What are you reading now?

[amateur51]

Just finished - 'phew - a 600 page Spanish novel, "El tiempo entre costuras" - variously translated as "The time between seams [costuras]", or "The seamstress", a best-selling 2009 novel by María Dueñas that has taken Spain by storm - translated into several languages including English, it was turned into an 11-episode serial on Spanish TV that had 5 million viewers.


A Spanish friend recommended it - it's a novel told in the first person by a fictional character Sira Quiroga and is set before and during the Spanish Civil War and Second World War, in Madrid, Spanish Morrocco and (briefly) Lisbon. The main character is a seamstress and wronged woman who finds herself in Tetuán at the start of the Civil War, interacts with real historical characters (Juan Beigbeder, the Spanish governor of Tetuán and his English mistress Rosalinda Fox, who may well have been a spy, Franco's brother in law Ramón Serrano Suñer and English consul and spymaster Alan Hillgarth. Yes, she ends up as a successful spy. A cracking yarn in either language. I read most of it on my recent Hispanic holiday - at 600 pages about right for a good holiday read. A glowing recommendation from Mario Vargas Llosa on the front cover.

I'm in the early stages of reading this but it is certainly a page-turner, ideal for a holiday read. Many thanks for the recommendation RT

[Richard Tarleton]

Great to hear that ams!

Still scratching my head over "Life after life" - sort of "Groundhog Day" meets "Atonement".

PS a week in Suffolk coming up - haven't decided on holiday reading yet!

[amateur51]

Great to hear that ams!

Still scratching my head over "Life after life" - sort of "Groundhog Day" meets "Atonement".

PS a week in Suffolk coming up - haven't decided on holiday reading yet!

Do you know "A Single Swallow: Following An Epic Journey From South Africa To South Wales" by Horatio Clare, RT?

[Richard Tarleton]

I didn't, but looks perfect for the job - have just ordered it! Thanks!

[richardfinegold]

I'm in the early stages of reading this but it is certainly a page-turner, ideal for a holiday read. Many thanks for the recommendation RT

I had bought it for our holiday that starts today, but my wife stole it!

[Pianorak]

Philip Roth: I Married a Communist, and Portnoy's Complaint. The latter for some light relief.

[amateur51]

Philip Roth: I Married a Communist, and Portnoy's Complaint. The latter for some light relief.

It'll put you off eating liver

[Pianorak]

It'll put you off eating liver

Too late - high uric acid level got there first!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I've just read The Darcys of Pemberley by Shannon Winslow - yet another sequel to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I'd say it was one of the better ones, though being by an American, the language isn't always what we might expect in the land of Austen. Having got used to the many "neighbors" and other such spellings, frequent references to "the fall" did jar a little.

[richardfinegold]

Just finished - 'phew - a 600 page Spanish novel, "El tiempo entre costuras" - variously translated as "The time between seams [costuras]", or "The seamstress", a best-selling 2009 novel by María Dueñas that has taken Spain by storm - translated into several languages including English, it was turned into an 11-episode serial on Spanish TV that had 5 million viewers.


A Spanish friend recommended it - it's a novel told in the first person by a fictional character Sira Quiroga and is set before and during the Spanish Civil War and Second World War, in Madrid, Spanish Morrocco and (briefly) Lisbon. The main character is a seamstress and wronged woman who finds herself in Tetuán at the start of the Civil War, interacts with real historical characters (Juan Beigbeder, the Spanish governor of Tetuán and his English mistress Rosalinda Fox, who may well have been a spy, Franco's brother in law Ramón Serrano Suñer and English consul and spymaster Alan Hillgarth. Yes, she ends up as a successful spy. A cracking yarn in either language. I read most of it on my recent Hispanic holiday - at 600 pages about right for a good holiday read. A glowing recommendation from Mario Vargas Llosa on the front cover.

The wife is tearing through it--200 pages to go and then I get it.
Meanwhile I am enjoying Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit. I find that with the lesser known Dickens works, if one can push past the first 200 pages or so then the good things start to happen.

[Bax-of-Delights]

STAND IN THE TRENCH, ACHILLES by Prof. Elizabeth Vandiver.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0199679320

A marvellous, erudite, examination of the WW1 poets (lesser and well-known), their connection to classical studies taught in the public schools of the late Victorian period and how the seam of Greek and Latin writing runs conciously and unconciously through their works.
The footnotes - sometimes taking up half the page - are models of their kind.

