📘What’s on the table – February

The table beside my chair. . . .

There’s been a real mix of things going this month so on the table is
One I’ve lined up to read – Two I’ve read and are waiting to be returned
plus One I’m ‘dipping into’.
However lower down you’ll find it’s been a case of. .
But wait there’s been more😊

I’m about to start reading

The Chilbury Ladies Choir – Jennifer Ryan (2017)

Kent 1940
In the idyllic village of Chilbury change is afoot. Hearts are breaking as sons and husbands leave to fight, and when the Vicar decides to close the choir until the men return, all seems lost. But coming together in song is just what the women of Chilbury need in these dark hours, and they are ready to sing

It’ll be interesting to see how they’ll go about changing the vicar’s mind

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I’ve been dipping into

Remember- Lisa Genova (2023)

Strangely I haven’t found anything new, nothing I’ve not seen, heard or read previously- it’s just laid out in a different style.

From what I’ve read so far the key seems to be not to stress about those lapses and pay attention. 
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Over the past month I read

Death of an Author – E.C.R.Lorac 1935 (republished 2023)

I seem to have been hard put recently to describe a book as ‘A cracking good story’ – well all I can say is this definitely has to be one. An old fashioned, humorous at time, police detective story filled with so many twists and turns (red herrings if you like) as the reader follows the thoughts and ideas of various people as they try to unravel the disappearance of a well known author. 

There’s nothing outrageous about this book, yes there’s a bit of a grizzly murder scene, but there are no difficult witnesses, no station politics, no home life distractions, the language is right for the time – use of word ‘queer’ in its original meaning strange, odd, peculiar or eccentric (all of them implied) plus lovely phrases like – “Well I’ll be jiggered” A great read!

The Little Wartime Library – Kate Thompson 2023

It was a strange read based on a true story, blending real time events into a storyline told from two fictional librarians point of view.
After an intriguing opening chapter set in 2020 that was supposed to set the scene but as the pages were turned you began to wonder how, you learn that, yes, after the above ground library in Bethnall Green was bombed during WW2 the space allocated in an underground tube station became very much like a community centre.

With countless chapters covering daily life underground and what was going on ‘up above’ it’s no wonder so many topics were built into the storyline – loss, grief, regret, fear, compassion, depression, alcoholism, racism, family violence (DV) family planning, a book club, suicide, PTSD, romance and happiness- at one time I thought ‘you name it and the author will include it’ but they were the happenings and emotions of those years. There was one incident, not of black marketeering more like hoarding/profiteering that I thought was added for the sake of it.
Oh and could a ‘novice’ (a migrant at that with few connections) write and have a novel published which then became an overnight sensation in a very short time in those post war days.

A good read – just a little too long for me

I did a little ‘googling’ when I finished reading
Yes, it’s a promotion for book sales but interesting reading all the same
https://www.historiamag.com/bethnal-greens-underground-wartime-library/.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/history/1591108/Bethnal-Green-library-Nazi-Hitler-Ukraine-Russia

(As an aside I believe another book will be published this year featuring the same underground library. I shouldn’t say this because authors put so much work into their new releases but it sounds the same as every television channel getting on the cooking show bandwagon)

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Also thanks to a blogger’s recommendation I spent a ‘delicious half hour’ with my eyes closed listening via YouTube to the tale of Buddy and his distant female cousin Sook

A Christmas memory – read by the author Truman Capote  1956

Memories of cooking fruitcakes and all that that involved, a dog called Queenie, earning small amounts of cash over the year – giving homemade paper kites as a present to each other, leaving home and sadness at her death forever looking for kites in the sky.

I think these two little descriptions will stay with me
“fifty cent pieces heavy enough to weight  a dead man’s eyes” and “weeping into a pillow already as wet as a widow’s handkerchief”

*****
A comment about rereading plus seeing an authors name crop up on a couple of blogs – a couple of nudges in the right direction – and this happens:-
I had not one but two rereads – both involved widows, younger persons, family, superstitions, folklore, talk of faeries plus a murder.  Both had unexpected endings!

The Brimstone Wedding is a newish/oldish novel (1996) written by Barbara Vine aka Ruth Rendell.  Set in modern day Essex but with flashbacks to post WW2

Like the other residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is smart and elegant and in control. She keeps her secrets to herself, revealing nothing of her past.  Only Jenny, her young care assistant seems aware that her heart harbours a dark painful mystery.  And only she can prevent Stella from carrying it to the grave.

The Good People, Hannah Kent’s second novel (2016). Set in 1825, in a remote valley lying between the mountains of south-west Ireland, near the Flesk River of Killarney

Nôra Leahy has lost her daughter and her husband in the same year, and now is burdened with the care of her four year old grandson……Unable to care for the child alone, Nôra hires a fourteen year old servant girl, Mary, who soon hears the whispers in the valley about the blasted creature causing grief to fall upon the widow’s house.

They sound so different yet In some ways are alike – because both are full of expressions, thoughts, customs and deeds belonging to another time yet still retained in some lives today.

These are some of the modern day girl’s handed down from her Nan :-

• Don’t take dead people’s clothes to wear for yourself because the clothes of the dead won’t wear long – they fret for the person who owned them
• Blood must be shed at a funeral or the dead person’s ghost will walk
• There’s wearing blue to a funeral, it’s a lucky colour and provides protection but don’t wear green because that’s what the fairies wear  
• Touching wood for luck, picking ferns for luck and the throwing salt over the shoulder – to blind the devil so he does you no harm.

Whereas the thoughts and beliefs and way of life of Nôra and others in the valley would have been handed down for many generations.

A big mention in The Good People is given to the  ritual of the wake – before the funeral not after.

Ashes are thrown at the outside door to banish those (the fairies) that would stop the soul passing into another world.

A young pregnant woman is told she shouldn’t be there, – in a corpse house (house with a dead person inside) – so is told ‘Put salt in your pocket and leave. Before you breathe death in and infect your child.’

As well as salt; charcoal and cinders/ashes played a big part in protecting the mind, body and the spirit.

But what I really liked about this book were all the little unusual sayings – ones that had your head nodding after you’d thought about the words and realised the meaning:-

• A man’s mouth often broke his nose.
• Your tongue collects no dust with all the stories you tell.
• It’s a lonely place without a man’s shirt on the washing line
• Constant company wears out its welcome

Then there’s the way family/kin are described:-

They are ‘Blood tied’ or ‘Bound by marriage’

(Work this one out😊)
“I’m a relation of the widow.  My man is the brother of Nôra’s dead sister’s husband”

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After all the dithering around last year I’ve decided to set some little personal challenges for this year. I don’t do well with ‘prompts’ (think 52 book club) so they’ll be easy ones like A-Z of previously unread authors, aiming for more non fiction, a classic a month, maybe take the easy way with children’s books, short stories/novellas, even A-Z of places in the title- anything that will make me encourage me to put my nose in a book.
 It certainly won’t be the end of the world if I don’t succeed but I’ll have fun trying.

Sharing with What’s on your Book Shelf Challenge

Also linking to Book Worms Monthly plus It’s Monday what are you reading