Carol's Notebook – Page 170

Mailbox Monday – 9/30

September 30, 2019May 19, 2020 by Carol10 Comments

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week. Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists. Tell us about your new arrivals by adding your Mailbox Monday post to the linky at mailboxmonday.wordpress.com. I picked up Beyond a Reasonable Stout on NetGalley. I think it will be a perfect read for late fall. And I couldn't pass up this Christmas novella from a series I'm waay late in discovering....

Fell Murder by E. C. R. Lorac

September 26, 2019October 4, 2019 by Carol6 Comments

In Fell Murder, Lorac does a great job setting the scene. Before the murder even happens, we know the family and their quarrels, the neighboring farmers and the landscape well. For some, the prolonged introduction may make the book seem to start off slow, but I like getting to know the eventual suspects and seeing how they interacted with the victim when he was alive. Garth was a respected, rather than loved, elderly and wealthy landowner. Even though he was tough and mean, he was a hard-worker and dealt with people fairly for the most part. Nevertheless, there are plenty of suspects among the family and neighbors. MacDonald, our series detective, is called in from Scotland Yard because the local man is too busy and not used to dealing with murders, and it's for the best. The local man is a townie and treats the farmers as if they're stupid. MacDonald is gentler and realizes their slowness in speech and action...

Sunday Salon – 9/22

September 22, 2019October 2, 2019 by Carol10 Comments

Thanks to Deb at Readerbuzz for hosting The Sunday Salon. Stop over there or at the Facebook Group to participate. Week’s Highlight: We went to the Beer, Barks & BBQ event supporting our local humane society. It was a fun evening. The food was good, pulled pork and all the sides. They had one of the local breweries' Oatmeal Stout, which David said was good. There was a bonfire, but they're weren't any chairs around it and we didn't bring our own, which was a little sad. So after we left, we came back to our house and a fire for a little while. Reading: I’m still listening to Bleak House. It's good, but it's not one of those ones that calls to me all the time. I read two collections this week. It's really no surprise that the Father Brown one was the better of the two. Haunted House Murder by Leslie Meier, Lee Hollis, and Barbara RossFather Brown: Selected Stories by G. K. Chesterton Playing: We finally got around...

Haunted House Murder by Leslie Meier, Lee Hollis, and Barbara Ross

September 19, 2019September 25, 2019 by Carol6 Comments

I love seasonal novella collections! Haunted House Murder contains three cozy mystery novellas. Each is part of series, but they all worked well as stand-alones for me. Out of the three, the only one I really enjoyed was Hallowed Out by Barbara Ross. Haunted House Murder, the first in the book, was lacking in a real plot. New people move into town, they're weird, let's all judge them. The amount of time Lucy spent complaining about having to take care of her grandson was annoying and I don't understand why her husband seemed to be incapable of helping at all. The mystery itself wasn't really much of a mystery, just people jumping to conclusions with little to no actual evidence. In Death By Haunted House, new people move into town, they're weird, let's all judge them. And guess, what? They haven't killed anyone either. Sorry, that was a spoiler but not a surprising one. At least this time, there actually was...

Father Brown: Selected Stories by G. K. Chesterton

September 18, 2019September 26, 2019 by Carol4 Comments

I finally got around to reading the only Father Brown book I have on my shelf. It's a selection of stories from each of the collections. Father Brown is easy to underestimate. In the first story of the collection, a police detective sees him as rather stupid and bumbling, which is the impression he gives most people at first meeting. "There was ... a very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village... The little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown-paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting... He had a large, shabby umbrella, which constantly fell on the floor. He did not seem to know which was the right end of his return ticket. He explained with a moon-calf simplicity to everybody in the carriage that he had...

Classics Club Spin #21

September 17, 2019September 24, 2019 by Carol14 Comments

The Classics Club is holding its 21st Spin. The idea is to list 20 of the books on your Classics Club list before September 23 when the wheel will turn and reveal the winning number. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List, by October 31. My Book Spin List – The 13 Clocks by James ThurberFaust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia HighsmithThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le CarréThe Nine Tailors by Dorothy L SayersThe Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens Dead Souls by Nikolai GogolThe Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wild Orlando by Virginia Woolf In Cold Blood by Truman CapoteThe Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery Orient Express by Graham Greene Double Indemnity by James M. CainAnatomy of a Murder by Robert TraverJourney to the Center of the Earth by Jules VerneConfessions of an English...