And for light relief:

PETER DE VRIES: Sauce for the Goose

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0140062815

I wonder how many others here have ever come across De Vries? A New Yorker columnist for many years his writing is intensely witty - probably quite out of fashion these days - but one I go back to from time to time to marvel at the felicitations of the English language and how humour can be simultaneously both slapstick and subtle.

[Bax-of-Delights]

Just re-reading it - after having watched The Longest Day the other day. I haven't read Cornelius Ryan's book (nor is it in Beevor's bibliography) but just about every vignette in the film is based on an actual event - the one exception the Richard Burton/boots on the wrong feet one , at least not referenced in Beevor! And whilst Lord Lovat did relieve Major Howard at Pegasus Bridge, Howard had already been relieved once, some hours earlier, by, er, Colonel Pine-Coffin. Max Hastings reviewed the book when it came out, and generously observed that Beevor had accessed many sources he had not used in his own earlier "Overlord".

I read this a couple of years ago. There were a couple of episodes in the book which I found astonishing (unless I am mis-remembering)
1) A French girl comes down to one of the landing beaches on D-Day looking for a lost bike. She encounters the British moving up the beach and since she is a nurse she assists some of the wounded on the beach even though there is sniper fire.
2) There was, apparently, a company of Jewish soldiers called Company X which encountered a group of German and axis prisoners being taken behind the lines. The Germans were peeled off and summarily shot.

[Richard Tarleton]

I read this a couple of years ago. There were a couple of episodes in the book which I found astonishing (unless I am mis-remembering)
1) A French girl comes down to one of the landing beaches on D-Day looking for a lost bike. She encounters the British moving up the beach and since she is a nurse she assists some of the wounded on the beach even though there is sniper fire.
2) There was, apparently, a company of Jewish soldiers called Company X which encountered a group of German and axis prisoners being taken behind the lines. The Germans were peeled off and summarily shot.

The first episode is on page 137 and happened at Sword Beach.

She ignored the wolf-whistles of the amazed squaddies and set to work bandaging wounds. Her work lasted two days and during the course of it she met her future husband, a young English officer

- the episode is sourced as John and Jacqueline Thornton, NW WIIM-EC.

I can't find the page reference for the other episode and can't recall it but - astonishing? There were cases of German prisoners being shot e.g. by American soldiers (on Omaha, p. 106, and during Operation Totalise, p. 438), but these were isolated episodes, cf. the appalling brutality for instance meted out to Canadian prisoners by the SS at Caen (inc. a beheading). And see e.g. pp 446-7 for massacres of French civilians inc women and children by the SS in reprisals......

...up to the Liberation, the Germans and the Vichy Milice killed some 20,000 people. Another 61,000 were deported to concentration camps in Germany, of whom only 40% returned alive. In addition 76,000 French and foreign Jews were deported east to concentration camps. Very few returned.

[Krystal]

I'm currently reading "Ravel" by Roger Nichols (Yale UP, 2011). Slow going because it's so detailed and technical. This one's not for those who cannot read music.

[clive heath]

I'm halfway through the second of 3 books that I wasn't aware we had here at home. They are all by J.L.Carr and signed by him in two cases. Apparently my wife's book club read one of them and someone wrote to him expressing appreciation and unexpectedly back came several signed copies so we have two of them. Not knowing any of this I saw "A Month in the Country" on the shelf and remembered seeing the film probably on the box ( harmless, slightly mushy) and thought I'd give it a go. I found it a delight and suddenly realised that a reference to Chalford was significant as quite by chance we are off to that very place this Friday to see its 16th century wall paintings among other treasures. I'm in the middle of "Harpole and Foxberrow, Publishers" and looking forward to "What Hetty Did" especially having glimpsed a passage on the first page "But it was only a sad little band of CND Ban-the-Bomb marchers trudging past, doggedly headed toward the American missile base". Yes, J.L.Carr is all heart.

Previously, I read Clive James' "Unreliable Memoirs". I have a soft spot for the Clive James as he has produced an appreciation of one of my special authors "Nigel Balchin" ( special: went to the same school, like his books) which you can find here

http://www.clivejames.com/pieces/hercules/balchin

.. it is a long read containing summaries of most if not all of Balchin's published work. Balchin does not trouble Waterstones as does not John O'Hara, another author I have a soft spot for. They both had novellas turned into successful films, "The Small Back Room" B&W, "Butterfield 8" Colour, Liz Taylor, Laurence Harvey.

responding to Bax of Delights, yes, de Vries another much read author we have "Comfort me with Apples" "Through Fields of Clover" and probably "Mackerel Plaza".