine Howard - Suzannah Dunn 38. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie 39. The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson 40. Eve - Anna Carey 41. Destination Unknown - Agatha Christie 42. Perdita: The Life Of Mary Robinson - Paula Byrne 43. The Winter Ghosts - Kate Mosse 44. The Drawing Of Three - Stephen King 45. I Know This Much Is True - Wally Lamb 46. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald 47. Girl With A Pearl Earring - Tracy Chevalier 48. Never Knowing - Chevy Stevens (abandoned) 49. Lucky Break - Esther Freud 50. The Waste Lands - Stephen King 51. The Hound Of Death - Agatha Christie 52. Doomed Love - Virgil 53. The Man Who Was Thursday - G.K. Chesterton 54. The Devotion Of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino 55. Into The Darkest Corner - Elizabeth Haynes 56. Shiver - Maggie Stiefvater 57. Wizard And Glass - Stephen King 58. Forbidden Fruit - From The Letters Of Abelard And Heloise 59. Half Of The Human Race - Anthony Quinn 60. Pure - Andrew Miller 61. The Eaten Heart: Unlikely Tales Of Love - Giovanni Boccaccio 62. Of Mistresses, Tigresses And Other Conquests - Giacomo Casanova 63. The Road - Cormac McCarthy 64. The Mysterious Affair At Styles - Agatha Christie 65. Your Heart Belongs To Me - Dean Koontz 66. Cures For Love - Stendhal 67. The Seducer's Diary - Søren Kierkegaard 68. First Love - Ivan Turgenev 69. Wolves Of The Calla - Stephen King 70. Courtesans - Katie Hickman 71. The Marriage Plot - Jeffery Eugenides 72. The Report - Jessica Francis Kane 73. One Day - David Nicholls 74. Hell Gate - Linda Fairstein 75. The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas 76. A Mere Interlude - Thomas Hardy 77. Prey - Michael Crichton 78. How To Lose Friends & Alienate People - Toby Young 79. You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik 80. Song of Susannah - Stephen King 81. The ABC Murders - Agatha Christie 82. The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins 83. Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins 84. Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins 85. The Kreutzer Sonata - Leo Tolstoy 86. Night Waking - Sarah Moss 87. Long Lankin - Lindsey Barraclough 88. Blood Harvest - S. J. Bolton 89. The Playdate - Louise Millar 90. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 91. A Russian Affair - Anton Chekhov 92. Eleanor Of Aquitaine - Marion Meade 93. The Dark Tower - Stephen King 94. Deviant Love - Sigmund Frued 95. A Visitor's Companion To Tudor England - Suzannah Lipscomb 96. No Time For Goodbye - Linwood Barclay 97. Magnetism - F. Scott Fitzgerald 98. A Perfectly Good Man - Patrick Gale 99. The Silence Of The Lambs - Thomas Harris 100. The Queen's Confession - Victoria Holt 101. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 102. The Stepford Wives - Ira Levin 103. Something Childish But Very Natural - Katherine Mansfield 104. Mary Anne - Daphne Du Maurier 105. The Submission - Amy Waldman 106. Shakespeare's Landlord - Charlaine Harris 107. Shakespeare's Champion - Charlaine Harris 108. The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood 109. Shakespeare's Christmas - Charlaine Harris 110. Red Dragon - Thomas Harris 111. The Birds & Other Stories - Daphne Du Maurier 112. Egypt: How A Lost Civilization Was Rediscovered.- Joyce Tyldesley 113. The Woman In Black - Susan Hill 114. The Bourne Identity - Robert Ludlum 115. The Virgin And The Gipsy - D. H. Lawrence 116. Pet Sematary - Stephen King 117. Turn Of Mind - Alice LaPlante 118. 1Q84 Books 1 & 2 - Haruki Murakami 119. Blood & Roses - Helen Castor 120. 1Q84 Book 3 - Haruki Murakami 121. Oryx And Crake - Margaret Atwood 122. Before I Go To Sleep - S. J. Watson 123. The Drowning - Camilla Läckberg 124. The Year Of The Flood - Margaret Atwood 125. Rosemary's Baby - Ira Levin 126. Thinner - Stephen King 127. Too Close To Home - Linwood Barclay 128. Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern 129. After Dark - Haruki Murakami 130. Night Shift - Stephen King 131. Shakespeare's Trollop - Charlaine Harris 132. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford 133. The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller 134. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde 135. Faceless Killers - Henning Mankell 136. The House On The Strand - Daphne Du Maurier 137. Hogfather - Terry Pratchett

I went to the library today and got out Deeper Than The Dead by Tami Hoag and The Book Of Human skin by Michelle Lovric. Nice cheery reading before Christmas

