Review: Vintage Murder by Ngaio Marsh

by Carol5 Comments
Title: Vintage Murder (Inspector Alleyn #5) Author: Ngaio Marsh First published: 1937 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars Add: Goodreads Purchase: Amazon |  Book Depository Death served well-chilled The leading lady of a theater company touring New Zealand was stunningly beautiful. No one-including her lover-understood why she married the company's pudgy producer. But did she rig a huge jeroboam of champagne to kill her husband during a cast party? Did her sweetheart? Or was another villain waiting in the wings? On a holiday down under, Inspector Roderick Alleyn must uncork this mystery and uncover a devious killer... I was having trouble deciding what to read. I'm halfway through a couple of books and just kinda stuck. I was sitting in the chair and happened to see this on the bookshelf, so I pulled it off. Marsh rarely disappoints me. Vintage Murder comes pretty early in the series. Alleyn is in New Zealand recovering from something or other, but none of these fictional detectives can actually have vacations. He happens to...
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Audiobook Review: Delicious! by Ruth Reichl

by Carol10 Comments
Title: Delicious!: A Novel Author: Ruth Reichl Read by: Julia Whelan Category: Fiction Audio published: May 6, 2014 by Random House Audio Rating: 2½ out of 5 stars Add: Goodreads Purchase: Audible | Amazon | Book Depository Billie Breslin has traveled far from her California home to take a job at Delicious, the most iconic food magazine in New York and, thus, the world. When the publication is summarily shut down, the colorful staff, who have become an extended family for Billie, must pick up their lives and move on. Not Billie, though. She is offered a new job: staying behind in the magazine's deserted downtown mansion offices to uphold the "Delicious Guarantee"-a public relations hotline for complaints and recipe inquiries-until further notice. What she doesn't know is that this boring, lonely job will be the portal to a life-changing discovery. Delicious! carries the reader to the colorful world of downtown New York restaurateurs and artisanal purveyors, and from the lively food shop in Little Italy where Billie works...
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Thursday’s Tale: The Song of the Armadillo

by Carol4 Comments
"The Song of the Armadillo" is a tale from Bolivia. I don't think I've featured many South America tales here, but it's one of those bittersweet stories that I tend to like. Once there was an armadillo who loved music more than anything else in the world. He listened to the frogs and crickets and canaries and wished he could sing like them. Meanwhile, the other animals made fun of him, knowing full well that there was no way an armadillo could learn to sing. The armadillo finally decided to ask the local wizard to help him. "Great wizard," he said. "It is my deepest desire to learn to sing like the frogs and the crickets and the canaries." At first the wizard was amused, because everyone knows armadillos can't sing, but then he realized how serious the little creature was. The wizard told the armadillo that he could make him sing, but the price would be too high. It would mean the armadillo's death. The...
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Teaser Tuesday

by Carol4 Comments
I feel like I've been in a bit of a reading slump lately. None of the books I'm currently in the middle of are grabbing my attention, so I pulled a mystery off my shelf. Ngaio Marsh never disappoints. This is from page 54 of Vintage Murder. Everyone had stopped talking. Alleyn, in the sudden silence, received a curious impression of eager dimly-lit faces that peered, of a beautiful woman standing with one arm raised, holding the scissors as a lovely Atropos might hold aloft her shears, of a fat white waistcoated man like a Blampied caricature, bent over the table, and of a red cord that vanished upwards into the dark. Suddeny he felt intolerably oppressed, aware of a suspense out of all proportion to the moment. So strong was the impression that he half rose from his chair. But at that moment Carolyn cut through the cord. And of course, this being a muder mystery, you can guess that someone dies in the...
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Roaring Laughter

by Carol5 Comments
Today's Daily Post asks, "What was the last thing that gave you a real, authentic, tearful, hearty belly laugh? Why was it so funny?" My first thought was the other night at dinner when Amber got carried away by her water, but I didn't want to embarrass her too much, so instead it's picture time. We were laughing so hard as Amber took these the other night. We had gotten to the stadium early to get a seat, which is my idea and they usually complain. so, to waster time, Amber took pictures with my phone. After about a million photos of grass and pop cans, she started goofing around with the "cartoon" setting. It really was funny. Here are the best of the three of us cartoonized....
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Thursday’s Tale: Talia, Sun, and Moon

by Carol3 Comments
I mentioned "Talia, Sun, and Moon" last week when talking about Sleeping Beauty. It was a written by Giambattista Basile, an Italian, in his 1634 work  Il Pentamerone. Il Pentamerone is a collection of 50 stories, told within a frame story of a deceitful queen who has demanded that her husband tell her stories, and he in turn hired a group of ten female storytellers who each tell five stories over five days. Two other stories I've looked at from this collection are "Penta with Maimed Hands" and "Verde Prato." After the birth of a great lord's daughter, Talia, wise men and astrologers cast the child's horoscope and told the lord that Talia would be later endangered by a splinter of flax. To protect his daughter, the father commands that no flax would ever be brought into his house. Years later, Talia sees an old woman spinning flax on a spindle. She asks the woman if she can stretch the flax herself, but...
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