I'm glad you enjoyed it Willoyd. It just wasn't my cup of tea despite my best efforts to get into the book. I finished Spiral by Paul McEuen Synopsis (from goodreads): In this riveting debut thriller by one of the leading researchers in nanoscience, the race is on to stop the devastating proliferation of the ultimate bioweapon. When Nobel laureate Liam Connor is found dead at the bottom of one of Ithaca, New York’s famous gorges, his research collaborator, Cornell professor of nanoscience Jake Sterling, refuses to believe it was suicide. Why would one of the world’s most eminent biologists, a eighty-six-year old man in good health who survived some of the darkest days of the Second World War, have chosen to throw himself off a bridge? And who was the mysterious woman caught on camera at the scene? Soon it becomes clear that a cache of supersophisticated nanorobots—each the size of a spider—has disappeared from the dead man’s laboratory. Stunned by grief, Jake, Liam’s granddaughter, Maggie, and Maggie’s nine-year-old son, Dylan, try to put the pieces together. They uncover ingeniously coded messages Liam left behind pointing toward a devastating secret he gleaned off the shores of war-ravaged Japan and carried for more than sixty years. What begins as a quest for answers soon leads to a horrifying series of revelations at the crossroads of biological warfare and nanoscience. At this dangerous intersection, a skilled and sadistic assassin, an infamous Japanese war criminal, and a ruthless U.S. government official are all players in a harrowing game of power, treachery, and intrigue—a game whose winner will hold the world’s fate literally in the palm of his hand. Thoughts: I loved this book. Right from the beginning it had me hooked and I could not read it fast enough. It was very scientific at times (the author is a professor of physics at Cornell University) but any jargon used was explained in a manner that was easy to understand, especially as science was not my strong subject at school. The plot was well thought out, as were all the characters. Rating: 5/5

Your favourite read of the year? It's hard to pick one favourite but I think it has to be Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Your favourite author of the year? Stephen King or Daphne Du Maurier Your most read author of the year? Stephen King Your favourite book cover of the year? The book you abandoned (if there was more than one, the one you read least of)? The Trial by Kafka The book that most disappointed you? The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold The funniest book of the year? Past Mortem - Ben Elton Your favourite literary character this year? Emma Bovary or Scarlett O'Hara. Your favourite children's book this year? The Tiger Who Came to Tea - Judith Kerr Your favourite classic of the year? Madame Bovary or Gone With The Wind Your favourite non-fiction book this year? Mary Tudor: England's First Queen - Anna Whitelock. Your favourite biography this year? Karl Marx - Francis Wheen Your favourite collection of short stories this year? Different Seasons - Stephen King Your favourite poetry collection this year? I haven't read any poetry collections this year. Your favourite illustrated book of the year? Katie And The Spanish Princess - James Mayhew Your favourite publisher of the year? I like them all!

It's my favourite period of history and I was really looking forward to reading a fiction story that centres around someone other than the usual suspects (Elizabeth, Henry and his wives etc). Is she writing a sequel? If she is I'll definitely give it a go but I'd probably borrow it from the library rather than buying it.

Personally I thought Wolf Hall was just alright, I gave it 3/5 stars on Goodreads. It had some brilliant sections but the rest of it was quite boring to me. I wasn't a fan of the writing style either. It took me a long time to get used to it, especially as Mantel uses "he" a lot. Most of the time "he" is Cromwell but most of the characters (and there are A LOT) are male and several times I had to re-read passages to understand. I recommend reading it though, it's such a marmite book and people seem to either love it or hate it. I only started making a list of books I've read last year. It's been really interesting to look back and see what I read, some books I'd completely forgotten about.

I have just started reading Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy.

I finished The Glass-Blowers by Daphne Du Maurier. It was different than her other novels I've read, but it was really enjoyable.

Jamaica Inn and Frenchman's Creek are both really good. I really want to read My Cousin Rachel at some point because it sounds good.

I'm 2/3rds of the way through The Glass-Blowers by Daphne Du Maurier and 1/4 of the way through Spiral by Paul McEuen. Both have been great so far.

Hello Vicky. Where abouts in Bucks are you living? I used to live in High Wycombe before I moved.

Finished my 100th book of 2011. The Russian Concubine - Kate Furnivall Synopsis (from goodreads): A sweeping novel set in war-torn 1928 China, with a star-crossed love story at its center. In a city full of thieves and Communists, danger and death, spirited young Lydia Ivanova has lived a hard life. Always looking over her shoulder, the sixteen-year-old must steal to feed herself and her mother, Valentina, who numbered among the Russian elite until Bolsheviks murdered most of them, including her husband. As exiles, Lydia and Valentina have learned to survive in a foreign land. Often, Lydia steals away to meet with the handsome young freedom fighter Chang An Lo. But they face danger: Chiang Kai Shek's troops are headed toward Junchow to kill Reds like Chang, who has in his possession the jewels of a tsarina, meant as a gift for the despot's wife. The young pair's all-consuming love can only bring shame and peril upon them, from both sides. Those in power will do anything to quell it. But Lydia and Chang are powerless to end it. Thoughts: I felt this book started off weak and slow, improved a bit towards the end but was ruined by quite a rushed ending. There were so many storylines and characters, who all know each other in some way, that it was a bit difficult to keep up at times. It's more of a romance novel (and even then the romance story we've read a million times before) than a historical novel which I think is a pity as the historical parts were more interesting to read. It's certainly interested me in finding out more about China in the 1920s. Overall, I'd just call the story ok. It was somewhat enjoyable to read but is not memorable and I would probably never think to read it again. Random Quote: It stopped him cold. He felt the blood drain from his face. With an efforthe replaced the scotch on the table. Favourite Character: Lydia. Rating: 2/5